Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The FBI investigation into evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia ended with a “no collusion” finding. Ross Douthat wrote that: “There will now be a retreat… to more defensible terrain — the terrain where Trump is a sordid figure who admires despots and surrounded himself with hacks and two-bit crooks while his campaign was buoyed by a foreign power’s hack of his opponent.” Alan Jacobs doubts that’s what will happen next. Instead, he feels the side that hates Trump (common man and media both) will: 1)       Ask for the entire report to be made public; 2)      If only parts of the report are made public (as is likely), they’ll say that the not shown parts are the “key to the whole mystery”; 3)      And if the whole report is shown, they “will find  something ,  anything , in it that, they insist, confirms their worst suspicions”; 4)      Say that the investigating age...

When the Opposition asked whether the surgical strikes after Uri had even happened or if it was just government progoganda, I felt it was very insulting. Not because governments don’t lie, not because the NDA/BJP is above lieing, but because the action in question was supposed to have been done by the Army. So was the Opposition saying that today even the Army is part of politics, that they would go along with such lies? If so, doesn’t it mean that the Army in India is no different than the army of dictatorships? And in such a scenario, would the Army allow any free and fair elections? If all this were true, surely we are facing a much bigger problem, a behind the scenes Emergency situation. So how come we don’t see the logical next step then, the Opposition up in arms against the “second” Emergency, except this time the Army is a part of it? Not satisfied with their contradictions, this time after the air strikes in Balakot, the Opposition continues with its contradictory lies:...

Teaching to the test. We accuse teachers of teaching exactly what is going to get tested, nothing more, nothing less. Though we know it, we speak less often, with less vehemence about the fact that students learn to the test, nothing more, nothing less. As parents, many of us extol the virtues of learning in a way that is relevant to the real world. And one of the biggest differences between the sanitized world of the classroom and the real world is (drumbeats) uncertainty, operating in a world where we lack perfect knowledge of all the relevant parameters. So what happens when a Class II chapter provides just such a set of problems? How do you think parents reacted to such problems? I found out via the WhatsApp group of my daughter’s class’ parents. The gist of the discussion around such questions went like this: “So there won’t be one right answer to such questions? Estimates can vary.” “Correct. There can’t be one right answer.” “Then I won’t spend time ...

Every institution obsesses over what’s measurable, be it circulation numbers or page views or profits or students’ marks or whatever. And almost all of us have complained that this mindset leads to the problem that V. F. Ridgway expressed so well: “What gets measured gets managed - even when it's pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so.” Of course, at the heart of this measurement mania lies the fear of the alternative: if it can’t be measured, does it become subjective? And once things are left to subjective assessments, will it become a free for all, where the lazy, the incompetent, the charlatans and the smooth talkers take over? As Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote in The Emperor of All Maladies , objectivity lies at the heart of everything that calls itself a science (quantum mechanics may feel like an exception since it straddles both objective and subjective worlds, but then again, it is insanely accurate when c...

The disease we have been calling as leukemia (blood cancer) for ages now was once known as the suppuration of blood. In case you were wondering “suppuration” meant “spoiling” (in this case, spoilt to become a pus). So what, you must be thinking, it’s just a name change, how does it matter? Except that the choice of name had unintended consequences, writes Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Emperor of All Maladies : “An illness, at the moment of its discovery, is a fragile idea, a hothouse flower – deeply, disproportionately influenced by names and classifications.” The term “suppuration of blood” suggested the root cause was that blood was getting spoilt. Whereas it was just a description of what was being observed. A key difference. That “humility of the (new) name” was transformative. Once we start from “We don’t know”, we are open to all options. Mukherjee points out that our understanding of another disease, a century later, got transformed similarly when we renamed it. F...

After Boeing’s popular new Max 8 planes got grounded in many countries following the crash in Ethiopia, it looked (financially) dangerous for Boeing. After all, this was their best-selling jet ever. You’d think that countries would have waited for the black boxes to be analyzed etc before coming to a decision. But then again, this is the age of the Internet… Donald Trump had (as usual) muddied the waters by his rants on Twitter that the cause lay in the sheer complexity of new aircrafts. His rage-tweeting in turn had backed the US regulator, FAA, into a corner where not acting would make them look like Yes-men to Trump. And so when Canada’s transport minister said that “newly available satellite-tracking data suggested similarities between the crash in Ethiopia and another accident last October”, it was the straw that broke the FAA’s back (apparently) who finally grounded all those planes in the US. And now, without waiting for the black boxes to be analyzed, we have all k...

Probabilities can often be totally counter-intuitive. One of the easiest examples to describe is the Monty Hall problem, named after a game show by the same man: 1)       There are 3 closed doors. Behind one of them lies a big prize; 2)      You are asked to pick one. You do so, randomly of course; 3)      At this point, Monty Hall steps in. He opens one of the doors that you didn’t pick and reveals it to be empty. He offers you a choice: do you want to switch your choice to the other closed door or do you want to stick to the one you already picked? Your intuition tells you that it doesn’t matter: 2 doors are still closed; so either choice has a 50-50 chance to win the prize, right? Wrong! If you change your choice to the other closed door, you’d have 2/3 chance of winning whereas you’d have just a 1/3 chance by sticking to your original choice. How can that be?! And yet it’s true. Ok, onto our next co...

Everyone uses Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube. A good chunk of people call for those companies to “do something” about all that fake news and spewing of objectionable opinions and content. Yet another set curses all social media in general. But what exactly are we asking for? And who is to blame for all this? That’s the topic of this Ben Thompson podcast : content moderation. Is social media all bad? Take this instance where a couple of users discovered a bug in one of Apple’s devices and mailed in the details to Apple. The company ignored the bug report. Then people started slamming Apple on Twitter and bingo! The bug was fixed within 12 hours. Sometimes raising a stink is the only way to get things done, says Thompson. And yes, that “amplification power” of social media works both ways. But to say it is all bad is ridiculous. Or how about this time when the #MeToo movement was at its peak and a lot of women posted “All men are pigs” kind of comments on Facebook. Facebook su...

In his book Hackers , Stephen Levy, talks about an early “application” of computers by college kids at MIT: games! One of the most popular games they wrote was called Spacewar , two rocket ships trying to destroy each other. Another kid, Dan Edwards, was “dissatisfied with the unanchored movement of the two dueling ships”. He felt that “adding a gravity factor” would make the game more interesting, ergo he added a sun to the game: “You could use the sun’s gravitational pull to give you speed as you circled it, but if you weren’t careful and got too close, you’d be drawn into the sun, which was certain death.” I was reminded of that when I was teaching my 7 yo daughter to program in this language-for-kids called Scratch. I was talking her through this game I found on the Net called Dodge Ball (you try to go from A to B, climb up poles along the way, all the while avoiding getting hit by rolling balls). The author of the game was in teaching mode, so the game was developed...

One of the chapters of the book, The Elephant in the Brain , has (part of the) answer to the why-is-education-so-obviously-messed-up-and-why-do-employers-still-give-it-value-at-hiring question. The purpose of the education system, say the authors, is for students to signal their “work potential” to the world. Future work productivity is what employers look for: “The best employees have a whole bundle of attributes – including intelligence, of course, but also conscientiousness, attention to detail, a strong work ethic, and a willingness to conform to expectations.” A technical test can only find “intelligence”, but not the other aspects. So employers use “school performance as a proxy” for the other points. Here’s what an employer can infer about a straight A’s student from a top college: 1)       “She might have retained that knowledge, but statistically speaking, she’s probably forgotten a lot of it…”; 2)      “(Far more imp...

Stephen Levy, in his book titled Hackers writes about college kids: “You begin working conscientiously as a student… and then you discover something that puts classes into their proper perspective: they are totally irrelevant to the matter at hand.” He cites this case where a professor drops a robot arm in the computer lab at MIT, and leaves. Here’s how the student feels: “Nothing in the world is as essential as making the proper interface between the machine (computer) and the robot arm, and putting the robot arm under your control… Then you can see your offspring come to life. How can anything as contrived as an engineering class compare to that?” Of course, this is a universal criticism of education world over. In The Elephant in the Brain , the authors point out the usual reasons we cite as to why students go to school (to learn, which in turn is a means to a higher paying job) isn’t the entire truth. After all, they say, many top American universities allow anyone t...

Tech blogger, Ben Thompson, wrote about this company called Bird that allows users to rent electric scooters. Recently Bird decided to provide such scooters to independent operators who could then run their own fleets, even re-brand them. So what’s in it for Bird? One, they get 20% of the ride fees; and two, all those scooters will show up on Bird’s rent-a-scooter app. Did that sound a bit like Uber? Of course, it did. No surprise then that there are rumours that Uber may buy Bird. Harvard professor, Theodore Levitt, famously said: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” See the connection to Uber and Bird? People want to go from A to B, the cab (or scooter) is just a means to that end. Ergo, it makes perfect sense for Uber to focus on the end (transport) instead of getting hung up on the means (cab v/s scooter). By the same logic, Thompson wonders if rent-a-room/home site, AirBnB, should start listing hotels on their app. After a...

The optical lens we don’t even think about is the key to taking good photos, whether with professional cameras or smartphones or the Hubble telescope. The next time you curse the camera on your phone, remember these lines from Simon Winchester’s book, Exactly : “Lens designers have discovered host of technical problems that can conspire to spoil a photographic image.” It’s all because of those long forgotten optics diagrams from school: Now for the English version of the best-known problems that cause distortions: 1)       Spherical aberration : Light bends when it passes from one medium (air) to another (lens material), and this bending causes distortion; 2)      Chromatic aberration : Even worse, light of different wavelengths (i.e., colors) bends by different amounts; 3)      Vignetting : Difference in brightness between points at the center of the image and those at the edges; 4)   ...