Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The Internet requires different networks to be able to talk to each other, regardless of which hardware, OS and programming languages they use. It’s only when you think of it that way do you realize how difficult it must have been to achieve it! Not just technically, but organizationally and politically. In the 1960’s, the US government (via ARPA) wanted inter-networking across universities. One, to allow for ease of information sharing. Two, to enable sharing of computing power! The second reason was also why many of the initial participants were reluctant to join in, explains Walter Isaacson in Innovators : “The universities in general did not want to share their computers with anybody. They wanted to buy their own machines.” When persuasion failed, the coordinators switched to threats: “There would be no more funding to buy computers until they were hooked into the network.” But the ARPA team also looked to address legitimate concerns. They realized universities did n

In his book, Why We Work , Barry Schwartz makes an interesting point about discoveries: “When a scientist, or anyone else, discovers something, it doesn’t occur to us to ask whether that discovery should exist… If someone were to suggest that the Higgs boson shouldn’t exist, we’d wonder what mind-altering substance he’d ingested.” And inventions? “Inventions, in contrast, are a whole other story. Inventions characteristically have moral dimensions. We routinely ask whether they should exist. We wonder what’s good (life improving) about them, and what the drawbacks are. We debate whether their wide distribution should go forward, and if so, with what kind of regulation.” Ok, so there’s nothing new or interesting in what’s said above. Where it gets interesting is in what happens next: “Discoveries tell us things about how the world works. Inventions use those discoveries to create objects or processes that make the world work differently. The discovery of pathogens leads t

I was both amused and horrified at how my 7 yo’s computer science book explained Windows: “Windows is the most popular program that makes the computer work.” Man, we’re defining an Operating System (OS) based on popularity, I shuddered. Once upon a time, the OS was defined as a piece of software that managed the hardware of a computer. I know, I know, that’s way too complicated for a 7 yo... Tech blogger Ben Thompson suggested a different way of describing the OS , not the computer science way, but from a control and money perspective . Huh? He starts with the definition I gave (software that manages the hardware) and explains where that led to (control and money-wise): -           As the OS was the broker to the hardware, users and programmers stopped knowing or caring about the hardware; -           As programmers write applications for an OS, users flock to it because so many applications exist for that OS. This sets off a virtuous cycle for that OS, which then

For all our lives, there have been rules on how to bring a new medicine to the market: clinical trials, patient consent, double blind trials etc. But all this only started well into the 1900’s, “as drugs became more powerful, so did side effects”, wrote Thomas Hager in The Demon Under the Microscope . And for decades, the way trials were done was, well, horrifying: “(Firms) often went to Africa to do large-scale human tests. In Britain they used soldiers. In the United States, tests were done on prisoners and inmates in mental institutions.” But has the current system of checks and trials gone overboard, wonders Jessica Flannigan in her book, Pharmaceutical Freedom: Why Patients Have a Right to Self-Medicate . In a radio interview with Bob Zadek, she says we should have “freedom over our bodies”, same as the other freedoms we enjoy. People handed the responsibility to the government to prevent a repetition with the “history of drug disasters”. That responsibility became a

A while back, I saw this BBC debate on the terms that Prime Minister Teresa May was able to draw up for Brexit. As expected, one spoke in favour, another against. The third panelist blew me away: he pointed out that it was now becoming increasingly clear to the public that Brexit was a bad idea, that staying in the EU was the lesser of two evils. Therefore, he argued, it was a time for another referendum with the same question: Stay or Leave? While a referendum is not legally binding, this sounded insane: what’s the point of a referendum if you’ll hold another one when you don’t like the outcome? And will they hold a re-re-referendum after that? Where does this stop? So are referendums a bad idea per se ? Is the general public unqualified to evaluate complicated questions, even one as “educated” as the British? Conversely, Malcolm Gladwell’s book, David and Goliath , talks of Mike Reynolds, a man whose 18 yo daughter was killed during a robbery. By two repeat offenders. Re

Physics envy: it’s a term used to describe the almost desperate attempt of the social sciences to be like physics, i.e., have maths, equations and predictability. Coming up with a mathematical, equation rich representation of things in a social science is extremely hard. Mostly because of that extremely annoying little attribute of humans called free will . Those pesky humans tend do what they like based on their mood, even things that aren’t in their best interest! As someone once said, man isn’t a rational animal; rather, he is a rationalizing animal… But wait a minute, you say, doesn’t economics (and its cousin, finance) have a lot of equations? Ah, true, but those are just models. Whereas physics has laws (“laws of physics”). What’s the difference between a model and a law? Let Emanuel Derman explain : “In physics, Maxwell’s theory and quantum mechanics allow you to predict the way an electron spins about its own axis inside a hydrogen atom to an accuracy of twelve dec

Adam Cline wrote this excellent book, The Current War , on the fight to decide whether AC (alternating current) or DC (direct current) would be the electrical standard. As the book says, it wasn’t a fight based on just the technical aspects; it was also a clash between two titans and their companies. It all began when Thomas Alva Edison invented the light bulb. But there was no wiring to get electricity into people’s homes. And so: “Edison would need more than the light bulb. He would need to come up with a whole new industry (to supply electricity).” Edison created an electric utility company based on DC (direct current). But transmitting DC power over long distances wasn’t possible due to the energy loss along the way. So end users had to be located within one-mile of the power generating plant. Thus, Edison and DC were restricted to the congested cities. George Westinghouse, another businessman, had heard of AC (alternating current). It could be stepped up to high vol

In her book, Mindset , Carol Dweck points out what every one of us knows is wrong with the famous story of the hare and the tortoise: “The lesson was supposed to be that slow and steady wins the race. But, really, did any of us ever want to be the tortoise? No, we just wanted to be a less foolish hare.” Then there is the story of Arjuna and how he saw nothing except the eye of the bird he was shooting at. Concentrate, focus: that was the lesson. While that’s obviously necessary for certain types of goals, isn’t Max Gunther right in what he says in many other cases, especially goals spread over long time periods? “If you put blinders on yourself so that you can see only straight ahead, you will miss nearly everything. This is what the unlucky typically do. They stick to preplanned life routes even when they are going nowhere or are actually plodding downhill to disaster.” Consider how Lee Kuan Yew made Singapore what it is today. In his terrific book, The Ocean of Churn ,

My 7 yo was very excited about her upcoming field trip from school. On the weekend before the trip, she came to the shop… without the usual whining. After all, she was going to select the junk food to carry on the trip. Next item on her list? A sanitizer. She told me the school asked that every kid bring one to clean their hands before eating, but who really knows if that’s true? Anyways, I agreed. When we couldn’t find one in the shop, she suggested we check a medical store. Wow! She knows which shop sells what? I don’t like where this is headed… Her excitement mounted as D-Day approached. That in turn meant that I couldn’t resist telling to not go. “Why?”, she demanded. “What if you get lost?”, I countered. “C’mon”, she said dismissively, “I’ve been on these trips when I was younger and I came back then, didn’t I?”. “But you were also more obedient then”, I said. Silence. I’d won that round of banter. A rare victory, one I will savour. The night before, she didn’t sleep w

Appreciating Bill Watterson : My 7 yo has begun to appreciate the art in Calvin and Hobbes . Especially Calvin’s expressions, from that wicked look to pure bliss to grumpiness and anger: Making faces : The other day, when I stuck my tongue out at her (it feels so good to do that), she challenged me to a “Who can make the uglier face?” contest. It was a massacre: is it a kid thing or did she learn from Calvin? Upside of phone games : The (phone) game of the month in her circle is Granny , involving a haunted house and the proverbial witch. As I told her yet again to not spend so much time on that game, she turned around and told me, “Playing this game will help me overcome my fear of ghosts and the dark”. Nice try! I need a volunteer : It’s not just the phone. Kids can weaponize stuff learnt from the TV too. Seeing the Heimlich Maneuver, a technique to save someone who is choking, she was instantly attracted to the (necessary) violence of the move. Needing a victi

The fourth Game of Thrones book is a bit weird. Correction: very weird. It doesn’t talk about half the main characters at all! George RR Martin explains why in the epilogue: “I felt the readers would be better served by a book that told all the story for half the characters, rather than half the story for all the characters.” And so we find missing half “the characters you love or love to hate”. This book is all about Tywin Lannister, the “perfect Hand”, the man “who wore no crown, yet he was all a king should be”. Consider how outrageous that is, given that the man in question dies at the end of the previous book! Inevitably, the man who “did what was needed” was never popular, notes his daughter, Cersei: “King’s Landing had never loved Lord Tywin. He never wanted love, though.” No wonder then that when the “perfect Hand” dies, the unravelling begins: “When the lion falls the lesser beasts move in: the jackals and the vultures and the feral dogs.” And so begi

In his book, Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed cites a very interesting problem solving incident at Unilever. The nozzle they were using to make detergents wasn’t working well at all. So they turned to the in-house experts in the fields of maths, fluid dynamics and high pressure systems. They couldn’t fix the problem. When maths-physics expertise couldn’t do the job, Unilever turned to their experts in (hold your breath) biology! The biologists took 10 copies of the nozzle; made random tweaks to each; and tested them. They then took the one that did the best and repeated the process. After 45 “generations”, they had an outstanding nozzle! The pic below shows how the nozzle “evolved”: The biology technique described above is what they call a “genetic algorithm”. Why that name? Nick Bostrom explained why in his book titled Superintelligence : because it mimics natural selection (mutation, inheritance and selection)! So does this mean trying random tweaks is the way to

My 7 yo daughter wanted to sign up for the Olympiad exams, both Science and Maths. Ok, the choice of subjects were mine. Once I saw the course material, I decided to focus only on the Maths and ditch the Science since the latter was just about mugging up stuff. Some things never change. On the day before the Science Olympiad exam, she announced: “It’s your fault that I will do badly in the exam tomorrow. You didn’t teach me anything.” I was not surprised. After all, this is the same kid who gives me grief for forcing her to learn stuff for her tests (“You made me learn 4 questions; they only asked 2 of them in the test.”). It’s not only teachers who teach to the test; students want to learn to the test too. Surprisingly, she came back from the Science Olympiad in a triumphant mood: “I managed to attempt all 35 questions. Last year, I couldn’t even try all the questions.” I guess she is ready for corporate life: after all, this is the same way most employees handle