Viswanathan K's Thoughts

When it comes to predicting the (big-picture) future, everyone gets it wrong. Even those who try to confine themselves to parts of the big picture get it wrong. Karl Marx on social trends. Or Malthus on sustainability (he thought mankind was going to starve because, “Hey, human population is expanding too fast”). How about predictions on technological trends? They are just as wrong as all the others. There’s even a “law” called Amara’s Law related to this: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Rodney Brooks cites GPS as an example of Amara’s Law. Started in 1978, GPS was intended to “allow precise delivery of munitions by the U.S. military”. And the underestimated long term use of that tech is what we have today, from driving directions to sharing one’s location on WhatsApp to tracking one’s cab on Uber to synchronizing clocks (yes, they use it for that in physics labs, electrical grids and even st...

As a huge Calvin and Hobbes fan, I’ve absolutely loved this strip: The idea, the drawings, the choice of words… it’s what they call perfection. As a parent, on the other hand, I’ve shuddered at the prospect of my daughter being that way. And then, I got a chance to do exactly that comparison! She’s 6 now, the same as Calvin. And the incident in question too involved ice melting! Recently, she was doing this experiment described in one of those S.T.E.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) kits involving 3 ice cubes. (You know what they say about catching them young, right?) Anyway, here’s the experiment: you leave the first ice cube as-is; on the second one, you put salt; and on the last one, you put sugar. And then she sat back to observe: which one melts the fastest? (You may think this is as interesting as watching grass grow, but you can make a kid interested in anything by throwing in the words “race”, “first” and “winner”!) Outcome: the one with sa...

Rafia Zakaria called for the revival of the negative book review , lamenting: “The general tone and tenor of the contemporary book review is an advertisement-style frippery… Absent in either is any critical engagement, let alone any excavation of the book’s umbilical connection to the world in which it is born.” Contrast that, she says, with the reviews from 5 decades back: “World reviewers and critics were feared as “persons of dangerous acerbity” who were “cruel to youth” and (often out of jealousy) blind to the freshness and importance of new work.” A part of this modern-day trend has to do with overdone political correctness, writes Zakaria, “the idea that all Native American or Muslim American women must be praised for the very fact of publishing a book”. All of which is why she calls “against forced and foppish praise, where everything is good and so nothing at all is good”. I think her call for the revival of negative book reviews is too little, too late. In his t...

Steve Jobs gave this great commencement address to students at Stanford in 2005. Of course, he himself had dropped out of college! Talking about that, he said: “But looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.” One of those courses that interested him was on calligraphy. Years later, that appreciation and understanding would get translated into the fonts of the world’s first GUI on computers; and expand further into the focus he gave to esthetic beauty of all of Apple’s gadgets. The lesson from all that? “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.” He talked about his ouster from Apple at age 30 and why he was able...

If you thought that that finding one’s kid showing interest in science experiments would be satisfying, you’d be wrong. Parents would have identified the next peak to be scaled, in this case Mount Explanations. We bought my 6 year-old this kit called Snap Circuits . It had Lego-like blocks for capacitors, resistors, wires etc. The manual would tell you different ways to join the blocks to produce different effects e.g. a fuse, regulating fan speed, dimming a light etc. Awesome kit, thought my wife and I. To my daughter though, it began to feel repetitive after a point. The output of all these circuits seemed to usually be one of the following: a light turns on (or off), a fan spins, a speaker makes sounds. And so her damning verdict of the kit was that dreaded word, “Boring!”. And that meant all attempts to explain how a circuit (or its components) worked was doomed from the start… But she did seem to like some of the applications, like the fuses I showed in the house. Or ...

During the first World War, Britain and France were obviously keen that the US join the fight alongside the Allies. Germany obviously did not want the Americans to enter the war. Woodrow Wilson, never keen to get Americans killed in a European conflict, intended to stay away from the conflict. In 1917, writes Simon Singh in his awesome book on encryption, The Code Book , Germany decided (secretly) to launch an all-out offense with their U-boats. Cut off Britain’s supply lines from the US, and they would be forced to capitulate. But what if the Americans joined the war the next time their civilians got killed in this all-out U-boat war, say when a civilian ship was sunk accidentally? Sure, it was possible that by the time the US decided to join, it would be too late and Germany would have already won Europe. But if not? Would America’s entry turn the tide of the war against Germany? A tough choice indeed. And so Germany’s Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmerman, came up with his ...

Tim Harford argues that referendums are bad for democracies: 1)       Voters don’t think through complex issues end to end. Instead, they vote by doing what Daniel Kahneman described in his bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow : “When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.” As an example of that, Harford says: “The difficult question in a referendum might be, “Should the UK remain in the EU?”; the easier substitution is, “Do I like the way this country is going?” 2)      Political parties serve as a proxy for certain ideologies. But during a referendum, that doesn’t apply. So voters should think harder. But, as we saw in #1, they don’t do that. 3)      Referendums are binding. That means the people we elect “to make considered choices on our behalf” have no choice but to execute the outcome of the referendum. Whether or not they agre...

In one of the Ice Age movies, there’s this song that starts with the line, “Everybody loves a dinosaur”. (That’s the one with the dinos in it, obviously). That line holds true for almost all of us. It’s huge, it’s ferocious, it’s scary… what’s not to love? A while back, my 6 year old and I were watching the Jurassic World movie on TV. That’s the one where they “designed” a new dino, a genetic hybrid of all kinds of creatures. In case you were wondering why they needed to design a dino, one of the characters in the movie explains: “You didn't ask for reality, you asked for more teeth.” The Indominus rex (that’s the dino’s name) escapes (obviously) and things need to be brought back under control, before, as the hero of the movie says: “She is learning where she fits on the food chain and I'm not sure you want her to figure that out.” Now keep in mind that my daughter loves dogs and cats. Dogs more than cats. That in turn means that I never miss a chance to nee...

Facial recognition algorithms have been in vogue for a while. Smartphones use your face as your password to unlock it. Which means they must be pretty accurate, right? Not really. Across the board, tests reveal that the western AI’s face recognition accuracy is better for whites than blacks, and within each race, better for males than for females. Similar algorithms developed in Asia are better at identifying Asians than whites. The algorithms aren’t “ intentionally  biased”. Usually, Big Data algorithms get better the more data you throw at them. But given the demographics of the West and Asia, there’ll always be more data of certain groups than others; so it’s hard to see how this can be fixed. Who cares, you may be thinking, locking phones with good old passwords isn’t that much effort. Aha, but these algorithms are increasingly being used by law enforcement agencies all over the world, where the cost of mis-recognition can be high. In not-so-free countries, the...

Does Trump have a vision, a doctrine towards which he works? (Forget the “how”, the question is about the “what”). Or does he do whatever catches his attention next, gets fixated on it, until the next thing comes along? (North Korea yesterday, trade war with China today, who knows what tomorrow). I found this article, The Trump Doctrine , by Bruno Maçães intriguing: 1)       Trump’s inauguration speech was odd, he writes, because: “ It left out the core of what an elected politician in the United States would include: an appeal to the universal principles of freedom, democracy and equality guiding America in its action(s).” 2)      But it may have been an indicator that Trump wants to copy whatever works elsewhere, including China’s policy of achieving economic growth by any and all means necessary. 3)      He may also think of Europe as a “has-been”, a continent which in the last 3 decades, has “produced a ...

In A Crack in Creation , her book on the gene editing tool, CRISPR, Jennifer Doudna mentions the time she found a tattered copy of James Watson’s The Double Helix on her bed: “My dad would occasionally pick up books for me at used bookstores to see if they sparked an interest.” My 6 year-old daughter likes to be read this book titled The Big Book of How . The first few points to the question, “HOW do astronauts train?”, were quite boring (for her). The next point was on training in zero gravity, so I decided to spice it up. It’s done by going on a plane that dives (like a free fall), I said. A falling plane? Now she was interested. So I drove home the advantage: Me : “You know the funny feeling in your tummy when you’re on a roller coaster?” She : “Yes” Me : “This is like that. But much worse. People even throw up.” She (all excited): “Really? They puke?” Me : “Yes. That’s why they call the plane the Vomit Comet.” Like all kids her age, she finds anything gross v...

The rise of mass media during the 1930’s coincided with that of fascism and Nazism. Was the media therefore an instrument for totalitarianism? Hence, post-World War II, we ended with decentralized mass media. In theory, more channels meant differing opinions, thus people form informed decisions. Then came Silicon Valley; and scaled it up massively: from a handful of media outlets we went to everyone-can-broadcast, aka social media. Not surprising then that many blame social media (and Silicon Valley) for the rise of Trump. But the book, Trump and the Media, says the truth may be more complicated. After all, Trump’s vote base doesn’t even spend that much time online! Instead, writes Nicholas Carr in his book review : “The novelty and frequent abrasiveness of (Trump’s) tweets… mesmerized the chattering class throughout the primaries and the general election campaign, fueling a frenzy of retweets, replies, and hashtags. Social media’s biggest echo chamber turned out to be the tr...