Viswanathan K's Thoughts

When my 6 year old goes to sleep at night, one of us usually (but not always) pats her to sleep. When my wife was out of the country recently, I did that every night. Which is why I was so surprised when my wife told me this incident. After my wife returned, my daughter sensed her “missed you” + guilty feeling. And once there is blood in the water, my daughter, like any kid, moved in like a shark for the kill, milking the guilt for all it was worth. One night while being put to bed, my daughter asked my wife to pat her saying, “While you were gone, I had to pat myself to sleep. And since I can’t pat myself on the back, I had to pat myself on the thigh instead”!!! Whoa! Wait a minute, what had I been doing all those days, I thought. I am sure this isn’t the first (or last) time that she’ll be cooking up such stories. The more exaggerated they are, the more fun they are to concoct… and to hear. But I would still have loved to say and do what Calvin’s dad did in the strip below:...

Ever since Newton, one would think that the position of any planet can be predicted for all time. Except that one would be wrong! Just having 3 objects in the scenario makes calculations very tough! That’s the (in)famous “three-body problem”. (And in case you wondered, yes, the first three-body problem people tried to solve involved the sun, earth and moon). You might be thinking if it’s so tough for humans, why not just throw a computer at the problem? Aha, but the point is in this line from Wikipedia : “There is no general closed form solution for every condition.” Put simply, the problem is that, for almost all starting positions, there is no equation into which you plug in the masses, coordinates and velocities at time zero and then find where they’ll be at all instants in the future. Sure, you can calculate positions instant by instant , but that still means we don’t the answer for all time. For example, consider the more general form the problem, the n-body problem (wh...

A year or so back, my daughter asked how mountains are formed. I told her about the (tectonic) plates that move, bump into each other, and cause the land to “fold” thereby creating mountains. It was fairly easy to show that effect with a bedsheet, but there was no reaction from her. So I left it there. Now she’s 6. Some time back, I pointed to the globe and asked her whether the eastern edge of South America and the western edge of Africa look like they “fit” into each other, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Yes, she said. And doesn’t Madagascar’s western edge align with the eastern edge of Africa? She looked and agreed. And doesn’t Madagascar’s eastern edge align with India’s western edge? This isn’t such a good fit, so her response was a bit muted. It is, I continued, India used to be a part of Africa, and started moving to reach where it is today. And when it bumped into Asia, it led to the folding of the land to create mountains, what we call the Himalayas, I told her. Now she...

Remember Dr.Mengele? He was the evil Nazi doctor who performed medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. A while back, I read this article debating the ethics of using any findings derived from such experiments. Would it be ethical today to use such findings, asked the article. Unfortunately, the easy answer that might have made this whole topic go away doesn’t apply: not all of that data was scientifically suspect: “Some of the data from Nazi experiments is scientifically sound enough to be useful.” One such example is the hypothermia experiments in which people were immersed in ice water until they became unconscious. Or died. This data on the rate of cooling of humans in icy waters and when re-warming might succeed could be useful today when dealing with folks rescued from boat accidents. Such examples raise the troubling question: “Should the results of Nazi experiments ever be taken up and used?” As the article says, the utilitarian attitude would be: ...

Back in the old days, before the Suez Canal was built, a trip from Europe to India was very circuitous and took forever. But at least the passage routes were wide. After the Suez Canal, the route got shortened significantly, but it also meant the passage via the Red Sea was very narrow. That very narrowness led to a surge in piracy in the region, and the associated hostage taking and ransoms have became notorious in recent years. The Tom Hanks movie, Captain Philips , was based on one such incident. Many countries, including India, have sent their navies to patrol the seas in the region. Given the area’s strategic importance, a tiny country you’d never hear of otherwise, Djibouti is now “home to more foreign bases than any other country”, writes Bruno Macaes! So who has military bases in Djibouti? France (who is now moving out due to budgetary constraints), China, Japan, the US, Italy and Saudi Arabia… for now . In fact, this is the only foreign base for both China and...

My memory is that nobody wanted to be the class monitor/prefect: the poor slob had no real power, was ignored by all anyway and he got branded teacher’s pet. But that’s now how 6 year old’s feels. Months back, my duaghter was very unhappy that she didn’t get to be Class Leader or Deputy Class Leader. Not even a Green Ambassador (more on what that is later). For some reason, she thought that the role got rotated among the kids every couple of weeks. As time passed, and no such change happened, she became angry. Why should only they be the leaders? What is so special about them? Hmmph… they scream more than those they tell to be quiet! They boss everyone. It’s amusing how kids can wind themselves into a tizzy with such righteous indignation… Unfortunately, she was way too young for me to be able to bestow wisdom on such matters. No, I don’t mean the sab moh maya hai kinda wisdom, I mean the Game of Thrones kind. Like this great quote by Lord Varys in Game of Thrones : “Power ...

Seth Godin calls it the “essential skill of thriving in a world that's changing fast”: “Flip, the ability, when confronted with a world that doesn't match the world in your head, to say, “wait, maybe I was wrong.” Or as David Foster Wallace wrote: “To really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time... (one should be willing to deal) with massive, high-entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux.” That, of course, can be exhausting. Which is probably why at times, many envy what Wallace calls “the “moral clarity” of the immature”! If you don’t try to keep upto date with all that changing info, then you could end up being wrong for the reason that Paul Graham cites : “When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world.” Even if you’re trying to get all that info, Wallace reminds us of: “How much subcontracting and outsourcing and submitting to other Decider...

Until a certain age, the usual meal time “conversation” with a kid will revolve around the fact that the kid doesn’t like/want to eat that dish. The problem’s never about the way the dish has been prepared on that day. At least that’s the way it seems to me so far (my daughter’s now 6). Except when it comes to sandwiches. That’s the one “dish” on which kids are connoisseurs and authorities on. I learnt it the hard way when my wife travelled to Amsterdam and the kid decided to fall sick a day before she left. So I was left holding the (sick) baby… I’d been told not to force her to eat while she was sick, except if it was necessary that she have something before she could be given medicines. So around breakfast time, I asked if she wanted to eat something? Bread, she replied. Ok, I said breathing a sigh of relief. Toasted, she added. No problem. And then she had a look at the toast I got her. It’s not brown all over, she declared. Yes, it is. Not the right shade of brown. W...

Uber is one those reviled-yet-needed companies, especially in the West (Asia, on the other hand, either loves it or creates copy cats a la Ola in India and Didi in China). I was reminded of this aspect when I read Om Malik’s commentary on Uber. He starts off by accepting that Uber “has been a godsend for me”. But then starts his criticism of Uber: -          It has taken in so much information about its users, and it has even tracked its riders in the past; -          Their data got hacked , and Uber didn’t even bother to disclose that until recently; -          The estimated time of arrival of the ride is often way off the mark; -          The cars are often dirty; -          And Uber seems to care more about its drivers than its riders: “The whole equation assumes that...

There was a time when your geographical location mattered a lot. For obvious reasons, as Will and Ariel Durant pointed out in The Lessons of History : “Geography is the matrix of history, its nourishing mother and disciplining home. Its rivers, lakes, oases, and oceans draw settlers to their shores, for water is the life of organisms and towns, and offers inexpensive roads for transport and trade.” No wonder then that landlocked countries have usually been poorer. In his book, The Revenge of Geography , Robert Kaplan made a very interesting point about how north-south oriented regions of the world have suffered compared to east-west oriented regions:  “Note how temperate zone, east–west oriented Eurasia is better off than north–south oriented sub-Saharan Africa, because technological diffusion works much better across a common latitude, where climatic conditions are similar, thus allowing for innovations in the tending of plants and the domestication of animals to sprea...

In recent times, my 6 year-old daughter has shown signs of being aware of the existence of other countries and the distances between them. In astronomy, the unit of distance is light years; for her, the unit of distance between countries is the number of connecting flights! One time, I showed her a video of the Aurora Borealis (aka Northern Lights) and told her that unfortunately it can only be seen from countries far north. Later, when she overheard us talking about (possibly) going to Maldives some time, her ears perked up. “That’s a different country from India, right? So can we see the Aurora Borealis from there?”, she asked. I realized it was time to get her a globe so she’d be able to see where countries are located. I am already finding the kinds of things she notices and asks thanks to the globe amusing and interesting. Wow! There are so many countries? So China is bigger than India? Which is the biggest country? Oh, so America is really on the other side of the world? ...

Blackmail is illegal in most countries. As it should be, I felt. After all, unlike some acts that are crimes without making any sense (like suicide or blasphemy), surely blackmail is, well, a black and white issue, right? Apparently not. There is even a term for it: the paradox of blackmail. Let us understand it. An example would explain the paradox. If workers threaten a strike unless their pay is increased, it is not considered illegal. But if you threaten to expose someone’s affair unless he pays you, that’s called blackmail. And hence illegal. But from a purely logical point of view, shouldn’t a “Give me money or else” threat always be considered blackmail? That’s the paradox. I know, I know, some would argue that the difference between the two is the motive. The workers are demanding more wages often because of their existing wages being low. Whereas the blackmailer of the above example is just out to make some easy money. Not so fast. The counter-argument to tha...

Have you heard of Urban Dictionary ? It is a different from regular dictionaries in these ways: 1)       It is not associated with any big-name dictionary from the past. 2)      Most of its content is slang words and phrases, especially the ones trending on the Internet. 3)      And like so many things today, its definitions are a “product of the internet hordes”, writes Clio Chang . Anyone can add a definition, and other users get to up-vote or down-vote it. 4)      The definitions then get ranked based on those up and down votes and the most popular ones show up first. A side-effect of this mechanism is that people try to come up definitions that will be popular. Sometimes this leads to humorous definitions. Like the Devil’s Dictionary of old time. At other times though, it leads to racist and sexist definitions. Of course, whether or not the likes of Chang like to admit it, racist and s...

Years back, I’d heard my friends say that their kids think of money as something you got out of an ATM, not as something you earned! Nowadays, people like us make most of our payments online or via credit cards, so I thought it would be a long time before my kid even realized there was such a thing called money. You’d think I’d have learnt my lesson by now that a kid will always prove you wrong… We’ve kept (some of) the money my daughter got from people from the time she was a baby in “her” purse. As a result, she’s seen money. More importantly, she knows it is her money. Believe me on that last part: when we tried to take some change from her purse one time, her fangs came out. Then there was this time when my daughter came back from play and asked, “Do you have a crore rupees?” Oh man, so this is what 6-7 year old’s talk about these days, I thought. Promptly, I replied, “No, I don’t” thinking that would nip whatever it was she wanted to buy/spend it on. Instead, she respo...