Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Once upon, people asked for directions. Today, the smartphone tells us the way. Yes, we should be thanking Google Maps, but have you ever given GPS a thought? The story behind GPS is a fascinating one, as described in Simon Winchester’s book, Exactly . In March, 1967, the (then young) author was in charge of lowering an oil rig at the right spot. He got it “about two hundred feet off the ideal”. But the feedback he received was, “It’s good enough”! Imagine trying to get anywhere today with that kind of inaccuracy in the system… The idea of GPS was conceptualized thanks to the launch of the first man-made satellite in space in 1957, Sputnik . The Soviets were aware that the world would dismiss it as just propaganda. So they decided to have a way to prove it from the get-go: “The device was continuously emitting radio signals from a tiny transmitter on board.” Check for yourself, the Soviets were saying. The pattern of the signal (its changing strength as it orbited etc) c...

Not even wrong. Here’s what that phrase means : “The phrase implies that not only is someone not making a valid point in a discussion, but they don't even understand the nature of the discussion itself, or the things that need to be understood in order to participate.” The phrase perfectly describes Aatish Taseer’s apocalyptically titled article in TIME magazine, “Can the World’s Largest Democracy Endure Another Five Years of a Modi Government?” . Here’s why: 1)         It applies Western norms of what is politically acceptable, Western norms of what cannot be said by politicians and so on. But of course, this is India and the rules of political discourse are very different here. a)      Taseer talks of Modi’s “deafening silences after more recent atrocities” (aka Godhra). But in India, Rajiv Gandhi’s widow and son have shown the same deafening silence wrt the 1984 killing of Sikhs. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but this i...

The computer scientist, Marvin Minsky, has suggested that minds work via the society-of-mind framework, writes David Eagleman in his awesome book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain : “Minsky suggested that human minds may be collections of enormous numbers of machinelike, connected subagents that are themselves mindless.” Eagleman takes that framework further and says it “runs on conflict”! Different parts of the brain don’t always agree and don’t work cooperatively: “As a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, cursing at yourself, and cajoling yourself to do something.” Perhaps it’s based on how evolution works: “Biology never checks off a problem and calls it quits. It reinvents solutions continually. The end product of that approach is a highly overlapping system of solutions – the necessary condition for a team-of-rivals architecture .” Eagleman cites the Stroop test as Exhibit A for this view. Here’s the test: “Name the col...

For once, the exit polls got the big picture right. Modi won, and the BJP got an absolute majority. There were surprises too. Like the BJP getting an even bigger absolute majority than last time. The BJP’s vote share rose from 31% last time to 41% this time despite a massive ganging up of all parties in pre-poll alliances. Rahul Gandhi lost in Amethi. Fortress Bengal was breached big time. See the maps below of who won where in 2014 and 2019. Whatever the BJP lost this time in Andhra/Telengana, it more than made up via the gains it made in the North East, West Bengal and Odisha. Mihir Swarup Sharma writes of the origin of the Congress’ “Idea of India”. At independence, especially after all the bloodshed of Partition, Nehru decided: “India is a bundle of contradictions, of competing group assertions, and it is the duty of the Indian state is to play an arbiter between them, to cover up and manage these centripetal and divisive forces through inclusion, representation and...

Will Durant describes a parent’s take on a baby just born in Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God : “See him, the newborn, dirty but marvelous, ridiculous in actuality, infinite in possibility, capable of that ultimate miracle— growth. Can you conceive it— that this queer bundle of sound and pain will come to know love, anxiety, prayer, suffering, creation, metaphysics, death?” Then, as the kid starts growing up, the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do aspect of parenting kicks in: “He learns by imitation, though his parents think he learns by sermons. They teach him gentleness, and beat him; they teach him mildness of speech, and shout at him; they teach him a Stoic apathy to finance, and quarrel before him about the division of their income; they teach him honesty, and answer his most profound questions with lies.” And then we try and give them things and experiences that we didn’t get but believe would do them good. And so we make them learn swimming (it’s easy n...

Security expert, Bruce Schneier, did this podcast which can be summed up in two words: interesting throughout. The term Internet of Things (IoT) refers to objects around us that “talk” via the Internet. While this opens up opportunities (your fridge tells Alexa that the milk is running out, who then tells you, and you then tell Alexa to order some milk), it opens up security risks all around. The root cause for these security risks, explains Schneier, is as simple as it may sound horrifying today: the Internet was never designed with security in mind! Because it was designed for mostly inconsequential usage, and only by academics at that. In other words, it was a conscious choice to not care about security. And boy, have those chickens come home to roost today. Ok, but why can’t security be incorporated today? Aha, there are many reasons: 1)       Complex systems are inherently hard to secure. Your smartphone is a highly complex device. And suppl...

For a very long time, Artificial Intelligence (AI) seemed no match for the supposedly “easy” tasks. “Easy” as in the ones that even small children can do, like lifting blocks and stacking them to form a tower. Or identifying objects in a pic. The problem wasn’t just about processing power or good enough sensors, because those were getting better and cheaper all the time. So what then was the problem? But before I get to that question, remember “machine learning”? Over-simplified, it is the most popular way machines learn: 1)       Load just a very few, very high-level rules into the computer; 2)      Throw a whole lot of data at the computer to interpret on its own ; 3)      Let the computer create its own rules, include changing existing ones ; 4)      Repeat steps 2 and 3. Step #3 is why it is called “machine learning”. It is also the attempt at AI that has yielded the most results fr...

In his book, Labyrinths of Reason , at one point, William Poundstone asks if you’d be able to know if the way you see colors is the opposite of how others see it, i.e., would you be able to know if “the sensation you have been trained to call “red” is what everyone else calls “green””? You can’t compare with anything to prove either way because colors are described by comparing with something else! I was reminded of all that when I read Ed Yong’s article . Different animals can see different parts of the spectrum e.g. some snakes can see infrared light whereas mice can’t. Until Tian Xui and his colleagues in China came along: “(The team) injected the eyes of mice with nanoparticles that were designed to stick to the light-detecting cells in the rodents’ retinas. These particles convert incoming infrared light (that the cells cannot naturally detect) into plain old green light (that they very much can).” While this may be impressive (or horrific, depending on your point...

I was amused when I heard of Matthew Walker’s highly rated book, Why We Sleep . How much can there be to write about a topic like sleep, I smirked. Even for doctors, it seemed a stretch; but writing a book for laymen? But it was highly rated on Amazon, so cometh the discount, I bought the book. And boy, are the ratings justified! There’s tons of fascinating info on matters to do with sleep. Including the question: what is the purpose of dreaming? Take the heat produced by a light bulb. It is not the intended purpose, just “an unintended by-product of the operation” of producing light. The technical term for such by-product is “epiphenomenon”. Is dreaming just an epiphenomenon of sleep? The answer is a categorical No. The first use of dreaming is that it serves as “overnight therapy”. But only if it is “content specific dreaming”, i.e., related to the “emotional themes and sentiments of the waking trauma”. In those cases, dreaming helps the individual move “forward into a...

I’d never given much thought to books written in the first person (“I”). It just felt like one of many styles in which a book could be written. Even when the murderer in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd turned out to be the narrator, it just felt like a nice parlor trick for a whodunit. Take this awesome book written in the first person, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance . Through the book, the narrator describes two versions of himself: the older, slightly crazy one (he names that version Phaedrus) who was eventually institutionalized and lobotomized; and the present one. If you’ve read the book, you know Phaedrus is the one went overboard; and the present day version is the wiser, mature one. Except, as Pirsig wrote in the preface to the 25 year anniversary edition, the narrator had pulled a Roger Ackroyd on you! “There is a narrator whose mind you never leave. He refers to an evil ghost named Phaedrus, but the only way you know this...

A lot of people complain that others extend the point being made to far more than what was intended. Or to apply in contexts well beyond the intended scope. Note that I am talking of misunderstanding of the genuine kind here, not the deliberate one practiced by politicians, journalists and those with an agenda. Some of it is unavoidable because the listener brings their perspective to the table. At other times, the history and track record of the speaker contributes to the problem. So is there no way out? Or can people put out explicit statements of what they don’t mean, call out the point beyond which they don’t want their argument to be extended? Yes, this is hard work, but surely it is worth doing if the topic is important enough, right? After all, it isn’t fair to blame others for not seeing your point when you don’t put the effort to see why they don’t see your point or the … OK, so let’s see how things played out when people have tried this approach of anticipating...

A few years back, Freddie de Boer called us the “Planet of Cops” : “I mean everyone   —   liberal, conservative, radical and reactionary. Blogger, activist, pundit, and writer, obviously, but also teacher, tailor, and candlestick maker. Cops, all of them. Cops everywhere.” Huh? A few examples will clarify: “The self-appointed Twitter police… People who want to scour test scores to get teachers fired are cops… Conservatives have always been cops, obviously…” And this is where we are currently: “You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something,  anything.” And then we have the inconsistencies in stances. What one side sees as all-too-human consistencies in their side is seen as hypocrisy by the other side: “In real life we’re all guards and prisoners at the same time. We are all informants on each other. Contemporary political culture is an autoimmune disorder.” de Boer wrote al...

Superconductivity is the phenomenon wherein certain metals, when cooled to near absolute zero (-273˚C), are able to conduct electricity with no electrical resistance. In Tales from the Quantum , Art Hobson explains how it works: At normal temperatures, each electron in the metal creates an electromagnetic (EM) field. The carrier for this EM field is a photon, which being massless, extends to infinity; As electricity tries to move through the metal, it experiences this EM field, and that is what we call “resistance” in our daily lingo; Remember how ice and water (or water and steam) are so very different even though they are chemically identical? Such radical changes in properties is called “phase change”; At near absolute zero temperature, the electrons pair up, and the character of the paired electrons is “radically different from normal unpaired electrons”. A phase change has happened; This transformed field of the paired electrons “causes photons to behave in a surprisi...

Simon Winchester’s book, Exactly , is an awesome walk-through the role of precision engineering in shaping the modern world. I assumed the book was about the world of electronics and miniaturization, but no, the story starts much, much earlier. And covers a lot many topics. During the American fight for independence from the British, for example, consider this problem: “Once a gun had been physically damaged in some way, the entire weapon had to be returned to its maker or to a competent gunsmith to be remade or else replaced. It was not possible… simply to identify the broken part and replace it with another from the armory stores.” Whyever not? “No one had ever thought to make a gun from component parts that were each so precisely constructed that they were identical with one another.” Component parts that are identical with one another. More than a century later, that is exactly what Henry Ford needed as a pre-requisite for his dream of mass producing cars. Identic...