Viswanathan K's Thoughts

As a teenager, I read a few Hardy Boys books where at the end of some pages, you’d have a choice: If you want to pursue the crook, go to Page 30. If you want to take the victim to the hospital, go to Page 40. It was interesting at times, and choices at some points may lead you back to pages you had already visited via a different series of choices. But I had never read (nor even knew about) a similar category called the “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. It too had the same forks where the reader makes choices to decide which page to read next. So what was the difference of this new kind from the type I had read? In the kind I had read, the final outcome was guaranteed: the good guys would win, the crooks would end up behind bars. Only the path to that outcome would vary. Whereas the other kind could have different “types of outcomes at the end of each path”, writes Sarah Laskow . The endings cover the entire spectrum from “great, favorable, mediocre, disappointing, or catastrop...

Hacker Kevin Mitnick, in his book, Ghost in the Wires , describes the time when he asked an operator in the company he was hacking into to type the following command: spawn /nowait/nolog/nonotify/input=ttg4:/output=ttg4 Did the operator key in the command? “Because she wasn’t keying in usernames or passwords, she didn’t think anything about what I was asking her.” Little did she know what the command was doing for the hacker… Over time, we’ve moved from such cryptic commands that were grammar Nazis (only exact syntax was accepted) to GUI/mouse to touch and now voice based interactions with computers. In voice, which is better? There are only two contenders, Alexa and Google Assistant (I base that on the extremely unscientific criteria of who has ads for such products). I thought kids didn’t care about this mortal combat between Google and Amazon, until I had this conversation with my 7 yo daughter after she saw the Google Home ad: She : “Alexa is better.” Me : “H...

In his book, Labyrinths of Reason , William Poundstone talks of the “Oracle of the Maze”, an oracle who can answer any question immediately. Even if he is a true oracle, convincing others isn’t easy. Why? “Answer a question that no one else possibly could, and he is accused of fabricating; answer a question whose answer is known or knowable, and he is accused of cheating.” So is there no way out for the oracle? Aha, there is: “a difficult question whose answer, once stated, can be verified easily ”. The solution to an insanely big and twisted maze is an example, ergo, the name Poundstone gave: Oracle of the Maze. This topic is of practical relevance (no, not maze solving; checking if an oracle is really an oracle) in… quantum computing, writes Erica Klarreich: “Once a quantum computer can perform computations a classical computer can’t, how will we know if it has done them correctly?” See the parallel with the Oracle of the Maze? Is there “any ironclad guarantee that i...

Ok, so meteorite crater found. But scientists still wondered if that was the cause for the dinos’ extinction, writes Lisa Randall in Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs . What such an impact does is hard to imagine, so it needs to be spelled out… step by step. How much “bang” could a meteorite have carried? At 3 times the width of Manhattan travelling at minimally 20 km per second, it packed more than a billion times the punch of the nukes dropped on Hiroshima: -           At the impact site, it would have set off extreme winds and waves; -           The impact would have set off earthquakes across the world. Those would have then set off monster tsunamis across the world; -           Trillions of tons of vaporized rocks at the impact site would get ejected and spread worldwide. As the red-hot debris fell back to earth, it would start fires trig...

In science, radical ideas are not welcomed immediately, writes Lisa Randall in Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs . A meteorite hit was such an idea. So scientists wondered if the iridium spike was caused by the volcanic eruptions in the Deccan traps? Did volcanoes bring iridium up from the bowels of the earth? “(The traps are) bigger than half a million square kilometers (as big as France) and they are about two kilometers thick. That’s a lot of lava.” Then the meteorite theory really began to gain favour, bit by bit: -           The iridium spike was proving to be global, not regional to a few places. That much iridium only seemed to fit a meteorite as the source. -           Next came the discovery of “shocked quartz” in the same layer across the world. Volcanoes didn’t generate that much heat. It did align with “impact melts” though. -         ...

I was very surprised by these lines from Peter Brannen’s The Ends of the World : “Dinosaurs roamed the earth for a long time. Tyrannosaurus Rex is closer in time to humans than to Stegosaurus.” Turns out Calvin, the dino expert, knew this very well: But Calvin couldn’t have known how dinosaurs went extinct. After all, back when Watterson was still drawing, there were multiple theories on the topic, but none was accepted as the answer. Lisa Randall in her book, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs , tells the story of how the answer was finally arrived at. In the 1970’s, geologist Walter Alvarez was studying the K-Pg (or K-T) boundary, the boundary between two eras in geological lingo. He found the iridium levels in the boundary layer to be abnormally high (30 times higher, later corrected to 90 times). His father, Luis, was a physicist who knew that earth’s iridium had dissolved into molten iron and sank to the earth’s core. Meteors, on the other hand, did have much higher...

I liked this blog by Shane Parrish on the importance of habits v/s goals. He starts by pointing out that the difference isn’t semantic. Habits have no deadline whereas goals do e.g. reading is a habit whereas trying to read 12 books a year is a goal. So what are the issues with setting goals? Isn’t setting them supposed to be a good thing? Of course they are, but goals have their downsides too: 1)       Goals have endpoints; so people often revert to their old ways after achieving a goal. 2)      Goals may be interrupted by events outside your control. Like an injury. 3)      Pursuing a goal requires a lot of focus, which often comes at the expense of other things. 4)      People sometimes confuse setting a goal with achieving it! (Apparently this happens more if people declare their goals to others). Worse, unrealistic goals can lead to unethical behavior. Ok then, what are the po...

After her recent visit to the US, my wife was telling me that her Indian-by-birth boss wouldn’t allow her (American) kids to do some of the American way of life things, like dating. That reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, David and Goliath , where he talked about the “immigrants to wealth” problem. Huh? It’s a phrase coined by James Grubman, explained thus by Gladwell: “For most of us, the values of the world we grew up in are not that different from the world we create for our children. But that’s not true for someone who becomes very wealthy.” This group is the “immigrants to wealth”: “They face the same kinds of challenges in relating to their children that immigrants to any new country face.” A much milder version of that is faced by post-liberalization Indian parents: “How do you teach “work hard, be independent, learn the meaning of money” to children who look around themselves and realize that they never need to work hard, be independent, or learn the mea...

The digital currency, Bitcoin, has been designed such that only a fixed amount of it can be created (“mined” is the technical term). In other words, the total amount of Bitcoins that can ever be created in the world is a certain fixed number. It’s like saying that the total money the world can have is, say, $100 trillion. Back in college, I remember reading Ayn Rand’s views on the gold standard. In case you’re wondering, the gold standard was a system that demanded that paper money must be backed by gold. What this meant was that a country couldn’t print money unless it had the gold to back it up. When Nixon sounded the death knell for the gold standard, critics like Rand worried that it would give governments the right to print money indiscriminately to pay off government debt or to finance populist schemes. That’s a fair criticism, but I remember my dad’s counterpoint when I’d mentioned Rand’s argument to him (I paraphrase from memory): “Why should the total supply of m...

Here are actor Liam Neeson’s opening lines from the first Taken movie: “I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.” Those lines tell you exactly what kind of movie it is going to be, don’t they? This is the very definition of genre movies, writes Eugene Wei : “Genre movies are ones in which we know going on what will happen, broadly, and so you grant audience pleasure by fulfilling expectations, not by subverting them.” No wonder then that those very lines were also part of the Taken trailer. Wei goes on to say: “These are not movies that ...

In his book Cosmos , Carl Sagan described how a Greek named Eratosthenes calculated the size of the earth almost 2,200 years back. He started with the observation that at a certain time, the sun cast no shadow in Alexandria. He inferred that this meant the sun was directly overhead. He then wondered how it was possible that a stick could cast no shadow in one place while at the exact same time, it could cast a substantial shadow at some other place (Syene). These observations didn’t match a flat earth scenario. Instead: “The only possible answer, he saw, was that the surface of the Earth is curved.” Eratosthenes then applied maths to the problem: “For the observed difference in the shadow lengths, the distance between Alexandria and Syene had to be about seven degrees along the surface of the Earth.” He then asked a man to calculate the distance between Alexandria and Syene: it was 800 km. If seven degrees mapped to 800 km, how much does three sixty degrees (a circle) ma...

Remember this Calvin and Hobbes strip? Keep it in mind as you read this blog: The other day, the William story I was reading to my 7 yo daughter has our hero becoming friends with a bunch of new kids, the kind his mother wouldn’t have approved of. The why behind that becomes obvious when those kids scornfully tell William that, unlike him, they don’t go to school because they go to work at the factory instead. “So lucky, they don’t have to go to school”, I told my daughter. Like all kids who love live to contradict others on every topic under the sun, her response was: “That’s not true. At school, one gets to make new friends. At school, one gets to learn new things. And at school, one gets to have fun.” My jaw dropped. Which, of course, was her cue to land her punchline with a wide got-you grin on her face: “Except at my school. None of those things are true about my school.” Ok, kiddo, you got me there.

Simple rules, applied long enough and in conjunction with other simple rules, can result in enormously complicated outcomes and systems. Often, the outcome is not even remotely close to our intention. This is something we know well from experience; and yet we also continue to act and believe that there exist some areas where this isn’t true. This tendency to believe (or apply) a rule in some areas but not others has a technical name: domain dependence. The laws of physics are one such example. Most of the laws are fairly straight forward; and yet the universe they produce is insanely complicated… in comparison to what you may expect by looking at each law in isolation . It’s when they come together that things become really complicated. Or take sci-fi writer, Isaac Asimov’s famous “three laws of robotics”, formulated in 1942: 1)       A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2)   ...

When it comes to trying to change people’s minds, most rational people go about it the way Karen Schulz says: “The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is that we just assume they are ignorant. You know, they don’t have access to the same information we do and when we generously share that information with them, they are going to see the light and come on over to our team.” No prizes for guessing how successful that approach is! Atul Gawande points out why that technique doesn’t work: “But, (Everett) Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up.” Ever worse (depending on your point of view), facts and data matter the least if you’re trying to change someone’s mind. Why? Because of the difference between persuasion and convincing , as pointed out by Seth Godin: “Marketers don’t convince. Engineers convince. Marketers persuade. Persuasion appeals to the emotions and to fear and to ...