Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Did you feel sad when Pluto got demoted from its status as a planet to a dwarf planet? The debate around that is because the classification is arbitrary: how spherical does an object have to be to be called a planet? How big must be it compared to other objects in orbit at the same distance? Why those values? None of these answers can be derived from the laws of physics, hence the controversy. Ok, but the difference between a planet and a star? Surely, that’s easy, right? A star emits its own light whereas a planet doesn’t. Simple? Even when a star runs out of fuel, we don’t call it a planet. Until we found the “diamond planet”, that is! Huh? Long, long ago, there was this pulsar. Oversimplified, a pulsar is a star that has collapsed and is spinning really fast. Like 170 times a second. As it spins, the pulsar shoots out deadly radiation. How deadly? Suffice to say, it’d make our nukes feel puny by comparison. There was this other star that got too close to this pul...

There are lots of claims that circulation of fake news tilted the scales in favour of Trump. How exactly, you wonder: 1)       Most people don’t bother reading/watching any news; and their sole source of news is whatever their Facebook feed shows them. 2)      Facebook didn’t (couldn’t?) filter out the fake news; and (as always) just kept pumping whatever users tended to click on. 3)      Thus the fake news barrage hit those who were inclined to believe in it; and the volume eventually convinced them it must be true. Nick Carr points out that how quickly things have changed: “Once upon a time — not so long ago, really — there was something called the mainstream media, and it employed lots of journalists and editors and fact-checkers to filter the news. We came to resent these “gatekeepers,” as we took to calling them, because they restricted what we read and saw. They were self-interested elites who… im...

Newton and gravity; Einstein and relativity; Darwin and evolution: everyone knows the theories associated with those scientists. But Richard Feynman? Most (lay) people wouldn’t know anything about what he contributed to science. And yet Feynman continues to be rock star famous. Why? Shane Parrish gets the reason for that perfectly: “Why is Feynman so well known? It’s likely because he had tremendous range  outside  of pure science, and although he won a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum mechanics, he’s probably best known for other things, primarily his  wonderful ability to explain  and teach.” As Bill Gates puts it: “He takes such obvious delight in knowledge—you can see his face light up. And he makes it so clear that anyone can understand it.” It’s not as if Feynman is good at explaining things only to laymen. Even physics students at college used to be blown away. As Leonard Susskind wrote in Black Hole Wars : “Everyone else wo...

Why the Internet was created is well known: back in the Cold War era, the American military was terrified at the prospect of the USSR launching simultaneous nuclear attacks on the HQ’s of all the American military installations, thereby knocking out the ability of the US to retaliate. Thinking in the capitalists’ way, the US decided to create a network that was completely decentralized . Knocking out an entire network that was decentralized was considered impossible. At least some parts would survive the Soviet attack; and they would retaliate. Recently, a massive attack took down many popular Internet sites (Amazon, Twitter, Netflix etc) in almost the entire US . Brian Krebs writes : “(It now emerges that the attack was) launched with the help of hacked “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices, such as CCTV video cameras and digital video recorders.” How the attack works using such network enabled devices is scary: “(It) scours the Web for IoT devices protected by littl...

When the Volkswagen emission scandal broke out last year, it brought out the dangers of more and more software being put in the good old automobile. But that was a case of deliberately writing software to fool the emission test. Then there’s Tesla, the company that made electric cars sexy, not just a car for those who care about the environment. How extensively its cars use software can be best described by these lines from Ashlee Vance’s book : “While the owner slept, Tesla’s engineers tapped into the car via the Internet connection and downloaded software updates. When the customer took the car out for a spin in the morning and found it working right, he was left feeling as if magical elves had done the work.” Or as Bruce Schneier wrote: “A modern car isn't an automobile with a computer in it. It's a computer with four wheels and an engine.” It does sound like magic, right? Until the software gets hacked, that is. Then we realize Paul Sherwood’s point on ...

In his blog on consumerism, Santosh Desai compared today’s scenario where: “The next big thing is awaited with anticipation, and gets absorbed into our lives virtually instantly, without creating a sense of satisfaction.” With the consumerism of our childhood, an era when: “Things lived twice over, once as yawning absences and then as presences that were made to linger, till every last drop of juice was extracted from it.” That sentiment isn’t all that uncommon. But what if consumerism is a good thing? A must have for the prosperity of all? Yuval Noah Harari’s awesome book Sapiens certainly seems to say so: Part 1: Origin of Capitalism : -          Long ago, money, that astounding thing that can “convert anything into almost anything else”, had a severe constraint: it could “convert only things that actually existed in the present”. -          And so “people agreed to represent imaginary ...

The media just doesn’t get it. Take CNN, for example. Seeing that channel you’d think that half the US refuses to accept Trump’s win and that everyone is on the streets! Or this editorial in Deccan Herald : “That 42% of women voted for Trump indicates how deeply women have internalised patriarchal values and how widespread this problem is. ” That line is a representative of how the media has to simplify, even over-simplify things. But it is increasingly evident that the media has now started believing its own over-simplifications! They actually believe that one attribute decides who you vote for (or against): so if Trump is misogynist, no woman would vote for him. He’s anti-Muslim, so no Muslim would vote for him. He’s anti-immigration, so no immigrant would vote for him. He talks crazy, so no sane person would vote for him. This line of “reasoning” then leads to a “logical belief”: surely, there can’t be enough “primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational” people i...

The media is increasing unable to predict the outcome of an election: they didn’t see the BJP sweep of 2014, Brexit or now Donald Trump. But worse than that is the media’s unwillingness to take “r esponsibility for one's own unjustified arrogance and undeniable mistakes”, writes Damon Linker . Citing the Trump election, he points out how the media seems to confuse what they would like to happen with what they believe was going to happen: “Trump's campaign and personal behavior are so offensive to so many things that the members of these establishments take for granted, believe in, and valorize, that the thought that Trump could prevail electorally was close to unthinkable for most.” Substituting a desire for a prediction is an amateurish mistake. “None of the smart guys came close to grasping the truth — which is that they don't really know what the electorate thinks, and they don't know who is likely to vote.” Time after time we are seeing this phenom...

I don’t think anyone writes thrillers better than Frederick Forsyth. The Day of the Jackal. The Odessa File. The Dogs of War. The Shepard. The Negotiator. The Fist of God . I loved each of them and always wondered: books so insanely detailed, could they be just great fiction or was this reality? I picked up Forsyth’s autobiography titled The Outsider hoping to see if it might answer my question. A journalist by profession, his stint in Paris during (who else?) Charles de Gaulle’s rule sowed the seeds for The Day of the Jackal in a macabre way. De Gaulle was very unpopular after his decision to pull out of Algeria and so: “(The press corps in Paris were in) permanent attendance… every time he had made some journey outside the presidential mansion… It was not to cover his visit to the Senate or whatever.  It was for that cataclysmic moment when he was assassinated.” Getting the book published was tough not just because Forsyth was an unknown author but also publishers...

In his book, The Righteous Mind , Jonathan Haidt explains the huge differences between the attitudes of most (truly) moral people. Explaining the Moral Foundation Theory, he says there are 6 different axis of morality: -          Care/harm -          Fairness/cheating -          Loyalty/betrayal -          Authority/subversion -          Sanctity/degradation -          Liberty/oppression The reason why moral people hold such different opinions is two-fold: -          The ideals (axis) often clash. Take Care/harm: most moral people would consider themselves to be on the Care side of the spectrum. But how far should we go in caring? That’s when it starts to clash with the Fairness/cheating axis: ...

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” -          Roy Amara Back in the 90’s, it sounded as if everything that could be digitized would be digitized. And yes, while that indeed happened (think ticket bookings, tax returns and e-books), in the longer run, software has disrupted more and more industries that seemed non-digitizable. Like cab services getting replaced by Uber; manned spy planes being replaced by drones; and as Venkatesh Rao points out : “The Nest thermostat achieves energy savings not by exploiting new discoveries in thermodynamics, but by using machine learning algorithms in a creative way.” But what’s different from previous technological upheavals is this: “It is a revolution that is being led, in large measure, by brash young kids rather than sober adults… and proceeding largely without adult supervision.” And another key difference? “...

The “inner (state) lines” of India, as Salil Misra describes in his wonderful article , were drawn in the past “not according to geographical factors, but the discretion of the ruler, the pattern of conquest, and the convenience of revenue collection”. He was talking of the Mughals and the British. In the 1920’s, the Congress decided to make “language the major determinant in the creation of administrative units within India”. As opposed to British units like the Madras Presidency that had “a large number of Telugu, Oriya, Malayalam and Kannada speakers”, for example. But Partition changed all that. Nehru, Patel, Gandhi, Ambedkar and others realized that the concept of a united nation needed to be “protected against certain political tendencies from within”: “It was felt that a strong linguistic passion, bordering on chauvinism, could be one such tendency. It began to be argued that strong linguistic passions might come in the way of national considerations.” And so the n...