Viswanathan K's Thoughts

At school, they teach X-rays as part of physics. Which is why I found Siddhartha Mukherjee’s chapter on X -rays in The Emperor of All Maladies fascinating. Röntgen discovered X -rays accidentally in 1895. Excited by his discovery, he then pulled his wife Anna to the lab and placed her hand between the source of the radiation and a photographic plate. Voila! The world had its first X -ray, a pic of Anna’s hand, er, bones. Shocked, she said: “I have seen my death.” Today, of course, X-rays are so common as exemplified by my daughter’s reaction to seeing an X-ray of her hand: she started (and soon gave up) counting the bones in her hand! The discovery set off other physicists in the quest for other sources of X-rays, Madame Curie being the most famous among them. She found radium, an element that radiated so much energy that it glowed in the dark. Unfortunately for Curie, it turned out the amount of energy being radiated from different elements could be immensely different...

Ever wondered why the shift to a sun-centric model of the planets was so important? Forget the religious aspect of it: have you ever wondered why it should matter if we consider the sun or the earth to be at the center? After all, isn’t all motion relative? I’ll answer that by starting with a new question: If the planets were moving around the earth, what would their orbits look like? They would be insanely complicated, with planets crisscrossing, and even reversing directions at times! This pic shows how their orbits look with a heliocentric (sun-centric) v/s geocentric (earth-centric) model: With such weird trajectories in the geocentric model to explain, I am guessing even Newton would have struggled to apply his laws of gravitation! Copernicus’ model made the problem statement so much simpler, didn’t it? Yet another instance of how changing your perspective can change your understanding of the universe dramatically!

My 7 year-old daughter is an early riser. Now and then, she’ll even wake up before us. Even on a school day . And then there will be the spells where it’ll be a struggle to get her out of bed. During one such spell of school day morning negotiations of “5 more minutes” v/s “Why can’t you go to bed early?”, she angrily told me on a Friday morning: “Tomorrow is Saturday. I will wake up as late as I want.” And then she added: “The problem is I now have this horrible habit of waking up early.” So she tried to will herself to change by telling herself: “Brain, wake up late tomorrow.” If only deeply ingrained habits could be changed so easily… ~~ At one point in Game of Thrones , the king considers asking the disgraced and exiled knight, Ser Jorah Mormont, to assassinate a rival in return for a royal pardon and return to the snake pit capital. There is of course, the risk of capture: “Mormont craves a royal pardon,” Lord Renley reminded them. “Desperately,” Varys sa...

Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. They are considered the founding parents of computers. But I didn’t know that Babbage was the “hardware” guy while Lovelace was the “software” girl until I read Walter Isaacson’s Innovators . The idea (and need) to automate tedious and error-prone calculations was there since Leibniz and Pascal. Babbage himself created the Difference Engine to perform basic arithmetic operations like addition and subtraction. He was inspired by the automated loom invented by Joseph-Marie Jacquard: holes in punch cards determined “which hooks and rods would be activated in each pass of the weave, thus automating the creation of intricate patterns”. Could something similar be done to create a general-purpose “computer”, wondered Babbage. And thus was born the idea of the Analytical Engine. Funding however was a problem. The British government funded the much simpler Difference Engine, but wouldn’t fun the general purpose Analytical Engine since they didn’t see...

The Web was designed for academic use, as a way for university folks to share content with each other. Web founder Tim Berners-Lee wanted content to be editable. After all, a collaborative medium demanded editability. And being academic, it was text-only. Then the Web reached the US. With that, its usage exploded, writes Walter Isaacson in his book, Innovators . But it also went commercial. Marc Andreesen wrote the first sexy browser, Mosaic that enabled display of images, “multimedia and ornamental fonts” on web pages. But editing was no longer supported (harder with all that multimedia!). That very support for jazzy styles and pics attracted media companies onto the Web. Posting their content online would attract even more advertisers, they reasoned. And as commercial content began to dominate the Web, the need to edit content fell through the floor. A college kid named Justin Hall started posting a “running Web log of his personal activities, random thoughts, deep musings...

As usual, this year too they celebrated Teacher’s Day in my 7 year-old daughter’s school with the older kids acting as the teachers for the day. It meant no studies that day. Not even a single period, said my daughter gleefully, just fun, games and events all day. I expected her to ask why every other day can’t be like this. Turns out she’s old enough to know that hell will freeze over before every day becomes like Teacher’s Day. So then you’d think she’d be happy about that one day? Nope. If Teacher’s Day can be so much fun, she argued with impeccable logic, surely Children’s Day should be even better, right? But no, that’s just a regular day with studies, she grumbled. Why call it Children’s Day if there’s nothing special for kids? What can I say, kiddo? Adults make the rules, hence the weird world you encounter… ~~ It takes a while to learn that exams and tests only accept certain answers as “correct”. Conversely, there are certain obviously true points that can’t b...

Steven Pinker criticized the tendency of many writers to be vague and imprecise, to “use hedges in the vain hope that it will get them off the hook”. Why have so many disclaimers, asks Pinker. After all, in a real world conversation: “If someone tells you that Liz wants to move out of Seattle because it’s a rainy city, you don’t interpret him as claiming that it rains there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, just because he didn’t qualify his statement with relatively rainy or somewhat rainy. Any adversary who is intellectually unscrupulous enough to give the least charitable reading to an unhedged statement will find an opening to attack the writer in a thicket of hedged ones anyway.” Couldn’t agree more. Paul Chiusano points out that the Internet aggravates this defensive style because “we’re effectively contorting our communication style to defend against a small minority of mean-spirited and uncharitable actions by some”. And so we end up with: “Boring writing stripp...

For a very long time, I resisted reading the Game of Thrones books. Why? In my experience, only one of the two is good: the book or the serial/movie. Given that the serial is so awesome, I assumed the book would be a huge letdown. But then during one of those all-too-many Kindle discounts, I bought the books: they were too cheap to ignore! Eventually, I read the first book. Boy, is it great. One of those rare cases where both the book and picturization are top of the line. George RR Martin’s ability to build up characters, filling in the most minor of details yet keeping it captivating, means that each character has a mind of his own, an agenda of his own. And the agendas are highly diverse: some are loyal to families (“I never bet against family” - Tyrion, the Imp), others to the king (“I protected him from his enemies, but I could not protect him from his friends” – Ned Stark), yet others are mercenaries (“It was your blade I needed, not your love” – Tyrion again), some do i...

This year, during a class test, my 7 year-old daughter tried writing her full name on the answer sheet (Until then, she’d write her name followed by the initials of the middle and last name). Since her middle name is short, she was able to guess (or memorize?) its spelling. But the last name (my name, Viswanathan) was just too long to even attempt. She told me that she’d replaced the last name with what I’ve been called at home: Vijay. I didn’t believe her, thinking she was just trying to be funny. By now, she knows that convincing adults to believe something that a kid says is a lost cause. When the answer sheet came back, she triumphantly showed the name she’d written: the last name she’d written was indeed “Vijay”. And added for good measure: “You never believe me, do you?” It is only we South Indians who have such long names. As a result, nobody you know calls you by your name your entire life! Every set, from relatives to school friends to college friends to office col...

Kids ask the craziest questions. Adults feel ashamed to do so. So it was kind of amusing to read two books that give serious answers to such seemingly weird questions, one on economics and the other on science. The Economic Naturalist by Robert Frank provides answers to seemingly illogical practices in the marketplace. Some of the more interesting answers included: -           Why are the sizes of DVD and CD covers different even though the disc is the same size? (Answer: To fit the same shelf space that was used for their ancient predecessors, the video cassette and the vinyl record respectively). -           Why do women’s and men’s shirts have buttons on different sides? (Answer: It’s a continuation of the ancient practice where men dressed themselves whereas women were dressed by maids; and so the buttons were positioned for ease of the man and the maid). -     ...

When my 7 year-old daughter wanted to take money to buy stuff at the school canteen, I tried shooting it down pointing out that she didn’t know to subtract in her head. “How would you know how much they should return?”, I asked. “It’s OK if they don’t return the right amount,” she said. Seeing my jaw drop, she explained her stance, “It’s your money, I am fine if you spent a little extra”. Another time, she told me that giving extra money for something is better than giving the exact amount. “Why?”, I asked. “Simple,” she said, “That way they give you back some money. Imagine that: giving you money for buying something from them .” Patience, I reminded myself. She will learn when she is ready. Or even better, when she has an incentive to learn such things. I think that incentive driven moment to learn about subtraction and accounting has arrived. Of late, she has taken to growing plants. It soon became a group activity with her friends where they’d all plant seeds in cups,...

In Being Wrong , Kathryn Schulz also talks about how we deal with the times we are wrong. But you know that already: denial, excuses etc. Where Schulz makes the topic so interesting is when she points out the reason isn’t (always) ego or malicious agendas. Far more often, we change the question from “Were we wrong?” to “How wrong were we?”. And rarely is the answer that we come up, “Totally”: “Almost no matter what we were wrong about, we can find countless different ways to take the measure of our mistakes.” Put differently, we don’t want to introspect, at least not honestly: “We are not so much honestly trying to size up our errors as frantically trying to downsize them.” Here are the usual ways we go about it: 1)       “Time-frame defense” : I can see the big picture, the long term. You don’t have the patience. Just you wait and see etc. 2)      “Near-miss defense” : But for some silly, minor event, what I said/thought w...