Viswanathan K's Thoughts

We store almost piece of information on our smartphone. And back that data up on the cloud. But haven’t people been doing that for centuries via stone tablets, books and Post-it notes? To which Sophie McBain responds , there are fundamental differences between the two: “In the past this required deliberate effort, such as sitting down to write a diary, or filing away a letter, or posing for a portrait, today this process can be effortless, even unintentional.” And: “One is a passive receptacle, the other is active. A notebook won’t reorganise the information you give it or ping you an alert; its layout and functions won’t change overnight; its contents aren’t part-owned by the stationery firm that made it.” Another point McBain makes is indeed true: “We’re all tourists exploring the world from behind a camera, too distracted by our digital memories to inhabit our analogue lives fully…Are we less attentive to our experiences because we know that computers will record them ...

Recently, I was reading my soon-to-be-5 year old kid a kids’ encyclopedia on sea animals. The format of the book was to ask a question on each page and then proceed to answer it (along with photos). That format (ask and answer a specific question) is far more interesting to kids than the narration of tens of facts without any apparent why am I being told all this? The other thing the book had, which I didn’t pay much attention to, was a single panel comic drawing on almost every page to amuse the kid: stuff like a fish sleeping on a bed after switching off the light. It turns out that drawing comics as a way to teach science is an approach actually adopted by a guy named Jon Chad! One of his Science comics is titled Science Comics: Volcanoes: Fire and Life . So why does he take this approach ? “I think when a reader can link a fact (or, their memory of acquiring a fact) to some sort of immersive narrative moment, there's a relationship that forms that is stronger than i...

Fred Zollo, the producer of the Mississippi Burning , dismissed the Internet threat to the movie industry, less than a decade back: “How can you watch a movie on a computer screen?” Except that almost everyone, everywhere today is glued to their smartphones watching movies! Which, by the way, are so much smaller than the computer screens that Zollo was so contemptuous about. And that’s without even getting into the people who watch movies on their tablets or even (gasp) their PC’s and laptops. Today Netflix has as many subscribers as HBO…streaming movies and serials via the Internet is starting to catch up with good old cable. This isn’t a blog to mock someone with the benefit of hindsight. Rather, it’s about this question Seth Godin that once asked: “How come so many of the attendees at the 1927 Solvay Conference went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics?” The equivalent question applies to every tectonic shift that is triggered by the tech sector, like watching movies o...

As someone who disapproved of George W. Bush on most fronts, I fully agreed with Daniel Larison’s comments on how many people who are so offended by Donald Trump never showed a proportional revulsion to Bush: “One of the remarkable things about this election is the sheer intensity of hostility to Trump from many of the same movement conservatives who shrugged at Bush’s far more serious betrayals and failures… (People that now panic) didn’t care when Bush expanded the security state, trampled on the Constitution, or launched an unnecessary war of aggression.” Or is there a deeper, more fundamental change going on with the very idea of democracy, wonders Santosh Desai : “Think of yesterday’s ‘cooler’ democracy as a wire that transported energy from the public to the state, but one that came clad in protective insulation of many kinds. What we are seeing today is the gradual stripping of this protective insulation.” And today? “The democracy of today is thus a ‘hot’ democra...

Recently I read this awesome book by Nathaniel Popper on the digital cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, titled  Digital Gold . Boy, is it informative and superbly written! Why the need for a new currency? 1)       Ideology : Many people in the US in particular dislike and distrust the power of governments to print money because, if done for the wrong reasons, that dilutes the worth of existing money. Now, it is one think to be wrong due to unforeseeable reasons; but let’s face it: governments mostly do wrong things because they are doing them for vested interest groups and for votes. 2)      Privacy : In the West, as most transactions are via credit cards, credit card companies and banks know what you spend on. Plus, of course, the government can force both of them to share that information. 3)      Experiment : For many, this was a chance to try something new, to test their software skills. For others, to understa...

If someone who sees the indignant scream-fests that pass for prime time “news” wonders why they are so popular, the answer is simple: after a long day at work, many just want to sit back and be entertained. As Valson Thampu wrote : “Party spokespersons can fight no-holds-barred in full public view, and not put us off, because we know – and they know that we know – they mean no harm and are only jousting with each other in jest.” While that is undoubtedly true, Santosh Desai points out that there are genuine differences of views, which the prime time “news” channels know to use: “Media speaks of and to its consuming constituency, framing events through the lens of what interests its audience. This has distorted any possibility of aggregating a sense of reality in a coherent and meaningful form. By setting up news as a conflict between a given number of worldviews, it works hard at placing its viewers in different camps.” No wonder then, with each news outlet (plus Facebook)...

Garrett James Hardin framed the eponymous Hardin’s First Law of Ecology: “You cannot do only one thing”. He meant that you can’t change one element of an ecosystem without having unintended consequences on other parts of the ecosystem. Of course, that “law” doesn’t apply just to ecology, which is why it is quoted so often. Take AirBnb, the site/app for renting your room/house to complete strangers for short durations. Despite the “how do you trust a stranger?” problem, the site has become a hit. It appealed to people with spare rooms and travelers who didn’t want to spend on expensive hotels. On a per-day basis, room rents on AirBnb would be higher than if you rented via an old fashioned long term lease. That’s obvious. Soon Hardin’s law comes into play: people decided it was better to rent their houses exclusively via AirBnb because they made more money! European cities began to find that rooms for long term leases were very hard to come by since everyone was renting via Air...

Now that it’s down to Hillary v Trump, will it be a landslide win for Clinton as many predict? Or will Trump surprise everyone the way he did in the primaries? Despite starting off with those questions, this blog doesn’t try to answer them! Instead, I’ll quote from this article by David Roberts on some very practical aspects that will kick in and change the current narrative: “There are entire classes of professionals whose jobs are premised on the model of two roughly equal sides, clashing endlessly. The Dance of Two Parties sustains the consultants and activists.” So who exactly are these professionals? “Media, consultants, power brokers, think tanks, foundations, officeholders, the whole thick network of institutions and individuals involved in national politics.” Then there’s the perception problem for the media: repeatedly stating that Trump is unfit for office “will become a partisan observation, something Democrats say”! Also, there’s the possibility that Hill...

Heard about the “intention heuristic”?  Let Arnold Kling explain what that means: “The intention heuristic says that if the intentions of an act are selfless and well-meaning, then the act is good. If the intentions are self-interested, then it is not good.” Put simply, the intent behind an action is more important than its consequence . The intention heuristic probably explains why so many people who genuinely want a better life for everyone dislike capitalism. Because the intention of capitalism isn’t to make everyone better off. That is just a consequence . The benefits of Internet connectivity are enormous and obvious to people like us. Yet, many criticize Facebook for its attempt to bring free access to a small subset of that very same Internet to the remote and/or poor for free. Why? Because the ultimate motives of Facebook is to make money from the next billion that comes on the Net. In other words, the intention heuristic. If Facebook aims to make money, it’...

In recent times, I found myself being able to relate totally with a couple of lines I read on the Net, simply because I’d experienced the feeling just recently. The first one was when we bought a new TV and discovered that all LCD/LED TV’s above a certain size are necessarily smart TV’s. You don’t even get the non-smart version at those sizes anymore! The guy who came to install it, right after setting it up, pulled out his smartphone and showed how to project stuff from the phone onto the TV. “Install the app and you can do the same”, he said. And so when I read this line by Ben Evans, I could fully relate to it: “TV, once thought of as the next phase after PCs, turned to be an accessory to smartphones.” The same week, I attended this company training on adopting a faster, nimble and less bureaucratic way of working. As you may have noticed, trainings nowadays cannot just be informative; they need to be entertaining too to keep people engaged rather than dozing off. Of ...