Viswanathan K's Thoughts

MIT’s Technology Review talked about this study that claims that “Using the Internet can destroy your faith”. As expected, this was a lightning rod for Slashdotters . Peragrin said: “great. now the christians are going to call the internet the tree of knowledge and get it declared forbidden in their quest for religious zealotry.” Would that make Steve Jobs the devil? After all, Apple computers and Apple phones are used to surf the Net! This guy with the ID, Opportunist, demo’ed his knowledge about well, knowledge: “Lucifer, as Satan is often called, can easily be translated as "he who brings the light" or "he who carries the light (to someone)", deducting from "lux", light and "ferre", carry, bring. His story is not too different from that of Prometheus, who served that role in the Greek mythology. And they're by far not unique. In other words, they were "evil" enough to bring light and enlightenment to human, rather th...

Financial innovation. Financial engineering. They have become very negative terms ever since the crash of 2008. And yet, not all financial innovation is bad (obviously). Recently, I read about an interesting instance of such innovation. Every time you hear of the astronomical earnings of a Virat Kohli, have you wished that you could invest in a sports star? The way you do in stocks? In such a system, investing in the star would entitle you to a fraction of all future earnings of that player both on and off the field. Yes, that means a share of his/her endorsements too! Ok, but why would any sports star agree to such a deal? Two words: risk reduction. Imagine you’re a player who is on the rise. You know that, even though you are talented, a lot of things can go wrong in the future. So to de-risk things, in return for handing over the above mentioned share of your future earnings, you get a lump sum upfront payment from those investors today. Guaranteed. Money you don’t have to...

When the Soviets wanted to assess what chance they had of winning a surprise preemptive nuclear war against the West (before, of course, the West launched one)? What fraction of nukes should be used? What fraction should be reserved for re-retaliation against the inevitable retaliation? What fraction of bombs on either side would misfire or be inaccurate? What were the odds of taking out the Western communication systems in a first strike? How many Western submarines might be close to the Soviet coast to launch their missiles? How much damage might the bombs do? When there are a huge number of variables, and the odds of each of those variables can be different every hour, statisticians do multiple runs with different numbers probabilities in each run. This is called by a racy name, Monte Carlo runs. And Monte Carlo runs is exactly what Colonel Valery E. Yarynich did to evaluate the USSR’s chances. And with so many variables with unpredictable probabilities in the equation, Ya...

I remember this lesson at school about the effects of the Hiroshima (or was it Nagasaki?) bombing. It left me, well, totally untouched. I guess it was poorly written or maybe I was too young for it. Also, it didn’t have sound bites, like the International Court of Justice ruling that said: “Their destructive power…cannot be contained in space and time.” Space and time. So Einsteinian in its sound. Kind of ironic, isn’t it? Recently, I read a book titled “How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III” by Ron Rosenbaum. I am totally unmoved by any of the let-us-get-rid-of-nukes argument the book had. Mostly because the genie is well and truly out of the bottle. How would you ensure everyone not only eliminates their stockpiles but can also be trusted to not build them again ever? Besides, I am not worried about nukes with the Americans, Russians, Chinese, Brits, French, Israelis and Indians since they all desire to live; none of them is suicidal. That leaves the Paki...

Take a minute to read these lines from Plato’s Apology : it is from Socrates’ defense: “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.” While the sentiment is definitely true, the wording is, well, heavy. Not easy to read. Now contrast that with how the same sentiment was expressed by Donald Rumsfeld: “There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.” Known unknowns. Unknown unknowns. Trust an American to explain an idea in simple (and oh yes, very quotable) terms! Errol Morris, however, warns us of the dangers of the above approach taken too far: “Progress hinges on our ability to discrimina...

It is standard practice for banks to lend money to the central banks (equivalent to RBI). In the current environment of Europe, banks don’t want to lend to customers and businesses because they consider that very risky. So they lend instead to the European Central Bank (ECB). Not happy with this, the ECB reduced the interest they pay on such loans to be negative. Yes, negative. But what does that even mean? It means the banks have to pay the ECB interest to take their money! As this article said : “The idea (is) that you can make not-lending so costly that lending starts up again.” But no: turns out that the banks would rather hoard the cash than lend it! Of course, hoarding doesn’t come for free either. It adds to storage costs, the cost of keeping all that money in giant, secure vaults. And transportation costs to move that money around. Additionally : “Bank robbers, earthquakes and other unforeseen disasters, on the other hand, are a problem. Or rather, the delicat...

If you thought that the way to get people to make the right choice was to provide them with more information or even better, teach them analytical skills, then you would be disappointed by what Yale law professor Dan Kahan found. Erza Klein describes his findings in the article : “People weren’t reasoning to get the right answer; they were reasoning to get the answer that they wanted to be right...More information, in this context, doesn’t help skeptics discover the best evidence. Instead, it sends them searching for evidence that seems to prove them right. And in the age of the internet, such evidence is never very far away.” Kahan says he is not surprised that “we react to threatening information by mobilizing our intellectual artillery to destroy it”! But why are we like that? Perhaps Mary Douglas has the answer in her book, Purity and Danger : “In perceiving we are building, talking some cues and rejecting those which fit most easily into the patter that is being buil...

There was this time when Calvin “kidnapped” Binky Betsy (Susie’s doll) and wrote out a ransom note: If Bill Watterson redid that scene today, he’d probably have Calvin using this site called (what else) the Ransomizer ! You key in the message and the site generates an output that looks like this: Great, right? Say goodbye to hunting through magazines to find letters in different fonts and sizes! It would be the recipe for the perfect ransom note provided you don’t make the mistake that Calvin made: So ironical that the master criminal got tripped up by something he learnt at (who’d have thought?) school!

“I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.” -          The line Oppenheimer remembered from the Bhagavad Gita Robert Jungk wrote this great book titled Brighter Than a Thousand Suns about the “atomic scientists” who contributed to the building of the atomic bomb: via theory, via exhortations to build it, and via direct participation in its construction. Later it talks of how they reacted after the nukes were actually used. Around the time Hitler came to power, the theories had identified the enormous energy waiting to be unleashed in the atom. The German scientist, Heisenberg, explained why people like him agreed to build the Nazi bomb: “(If anyone protests), he will naturally finish up a few days later in a concentration camp.” Non-Aryan scientists were persecuted and fled Germany. The exodus continued from other parts of Europe as the Nazis marched on. Most of these scientists were terrified at the prospect of Nazi Germany bui...

You’d think the term “tech companies” would refer to any company in, well, the technology sector: so pretty much any engineering company. In other words, the list should include everything from Apple to Intel to L&T to BHEL, right? Wrong! Take the company I work for: General Electric, or GE. As Ian Bogost says : “GE makes almost everything — from light bulbs to medical imaging devices to wind turbines to locomotives to jet engines.” And yet GE is not considered a tech company! You can see that when Bloomberg’s Shira Ovide and Rani Molla recently wrote: ““Non-tech titans like Exxon and GE have slipped a bit” in top valuations.” In fact, when the markets closed last Monday: “At the close of trading this Monday, the top five global companies by market capitalization were all U.S. tech companies: Apple, Alphabet (formerly Google), Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. Bloomberg, which reported on the apparent milestone, insisted that this “tech sweep” is unprecedented, even...

Recently, my wife accidentally took my ATM card instead of hers to withdraw cash. As the SMS’s indicating the amounts withdrawn started coming in, I realized what had happened. Because multiple withdrawals of those amounts happened at the beginning of every month. Pattern recognition is the name of the game. Google wants to use that for yet more uses of the smartphone. Here are a few examples of what might be coming next: -          If you take lots of photos of nature, the next time you’re in a scenic location, the camera app would open automatically. -          Or, as this site joked , that Health app might wag its finger at you if you hit the pizza joint for the third time that week. -          Tired of remembering and entering those pesky passwords? Google is proposing an alternative : “Instead of asking for a password, the phone might analyse your fa...

I’ve heard my dad say on multiple occasions that there is something about this land that generates tolerance, a certain kind of philosophy, certain kinds of religions, a search for spirituality…you get the idea. So it was kind of amusing when Om Malik wrote this comment : “Despite our problems, I am an unabashed believer in America, which to me is more a philosophy than just a landmass.” Me too. Philosophies like capitalism, even if that is sometimes of the “greed is good” variety; or individual freedom; or free speech; or the Silicon Valley belief that anyone can become a billionaire. So are India and America the only two philosophies juxtaposed on landmasses? Or is this just crazy talk that Indians do, wherever they are?

One of the points my dad has made during our never-ending debates on the existence (or not) of God is apparently one that many others feel too. Julian Baggini expresses that view perfectly in an interview: “Atheism (is) parasitic on what it denies. People say ‘Look, it’s even in the name itself: ‘a-theism’.” I always felt there was something wrong with the point but could never nail it. Until I read Baggini’s response to it: “That’s just historical accident. It just so happens that western civilisation has, for many centuries, been predominantly religious, and so the alternative worldview ended up being defined in contrast to that.” More importantly, Baggini points out that an atheist subscribes to a “physics-based explanation of the universe”. And once you see that, what he says next follows: “If people say that atheism is parasitic on religion, ‘What would happen if no one believed in God any more? Would that mean there were no atheists?’ Of course not. It would mean tha...