Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The Internet requires different networks to be able to talk to each other, regardless of which hardware, OS and programming languages they use. It’s only when you think of it that way do you realize how difficult it must have been to achieve it! Not just technically, but organizationally and politically. In the 1960’s, the US government (via ARPA) wanted inter-networking across universities. One, to allow for ease of information sharing. Two, to enable sharing of computing power! The second reason was also why many of the initial participants were reluctant to join in, explains Walter Isaacson in Innovators : “The universities in general did not want to share their computers with anybody. They wanted to buy their own machines.” When persuasion failed, the coordinators switched to threats: “There would be no more funding to buy computers until they were hooked into the network.” But the ARPA team also looked to address legitimate concerns. They realized universities did n...

In his book, Why We Work , Barry Schwartz makes an interesting point about discoveries: “When a scientist, or anyone else, discovers something, it doesn’t occur to us to ask whether that discovery should exist… If someone were to suggest that the Higgs boson shouldn’t exist, we’d wonder what mind-altering substance he’d ingested.” And inventions? “Inventions, in contrast, are a whole other story. Inventions characteristically have moral dimensions. We routinely ask whether they should exist. We wonder what’s good (life improving) about them, and what the drawbacks are. We debate whether their wide distribution should go forward, and if so, with what kind of regulation.” Ok, so there’s nothing new or interesting in what’s said above. Where it gets interesting is in what happens next: “Discoveries tell us things about how the world works. Inventions use those discoveries to create objects or processes that make the world work differently. The discovery of pathogens leads t...

I was both amused and horrified at how my 7 yo’s computer science book explained Windows: “Windows is the most popular program that makes the computer work.” Man, we’re defining an Operating System (OS) based on popularity, I shuddered. Once upon a time, the OS was defined as a piece of software that managed the hardware of a computer. I know, I know, that’s way too complicated for a 7 yo... Tech blogger Ben Thompson suggested a different way of describing the OS , not the computer science way, but from a control and money perspective . Huh? He starts with the definition I gave (software that manages the hardware) and explains where that led to (control and money-wise): -           As the OS was the broker to the hardware, users and programmers stopped knowing or caring about the hardware; -           As programmers write applications for an OS, users flock to it because so man...

For all our lives, there have been rules on how to bring a new medicine to the market: clinical trials, patient consent, double blind trials etc. But all this only started well into the 1900’s, “as drugs became more powerful, so did side effects”, wrote Thomas Hager in The Demon Under the Microscope . And for decades, the way trials were done was, well, horrifying: “(Firms) often went to Africa to do large-scale human tests. In Britain they used soldiers. In the United States, tests were done on prisoners and inmates in mental institutions.” But has the current system of checks and trials gone overboard, wonders Jessica Flannigan in her book, Pharmaceutical Freedom: Why Patients Have a Right to Self-Medicate . In a radio interview with Bob Zadek, she says we should have “freedom over our bodies”, same as the other freedoms we enjoy. People handed the responsibility to the government to prevent a repetition with the “history of drug disasters”. That responsibility became a...

A while back, I saw this BBC debate on the terms that Prime Minister Teresa May was able to draw up for Brexit. As expected, one spoke in favour, another against. The third panelist blew me away: he pointed out that it was now becoming increasingly clear to the public that Brexit was a bad idea, that staying in the EU was the lesser of two evils. Therefore, he argued, it was a time for another referendum with the same question: Stay or Leave? While a referendum is not legally binding, this sounded insane: what’s the point of a referendum if you’ll hold another one when you don’t like the outcome? And will they hold a re-re-referendum after that? Where does this stop? So are referendums a bad idea per se ? Is the general public unqualified to evaluate complicated questions, even one as “educated” as the British? Conversely, Malcolm Gladwell’s book, David and Goliath , talks of Mike Reynolds, a man whose 18 yo daughter was killed during a robbery. By two repeat offenders. Re...

Physics envy: it’s a term used to describe the almost desperate attempt of the social sciences to be like physics, i.e., have maths, equations and predictability. Coming up with a mathematical, equation rich representation of things in a social science is extremely hard. Mostly because of that extremely annoying little attribute of humans called free will . Those pesky humans tend do what they like based on their mood, even things that aren’t in their best interest! As someone once said, man isn’t a rational animal; rather, he is a rationalizing animal… But wait a minute, you say, doesn’t economics (and its cousin, finance) have a lot of equations? Ah, true, but those are just models. Whereas physics has laws (“laws of physics”). What’s the difference between a model and a law? Let Emanuel Derman explain : “In physics, Maxwell’s theory and quantum mechanics allow you to predict the way an electron spins about its own axis inside a hydrogen atom to an accuracy of twelve dec...

Adam Cline wrote this excellent book, The Current War , on the fight to decide whether AC (alternating current) or DC (direct current) would be the electrical standard. As the book says, it wasn’t a fight based on just the technical aspects; it was also a clash between two titans and their companies. It all began when Thomas Alva Edison invented the light bulb. But there was no wiring to get electricity into people’s homes. And so: “Edison would need more than the light bulb. He would need to come up with a whole new industry (to supply electricity).” Edison created an electric utility company based on DC (direct current). But transmitting DC power over long distances wasn’t possible due to the energy loss along the way. So end users had to be located within one-mile of the power generating plant. Thus, Edison and DC were restricted to the congested cities. George Westinghouse, another businessman, had heard of AC (alternating current). It could be stepped up to high vol...

In her book, Mindset , Carol Dweck points out what every one of us knows is wrong with the famous story of the hare and the tortoise: “The lesson was supposed to be that slow and steady wins the race. But, really, did any of us ever want to be the tortoise? No, we just wanted to be a less foolish hare.” Then there is the story of Arjuna and how he saw nothing except the eye of the bird he was shooting at. Concentrate, focus: that was the lesson. While that’s obviously necessary for certain types of goals, isn’t Max Gunther right in what he says in many other cases, especially goals spread over long time periods? “If you put blinders on yourself so that you can see only straight ahead, you will miss nearly everything. This is what the unlucky typically do. They stick to preplanned life routes even when they are going nowhere or are actually plodding downhill to disaster.” Consider how Lee Kuan Yew made Singapore what it is today. In his terrific book, The Ocean of Churn ,...

My 7 yo was very excited about her upcoming field trip from school. On the weekend before the trip, she came to the shop… without the usual whining. After all, she was going to select the junk food to carry on the trip. Next item on her list? A sanitizer. She told me the school asked that every kid bring one to clean their hands before eating, but who really knows if that’s true? Anyways, I agreed. When we couldn’t find one in the shop, she suggested we check a medical store. Wow! She knows which shop sells what? I don’t like where this is headed… Her excitement mounted as D-Day approached. That in turn meant that I couldn’t resist telling to not go. “Why?”, she demanded. “What if you get lost?”, I countered. “C’mon”, she said dismissively, “I’ve been on these trips when I was younger and I came back then, didn’t I?”. “But you were also more obedient then”, I said. Silence. I’d won that round of banter. A rare victory, one I will savour. The night before, she didn’t sleep w...

Appreciating Bill Watterson : My 7 yo has begun to appreciate the art in Calvin and Hobbes . Especially Calvin’s expressions, from that wicked look to pure bliss to grumpiness and anger: Making faces : The other day, when I stuck my tongue out at her (it feels so good to do that), she challenged me to a “Who can make the uglier face?” contest. It was a massacre: is it a kid thing or did she learn from Calvin? Upside of phone games : The (phone) game of the month in her circle is Granny , involving a haunted house and the proverbial witch. As I told her yet again to not spend so much time on that game, she turned around and told me, “Playing this game will help me overcome my fear of ghosts and the dark”. Nice try! I need a volunteer : It’s not just the phone. Kids can weaponize stuff learnt from the TV too. Seeing the Heimlich Maneuver, a technique to save someone who is choking, she was instantly attracted to the (necessary) violence of the move. Needing a victi...

The fourth Game of Thrones book is a bit weird. Correction: very weird. It doesn’t talk about half the main characters at all! George RR Martin explains why in the epilogue: “I felt the readers would be better served by a book that told all the story for half the characters, rather than half the story for all the characters.” And so we find missing half “the characters you love or love to hate”. This book is all about Tywin Lannister, the “perfect Hand”, the man “who wore no crown, yet he was all a king should be”. Consider how outrageous that is, given that the man in question dies at the end of the previous book! Inevitably, the man who “did what was needed” was never popular, notes his daughter, Cersei: “King’s Landing had never loved Lord Tywin. He never wanted love, though.” No wonder then that when the “perfect Hand” dies, the unravelling begins: “When the lion falls the lesser beasts move in: the jackals and the vultures and the feral dogs.” And so begi...

In his book, Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed cites a very interesting problem solving incident at Unilever. The nozzle they were using to make detergents wasn’t working well at all. So they turned to the in-house experts in the fields of maths, fluid dynamics and high pressure systems. They couldn’t fix the problem. When maths-physics expertise couldn’t do the job, Unilever turned to their experts in (hold your breath) biology! The biologists took 10 copies of the nozzle; made random tweaks to each; and tested them. They then took the one that did the best and repeated the process. After 45 “generations”, they had an outstanding nozzle! The pic below shows how the nozzle “evolved”: The biology technique described above is what they call a “genetic algorithm”. Why that name? Nick Bostrom explained why in his book titled Superintelligence : because it mimics natural selection (mutation, inheritance and selection)! So does this mean trying random tweaks is the way to ...

My 7 yo daughter wanted to sign up for the Olympiad exams, both Science and Maths. Ok, the choice of subjects were mine. Once I saw the course material, I decided to focus only on the Maths and ditch the Science since the latter was just about mugging up stuff. Some things never change. On the day before the Science Olympiad exam, she announced: “It’s your fault that I will do badly in the exam tomorrow. You didn’t teach me anything.” I was not surprised. After all, this is the same kid who gives me grief for forcing her to learn stuff for her tests (“You made me learn 4 questions; they only asked 2 of them in the test.”). It’s not only teachers who teach to the test; students want to learn to the test too. Surprisingly, she came back from the Science Olympiad in a triumphant mood: “I managed to attempt all 35 questions. Last year, I couldn’t even try all the questions.” I guess she is ready for corporate life: after all, this is the same way most employees handle...

Which technologies in history have had the most transformative impact? Venkatesh Rao, a tech blogger, lists these : “Electricity, steam power, precision clocks, written language, token currencies, iron metallurgy and agriculture.” That made me wonder why he said “written language” as opposed to just language. And then I remembered these points from different sources. James Gleick in his book, The Information , pointed out that “speech is too fleeting to allow for analysis”. He went on to point out that logical reasoning has “no power unless people can examine and evaluate them”. And he’s right: can you imagine confirming any theorem from geometry unless it was written down, allowing you to go over it at your own pace, to look back at a previous step in the chain of reasoning? Of course, the point extends beyond just the theorems of geometry: it applies to every logical chain of reasoning. From a different perspective, Paul Romer, in one of his blogs, wrote that : “Cle...

No matter what certain economists may tell you, you know that people aren’t rational in the choices they make. That is pretty obvious. And yet, we forget that every time we come up with a “rational” solution only to find that it ends up achieving a totally different and unexpected outcome, all because people aren’t rational! For example, there was this day care center in Israel that expected parents to pick up their kids by 4 pm. Sometimes, parents were late but not by much. Why? Because they had to interact with the teacher who had to stay late and thus felt apologetic and a bit guilty. An experiment was conducted to impose a fine for late pickups. The surprising consequence ? “In day cares where the fine was introduced, parents immediately started showing up late, with tardiness levels eventually leveling out at about twice the pre-fine level. That is, introducing a fine caused twice as many parents to show up late. What about the remaining four day care centers that remaine...

Due to a school function, my 7 yo daughter had very few classes all week. It was just “practice, practice, practice”. One evening, she told me that the teachers took the kids to the play area that day since the stage (or something, I wasn’t really paying attention) had to be decorated… by the teachers. “That meant the kids could run around the play area and have fun”, said my daughter. “And yet, a couple of them went to help the teachers”, she said, as if it was the most abnormal behavior in recorded history. “Nice kids”, I said just to irritate her. “No”, she snapped back, “The teachers don’t want them around. The kids just keep getting in the way, dropping things here, misplacing things there”. On a roll now, she continued, “Like the time when one kid said he couldn’t find whatever the teacher asked for. The teacher scolded him nicely, only to find that another kid was holding the thing in her hand with a proud it-was-with-me look”. Don’t ask me what the thing in quest...

When an act is committed, who should we hold responsible? Should we blame the person who commits the action? Or the ideology/belief that leads him to do it? Or the tools/environment that made the action possible? Can you honestly say you’ve never pointed at different sources, based on the situation or your moral/political orientation? Let’s check it out. Take the periodic gun killings that happen in America. Is the problem the killer, who post facto is almost always found to be a guy with a mental problem? Or is it the ease of procuring guns in “the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past five years”, as the Onion describes it? So why is it so easy to procure guns in the US? Because (brace yourself) it’s there in the constitution! Then again, as Scott Adams says : “The Founders wisely made it hard to change the Constitution, but they did give us the tools to do it. And we have changed it i...

Visual illusions. A subset of the more general category of all illusions. Visual illusions can be fun at times, like when we enjoy them at magic shows. At other times, they can be perplexing: how can squares A and B below be the same color? And yet they are : Then there is the famous ‘inferior mirage’, one that shows us things that don’t exist. Like the beaten to death oasis in a desert. If there’s such a thing as an ‘inferior mirage’, does that mean there’s a ‘superior mirage’, you ask? Yes. And it wrecked a man’s reputation. Kathryn Schulz describes it in her terrific book, Being Wrong . In 1818, John Ross set out to find a (faster) sea route from Europe to Asia via the Arctic. At one potential point of progress, he was disappointed when the fog cleared: a huge chain of mountains appeared about 27 miles. Ross gave up and returned. But his second-in-command, William Parry, who was following in a different ship, hadn’t seen any mountains blocking the way. Parry...

My 7 yo daughter would want one of us to be/work from home if she had a holiday or vacation. This was true as recently as her summer vacation a couple of months back. And then things changed, starting with her Dussehra holidays. Now she doesn’t want us home on her holidays. Apparently, like all parents through the ages, we get in the way of fun and freedom. Don’t watch TV all day. Enough of playing that game on the phone. No, it’s too cold to go to the pool. It’s too hot to go for a picnic with your friends in the afternoon…                  I learnt this the hard way when I worked from home one day during her Dussehra holidays… to keep her company. And she was out of the house all day with her friends. In the night, she asked me whether I’d be working from home the next day as well. No, I said. Thank god, she replied. Ouch! But why, I asked, I didn’t stop you from doing anything all day. She had tha...

“Never ask a question if you don’t know the answer.” -           Rowena Cherry in Knight's Fork That line describes the perfect sense for a lawyer to have. After all, he doesn’t want the witness to answer with something that harms his client! But what about areas other than the law? Asking truly open ended questions is harder than you think. In Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer asks: “If we are asked: “Who made the world?” we may answer: “God made it,” “Chance made it,” “Love and hate made it,” or what you will. We may be right or we may be wrong. But if we reply: “Nobody made it,” … in this last instance, we have only seemingly given an answer; in reality we have rejected the question .” The point Langer is trying to make is that (unconsciously or not) the way a question is phrased can sometimes be very leading: “There can be only a certain number of alternatives that will complete its sense.” In her book, A Field ...