Viswanathan K's Thoughts

We’ve all heard of jokes like this one by Groucho Marx: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know.” Julia Galef wrote this awesome blog on how our mind switches perspectives to “get” the joke: “You can almost hear the gears grinding as we shift from “I, in my pajamas, shot an elephant” to “I shot an elephant who was wearing my pajamas.” Apparently, there’s even a term for cases like this “whose latter half surprises us, forcing us to go back and reconsider the assumptions we’d made about what was going on in the first half”: paraprosdokia. You’re probably thinking only a nutjob analyzes the process behind a joke, right? Hang on because Galef points this is usually how theories change in science, except much more slowly than when you got that joke! “As you collect more observations that don’t seem to fit your theory, you either dismiss them as an anomaly, or find a way to shoehorn them into the framework of your theory, or you...

In his awesome book, Fooling Houdini , Alex Stone said that magic is all about breaking the laws of physics. Or appearing to do so. I never thought of it that way, but on reflecting, I feel that’s a great definition. After all, isn’t magic all about the card that tunnels through the deck to the top, the girl who gets cut in two and lives, the magician who escapes from a box dropped into water while he was chained? Later in the book, Stone talks about a category of magicians called mentalists. Those are the folks who claim to be able to read your mind and to communicate with the dead. But there’s a key difference, says Stone: “A magician should pull off every trick perfectly; a mentalist should not. Mentalists should only be about 85 percent accurate…The idea is that the sixth sense, like the other five senses, should be fallible.” Ironical, isn’t it? The very definition of science is repeatability; but if you break the laws of physics with repeatability, we call it magic, a t...

In his book, The Big Short , Michael Lewis talks about a fund manager named Steve Eisman who, as a young man, decided to study the Jewish holy book, the Talmud. Why? “Not because he had the slightest interest in God but because he was curious about its internal contradictions.” I didn’t read religious stuff with that aim ; but I did start to notice the contradictions as I went along. Take prophecies, for instance. Almost every religion has them. A prophecy implies that the future is pre-determined. So does that mean there’s no free will? And if it’s true that there’s no such thing as free will, then it is illogical to claim that heaven, hell, rebirth or nirvana are based on your actions, right? Take Kamsa. After hearing the prophecy that he’d be killed by Devaki’s 8 th born, if he had turned over a new leaf, would he still have been killed? A la Angulimala? Or would he have been spared, in which case all future celestial prophecies would have been considered non-binding...

A year or so back, we bought a science kit for our then 5 year old daughter. As with all such kits, the highlight was supposed to be the volcano (vinegar with baking soda). And as we’ve discovered so many times since, that experiment is never anywhere near as spectacular as the pics will show or what you think it will be… But that activity still got her interested in “science experiments”, many more of which have since been done based on YouTube and various kits. One of her first experiments was to catch a couple of ants in a bottle and observe them with the magnifying glass provided in the kit. Any attempts at telling her to leave the poor ants alone was met with a ferocious “Do you or do you not want me to do science experiments?” response. Oh, what horrors we inflict in the name of science. (Note: she’ll call her friends who “play” with ants the ant bullies…) The wheel with different colors (or patterns) that merge when the wheel is spun fast blew her mind. How can that be...

Sometimes, when we see people (or companies) make terrible choices and get butchered, we wonder: How could they not have seen that coming? Why didn’t they think deeper about it when they had a chance? There are (obviously) many reasons for that, but here are a few more of the common ones. Sometimes, it’s because people have a mental model of the world that they truly believe in. Leonardo di Caprio describes it in the movie, Inception : “What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed - fully understood - that sticks; right in there somewhere.” What’s worse is that just having an opinion is bad enough at times, says Leo Tolstoy: “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to th...

A pic of a Buckingham Palace guard started off a conversation with my 6 year-old on kings and queens. She was surprised that England still has a queen. Not just England, I said, so too do many European countries. Except France, I added. And thus came up the topic of the guillotine. What’s that, she asked. I drew a pic of the guillotine setup. This is how the conversation continued: She : “Really, so the French king was killed by his own people?” Me : “Yup.” She : “But why did they kill their king?” (I told her the infamous Marie Antoinette quip on eating cake). She : “Don’t tell me jokes and stories, I am asking what really happened?” Me: “I’ll find out the kid-version answer and tell you later.” I’ll-get-back-with-the-answer-later is one of the only topics where my daughter has the patience to wait. In fact, I was very gratified to hear her say one day to my wife, “If you or appa don’t know something, you say you’ll find out and tell it later. Why can’t my m’am do that...

In his book, Ignorance: How it Drives Science , Stuart Firestein wrote: “In science there are so far two well-known instances where knowledge is shown to have limits.” He was referring to the famous Uncertainty Principle from quantum mechanics and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem in maths. The former says it is impossible to know both items in certain pairs of properties of objects. What does Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem say? Simply put, it about any system of axioms (statements taken to be true, as being “obvious” without a formal proof) and proofs built using those axioms. No matter how you much progress you make with this system, the theorem says that there will always be true statements that cannot be proven . Aha, you think, but does this just mean that one needs to add another fairly obvious axiom to the list? Would that then make all true statements provable? Go ahead, said Gödel, add another axiom to the list. I’ll then find a different true statement that can’t...

When it comes to data about the stuff we do being available to (and used by) our phones and apps, most people don’t seem to care. Is it because we feel that it makes no sense to be so possessive about something we didn’t even know had any value to anyone? Or is it a calculated move, a la what Tyrion Lannister advised Daenerys in Game of Thrones : “You didn’t even know it (dragonglass) was here; it’s nothing to you. Give him something by giving him nothing .” If the alternative is to pay for the services that Google, Facebook and WhatsApp provide, then it seems most of us would rather give them something (data) by giving them nothing (we care about). We seem to take the Tyrion approach: “Let him mine the dragonglass. If he’s wrong, it’s worthless.” Like Daenerys gave Jon Snow dragonglass; we give Google and Facebook data! Given that’s our stance with data about ourselves (who we know, who we interact with, location, where we go, what interests us etc) when it comes to Goo...

Using Pamela Kanwar’s Imperial Simla as his base, Salil Misra wrote this fascinating article on British India’s summer capital, Simla: “Prior to British arrival, Indians had a different relationship with their mountains. They were a source of faith. The height and the mystique created faith and reverence, also a fear of the unknown and the inaccessible. Mountains were visited only for pilgrimage.” In the 19 th century, Britain changed from just a commercial exploiter of India to become “an over-arching, intrusive and interventionist state”. That transformation in turn required a huge number of Britishers to come to India to govern. The power and potential for wealth were obvious attractions; but the heat wasn’t. Hence were created the summer capitals (Madras to Ooty, Bombay to Mahabaleshwar, Bengal to Darjeeling, and UP to Nainital). Simla became a “little England”, and by 1862 Britain’s favourite hill station became the summer capital of British India. Now remind yourse...

One of the science experiments that my 6 year old daughter did involved removing the ink pack from a marker pen, draining its ink, mixing the ink with water, and finally watching the ink glow in the dark. (The intent was to learn about phosphorescent materials). Removing the ink pack from the marker was impossibly difficult. So I took out the hammer to crack open the pen and pull out the ink pack. My daughter had this astonished look on her face and said: “I didn’t know we had a hammer in the house!” It reminded me of what Ser Jorah Mormont said in Game of Thrones : “There is a beast in every man and it stirs when you put a sword in his hand.” Apparently, a hammer has the same effect! I could see the manic glee in my daughter’s eyes at the prospect of going to town with the hammer. I shuddered at the fact that she seemed to share Calvin’s view on hammers: I scrambled to find a way for her to use the hammer without destroying something in the house. The solution? Ice, ...

Since 1930, many expected the number of work hours to reduce as technological advances continued and more and more things could be done by machines. Obviously, that hasn’t happened. In fact, the hours per week have increased for most people. Why is that? Sebastian Thrun’s response seems to explain why : “When there are fewer jobs…one way to stay employed is to work even harder. So we see people working more, not less.” But then I realized that this would imply that there are always new jobs getting created that need to be done. But on closer inspection, don’t you agree that most of the jobs today don’t have anything to do with the production and distribution of anything of any value to anyone? After all, what fraction of the world’s population is farming or delivering pizzas or, I don’t know, producing iPhones? And aren’t those some of the things people actually want/need? The jobs most people do are the one that David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” . Bullshit jobs include...

Precedent. A dicey word. A lot of the time, it’s good to follow precedent: after all, that approach/policy/whatever has worked for so long. On the other hand, it causes people to play safe, be lazy and never think. Like the era when everyone bought IBM because “Nobody ever got fired for picking IBM”! Or the way bureaucrats behave everywhere, even today. Taken too far, following precedent leads to the mindset Bob Sutton worded thus in a blog title : “The best you can be is a perfect imitation of those who came before you.” Most of us know both these viewpoints. But another reason for following precedent was the one F.M. Cornford cited in his 1908 book, Microcosmographia Academica , a guide for politicians then as much as it is today: “The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent is that you should not now do an admittedly right action for fear you, or your equally timid successors, should not have the courage to do right in some future case…It follows that nothing should ever be d...