Viswanathan K's Thoughts

If it’s election time, can accusations of EVM tampering be far behind, wonders Sreemoy Talukdar: “It duly emerges during election time and depending on whether BJP wins or loses, either escalates or vaporises into thin air. For instance, EVMs were alright when Arvind Kejriwal's party swept Delhi in 2015.” Questioning the EVM’s fits into the narrative of certain people that the Modi government is “destabilising institutions”, including the Election Commission (In India, unlike the US, the EC is an independent institution. So of course, the BJP must be all out to destroy it). Selective stats are presented as “evidence”. In two Lok Sabha seats, 20.8 percent and 19.22 percent of all VVPAT machines had to be replaced. Is that a very high number? Absolutely. But during the Punjab assembly elections, the number was 35 percent in one constituency. A state that, in case you forgot, the Congress won. The right question is why is the replacement rate so high at times for the n...

In his best-selling Chinese sci-fi novel (also translated into English), Three Body Problem , Cixin Liu starts with events during the Chinese Revolution. Science got mixed with ideology, as one character in the book laments: “You changed the names of many physical laws and constants: Ohm’s law you called resistance law, Maxwell’s equations you called electromagnetic equations, Planck’s constant you called the quantum constant.” Why the renaming? “All scientific accomplishments resulted from the wisdom of the working masses, and those capitalist academic authorities only stole those fruits and put their names on them.” One might dismiss all this with a Shakespearian “What’s in a name?” shrug. The problem is that such interference rarely stops with name and credit. Even scientific statements could get you into trouble with the political authorities. Like the Church and communist regimes. Scott Alexander wrote about the Kolmogorov option (or should it be “complicity”...

One time my 6 yo (year old) daughter quickly doodled this pic of sea-life: Not satisfied with my complement, she showed her mean streak challenging me to draw a dolphin. I drew this: She dismissed it as a pitiful effort, adding insult to injury by offering to teach me how to draw a dolphin. Deciding to change the terms of engagement from drawings to text, I responded with a speech callout: She responded by drawing another dolphin (she didn’t want to ruin her masterpiece, apparently) and pasting her own callout: To which I responded with: The all caps was for emphasis, something lost on her. She misunderstood it as an escalation to war with font styles, because she wrote this next: Assuming it was an “L” followed by an (unintentionally) inverted “i”, I smugly told her that’s not how the word “Lie” is spelt. I was promptly corrected: “No…. I wrote ‘L’ followed by an exclamation mark. ‘L’ for ‘Loser’”. The statement was accompanied with the universa...

The worst things we see in India almost always happened in the West too. The difference, of course, is that those things have stopped happening in the West by now. Take the VIP treatment of rich or political prisoners, for example. We know the lavishness that the Jayalalithaa’s and Laloo’s have enjoyed during their imprisonment. But guess what? Spanish prisons in the 1580’s were pretty much the same. As Robert Goodwin wrote in Spain: The Centre of the World 1519-1682 , Seville’s Royal Prison had a gate called the Golden Gate: “It was called the Golden Gate because at this stage those who could afford the fees could pay 'no mean quantity of Gold' to 'stay in the sheriff's accommodation'…The accommodation was relatively comfortable, with its own roof terrace, and such inmates were largely free to come and go and many were given leave to sleep at home.” For those couldn’t pay in gold, there was: “The Silver Gate, where for a ducat or two a prisoner could h...

Rights and duties: remember those terms from civics class? Rights are what all citizens are entitled to; and duties are obligations of the citizens to the country. Additionally, rights are enforceable, i.e., a citizen could file a case if deprived of his rights. But duties were just obligations, good to do’s, not mandatory and thus not enforceable. That last aspect is a very important distinction; and Ayn Rand gave a great example of that difference. She said that the framers of the American constitution included the “right to pursuit of happiness”, but not the “right to happiness” itself. Philosopher John Searle made a great point on the topic of rights that had never occurred to me, the sub-categorization of rights as either positive rights or negative rights: “If you look at the logical structure of rights, every right implies an obligation on someone else’s part…(For example) My right to free speech means I have a right to exercise my free speech without being inter...

In recent times, my 6 yo daughter has suddenly become very interested in Hindi movie songs. This was surprising to us because we hardly ever watch Hindi movies. To begin with, she couldn’t even identify the actresses. Since that was around the time of the talk-of-the-town Virat Kohli – Anushka wedding, it was very embarrassing for her to not even be able to recognize Anushka! And so began the binge watching of Hindi song videos. Progress was slow: she complained that Anushka and Katrina look so similar as she got them wrong yet again. In which universe do they look similar, I wondered… (Among the actors, she’s been able to recognize Salman Khan since she was 2. And till date, she has shown no signs of being able to name any other actor). Next her interest expanded from identifying actresses to sing and hum the hit songs. I offered to download the videos of the songs she liked from YouTube thinking it might also help improve her Hindi (I know, I know, parents ruin everything ...

“Murder of democracy”. That’s the phrase going around to describe what’s followed the results of the elections in Karnataka. While it accurately describes the actions of the BJP camp; it also applies to the actions of others. Let’s see why: -          Was the Governor biased in ignoring the joint claim of the Congress and JD(S)? Yes. Was he biased in allowing the BJP a ridiculously large period of 15 days to prove its majority? Absolutely. -          But little of what the Governor did was illegal. Exercising his “discretion” in deciding whom to call first (Largest party first in Karnataka; whoever claims to have the numbers in Goa), while discretionary, is still legal. Which raises the question: Why hasn’t any party at the Center ever framed clear, unambiguous rules on the topic? The Congress never did it, nor did the BJP or the regional parties that were part of various coalitions at the Center....

After explaining the workings and eventual decryption of the Enigma code in his terrific book, The Code Book , Simon Singh pointed out that the British kept the fact a secret even after World War II. Why? To keep tabs on countries who still used the Enigma code, says this Wikipedia article. In fact, they went a step further than just tapping into countries that happened to use the Enigma code: “After the end of World War II, the Allies sold captured Enigma machines, still widely considered secure, to developing countries.” Were you appalled by that? Fast forward to present day, says security expert , Bruce Schneier, and things are actually lot worse: 1)       The Pentagon recently stopped selling phones made by Chinese manufacturers like ZTE and Huawei on military bases. Why? Because they might be spying on their users. 2)      In 2012, the US was worried about Chinese made Internet routers for the same reason. 3)  ...

Charlie Munger once talked about the work one should put in before forming an opinion: “ Ask yourself what are the arguments on the other side. It’s bad to have an opinion you’re proud of if you can’t state the arguments for the other side better than your opponents. This is a great mental discipline.” That is very good advice indeed. Sadly, it is also very hard to follow. That is probably why most people with a strong opinion rarely know of any merits in the opposing view. And so they take to name calling and like to think of themselves as morally superior. No, that doesn’t just apply to politicians and fanatics. It applies to most people we know, probably (shudder) even ourselves. Sure, the degrees may be vastly different across groups or individuals, but very few people take the actual effort of going as far as Munger advised. Or if they do, they just pick the worst possible motive they can think of for the opposing view (bigot, racist, religious fanatic, greedy, ...

It is said that very small kids are hard to fool with magic tricks. Why? Because they’ve not experienced the world enough, they have fewer ideas from experience as to what should happen next. Hence they don’t look at/for the “expected” thing, which is exactly the window when the magician pulls his trick. The violation of what you expect based on years of experience. That’s how Alex Stone defines magic in his engrossing book, Fooling Houdini . But that definition doesn’t factor in for the scenario where your expectation may be wrong or invalid in the first place! Which is why, Stone being a physicist, goes a step deeper and describes magic as the perceived violation of the very laws of physics: “Magic transports us to an absurd universe, parodying the laws of physics in a whimsical toying of cause and effect.” And most of us don’t really want to know how the trick was done: “Being fooled is fun, too, because it’s a controlled way of experiencing a loss of control. Much lik...

George Soros is famous for being the man who made a billion dollars on a single day . Less known are they very thought provoking series of lectures he gave. We know that the Semitic religions claim to know the one and only ultimate truth. Both Christianity and Islam have shown the evil that claim inevitably leads to. Soros says the same applies to non-religious ideologies too: “Ideologies which claim to be in possession of the ultimate truth are making a false claim; therefore, they can be imposed on society only by force. This applies to Communism, Fascism and National Socialism alike. All these ideologies lead to repression.” Soros goes on to talk about the two purposes of thought: “One is to understand the world in which we live; I call this the cognitive function. The other is to change the situation to our advantage. I call this the participating or manipulative function.” He then says that when both of the above functions work at the same time, they can interfere...

In his terrific book on the world of narcotics titled Narconomics , Tom Wainright has a chapter on “designer drugs”. So what are designer drugs? “(Designer drugs are) synthetic drugs (that) mimic the effects of more mainstream narcotics.” In other words, they are “concocted in laboratories rather than on Andean hillsides or in Afghan poppy fields”. Also, they are legal (more on that later), which is why they’re also called “legal highs”. While “legal” sounds like “safer”, they are actually riskier than good old cocaine and heroin (more on why later). It all began in New Zealand! Since New Zealand is in the middle of nowhere (“where Hobbits frolic”) and has a tiny population, it just wasn’t economical for drug cartels to smuggle their drugs to the Kiwis. But of course, the Kiwis being human, needed drugs like the rest of us… which led to the creation of designer drugs. And then they began to spread to other parts of the world. But why are they legal? Aha, it’s a cat-and-...

When we’ve gone for vacations in the past, we’ve done home stays and stayed at hotels. The recent trip to Kabini involved a first for the kid: a stay at a resort. When she asked what a resort was, I was very tempted to say, “You’ll know it when you see it”. Wisely though, I held my tongue. On the drive to Kabini, she lay down in the back of the car and started to doze off. Unfortunately, right about then, I had to hit the brakes hard, and she slid off the rear seat. She woke up on the floor, groggy, and in a little pain. After we made sure she was OK, I couldn’t resist telling her at least this Humpty Dumpty got back in one piece. She was not amused. She was blown away by the resort. You can imagine how good the place was when I tell you that the place didn’t have any TV, and yet in 3 ½ days, not once did she complain. Sure, she had the tablet and free wi-fi, but TV is different. Now and then, she did pester us with “What’s planned for the evening? For tomorrow?” like questi...

It never ceases to amaze me how many different ways you could prove so many things in maths. The famous Pythogoras theorem alone can be proved in 112 ways according to this site that lists them all! Even if some of them turn to be repetitions (I didn’t check them all, and let’s take that list with a pinch of salt: after all, this is the Internet!), it still leaves a huge number of ways to prove the same thing. Another famous example is calculus (Newton and Leibniz). In science, there are multiple instances of different people discovering the same thing independently . Examples include oxygen (Scheele, Priestley and Lavoisier) the theory of evolution (Darwin and Wallace), and quantum electrodynamics (Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga). There’s even a term for all this: “ multiple discovery ”. It’s so frequent that Wikipedia even has a list of multiple discoveries across the centuries! Funnily, it happened in the case on non-Euclidian geometry where Farkas Bolyai, the father o...

Why are “news” shows like Arnab Goswami’s Newshour so popular? Why is that yelling-till-you-are-blue-in-the-face format the one that all the other news channels are aping? Michael Crichton wrote this article on why speculation is rampant in US media; but many of his points would answer my questions above. First, there’s the financial aspect to such shows: “It’s incredibly cheap. Talk is cheap. And speculation shows are the cheapest thing you can put on television.” Talk though, while cheap, is also boring. Unless “the talk becomes heated and excessive. So it becomes excessive”, says Crichton. Of course, even heated talk is not always compelling; hence the next step: ““Crisisization” of everything possible…There is a tendency to hype urgency and importance and be-there-now when such reactions are really not appropriate.” Ok, so it’s garbage. But does it do any harm? After all, some of my friends say they watch such shows for entertainment, not for information. You can...