Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Did you know there’s a part of the Net that is “hidden”, inaccessible via regular browsers like Chrome and Firefox? Both the sites themselves and the special browser needed to access such sites use a “fiendishly clever encryption system”, as Jamie Bartlett puts it in his TED talk . Even users accessing these sites cannot be traced thanks to the encryption systems in use. Called the Dark Net, it is a “censorship-free world visited by anonymous users”. So yes, as expected, the Dark Net has its share of sites for illegal activities. But Bartlett's talk focuses on other very interesting aspects of the Dark Net. Like it hosts lots of whistle-blowing sites and political activism blogs! Plus: “(Innovation) also takes place in the fringes, because those on the fringes -- the pariahs, the outcasts -- they're often the most creative, because they have to be.” But wouldn’t any financial transaction on the Dark Net be traceable eventually? Ah, but they don’t use regular cash; t...

As I’ve said multiple times before, freedom of speech includes the right to offend others with what you say . Which should be obvious: if it didn’t include the right to offend, then why do all of us feel so critical of communist countries and dictatorships on the freedom of speech topic? How about freedom of the press? You’d think that Western democracies are pretty much the same on that front. And you’d be wrong in thinking that. As Emma Garman wrote while comparing the US and UK : “In the US, the idea of muzzling the press is, of course, constitutionally anathema. Not so across the pond, where since around the turn of the century, a quirk of law has meant that anyone with sufficient means can, by making a legal claim of privacy invasion, kill an embarrassing or damaging article before it is published.” The UK supports the concept of super-injunctions. What’s that? “(Super-injunctions) which, as well as barring the publication of the names and details of a given case, ba...

In an awesome lecture titled “The Disembodied Universe” in his book, The Accidental Universe, Alan Lightman says that: “What we see with our eyes, what we hear with our ears, what we feel with our fingertips, is only a tiny sliver of reality. Little by little, using artificial devices, we have uncovered a hidden reality.” We’ve learnt that time isn’t absolute, teeny tiny molecules encode the instructions to build life forms, and that matter behaves like both particles and waves! And then Lightman points out where all this knowledge is taking us: “It is an irony to me that the same science and technology that have brought us closer to nature by revealing these invisible worlds have also separated us from nature and from ourselves. Much of our contact with the world today is not an immediate, direct experience, but is instead mediated by various artificial devices such as televisions, cell phones, iPads, chat rooms, and mind-altering drugs.” Talking of how glued we are to o...

In his awesome book, The Happiness Hypothesis , Jonathan Haidt talks about the “Myth of Pure Evil” through which we view the world and events: “Evil doers are pure in their evil motives.” In another terrific book, The Lessons of History , Will and Ariel Durant start off by asking: “Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent equivalence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our patriotic or religious partisanship.” Combine those two views and it makes you wonder whether you should trust history at all. Not just the Hindutva or Taliban versions, but even the secular versions?! Tim Urban nails the impossibility of narrating an accurate version of history: “History is a giant collective tangle of thousands of interwoven stories involving millions of characters, countless chapters, and many, many narrators. And you know humans—that’s not how they like things. The human brain really, really likes...

Google has been promoting what it calls “activity-based” music. Huh? Open the Google Play Music app and it will ask you to select your current activity (options include Cooking, Being Romantic, Relaxing, Studying etc). The app will then pull up a list of songs best suited for that activity! If done right, Google’s claim may not be just an instance of bragging: “Google Play Music has whatever you need music for — from working, to working out, to working it on the dance floor.” Nick Carr points out what this approach implies : “Music becomes an input, a factor of production. Listening to music is not itself an “activity” — music isn’t an end in itself — but rather an enhancer of other activities, each of which must be clearly demarcated.” And if you accept that listening to music is not an end in itself but the backdrop to whatever else you are doing, then it is logical to outsource the effort to find that backdrop and focus on the main activity! And so: “You shou...

As part of the verdict on the allowing women to the Sabarimala temple, the Supreme Court stated: “In Hindu dharma there is no denomination of a male or female. A Hindu is a Hindu.” Now, don’t get me wrong: I am in favour of the verdict and am opposed to all such discrimination against women by all religions. That said, is that statement true? Not according to the Vedas, says Gayatri Jayaraman : “The Vedas contain entire texts devoted to women… To say Hindus have no gender and are but Hindus, makes a mockery of much great philosophy.” And rightly points out: “The Supreme Court also seems to be reducing Hindu philosophy to a single absolute certainty. Something Hindu sages, the progenitors of the philosophy themselves, never did. ” So she pours her scorn on the judge: “He had clearly studied it, decoded all the caste links and structures, schools of knowledge, expounded it, and was only thus explaining it in open court. Which is an amazing feat, considering all comm...

In his book, The Upside of Irrationality , Dan Ariely talks about how when people talk to strangers on a plane or at a party, they “often discuss what they do for a living before talking about their hobbies, family, or political ideology”. Therefore, Ariely notes that: “It seems that many people find pride and meaning in their jobs.” Philosopher Roman Krznaric has this to say about the desire for job satisfaction: “The desire for fulfilling work – a job that provides a deep sense of purpose, and reflects our values, passions and personality – is a modern invention. … For centuries, most inhabitants of the Western world were too busy struggling to meet their subsistence needs to worry about whether they had an exciting career that used their talents and nurtured their wellbeing…We have entered a new age of fulfillment, in which the great dream is to trade up from money to meaning.” Trade up from money to meaning: best description of job satisfaction ever! And then there’...

One of the surprising things I learnt from Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow , was about how we humans remember pain. Researchers studied a bunch of patients undergoing a painful procedure and asked them at 1 minute intervals to rate the intensity of the pain (0=lowest; 10=highest). Here is how the graphs looked for 2 patients : Notice that Patient A’s procedure lasted 8 minutes while Patient B’s lasted 24 minutes. So if you asked both patients to rate the total pain they experience, you’d assume B’s memory of the experience should be worse than A’s. But the actual answers received were that A’s memory was much worse than B’s, in fact on an average twice as much ! Why is that? Researchers found a pattern that explains why: 1)       Peak-end rule : Total pain is best predicted by the average of the worst moment and the last moment (the rest of the data points can be ignored !) 2)      Duration neglect : The total ...

One of my dad’s hobbies was photography. Apart from regular photos, he did trick photos and even had a slide projector for slide shows (today’s equivalent technology for that is a Power Point presentation of digital pics projected onto a giant screen). One thing he didn’t do though was to create videos. Camcorders hadn’t come to the market at that stage, I guess. Notice what’s the common theme in the above paragraph? Apart from creating memories, that is? The answer: obsolescence. Camera rolls, analog cameras, slide projectors, camcorders: all dead or dieing or very niche. But nowadays even the format in which content is stored becomes obsolete at unbelievable speed. In the book, This is Not the End of the Book , Jean-Claude Carrière talks about the transition from video to CD-ROM to MP3/MP4’s to streaming (video on demand via the Net): “It may seem as if I’m talking about things that changed over a very long time-span, a matter of centuries. But all this has taken place i...

Remember that line from a Bon Jovi song: “Darling, you give love a bad name.” After yet another terroristic attack, this time in Brussels, isn’t it time we said: “Islam, you give religion a bad name.” But of course, “secularism” and political correctness won’t allow that to happen any time soon. But things have gotten so bad that this Dilbert strip isn’t too far off most people’s idea of that religion anyway: Remember water boarding, that (in)famous form of torture devised by the US after 9/11? Sarah Palin, a religious nut  job, who was the Vice-Presidential candidate in the last US election, had then remarked: “Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.” Upon which the comedian Jon Stewart made this brilliant remark: “That is Sarah Palin giving a speech where she is somehow conflating a sacrament of her faith with torture, in order to somehow bring the fear of God to religious extremists.” Ha ha! ...

Is the majority always wrong, simply because it is the majority? Conversely, is the minority always to be excused, simply because it is the minority? These questions are increasingly becoming the major fault line between the left and the right in more and more countries. Things have gone so far that Roger Scruton says that: “The great difference between left and right, in every matter that impacts on our survival, is that the left turns against us, whereas the right believes that, on the whole, we are not to blame for wanting to hold on to our way of life.” Remember the mass scale molestation of German women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve? Sadly, for many, it was unacceptable to call out the ethnicity of the perpetrators (Arab and North African). Turns out reports of a similar assault on women in Sweden during the We Are Sthlm music festival were suppressed because the assaulters were ‘so-called refugee youths primarily from Afghanistan’. In Sweden: “If you mention anything n...