Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In his awesome history of chemistry, Mendeleyev’s Dream , Paul Strathern has a chapter on phlogiston theory. In the 1600’s, Johann Becher postulated that all solids had 3 constituents: terra fluida (fluid component), terra lapida (solidifying element), and terra pinguis (combustible component). As per his theory, when wood is burnt, terra pinguis is released, leaving the ash. Georg Stahl extended the theory to state that terra pinguis could move from one thing to another, not just out of a substance during combustion. He also renamed it “phlogiston”. He said phlogiston explained combustion, smelting and rusting. Critics pointed out that combustion happened only in the presence of air, so why shouldn’t air be considered key to explaining combustion instead of this mysterious phlogiston? No, said Stahl, air was only the carrier of phlogiston from one thing to another. Others asked why phlogiston exchange caused fire during combustion but not during rusting? Stahl countered tha...

Ed Yong wrote this fascinating article on this phenomenon called quorum sensing, “in which bacteria release molecules that indicate how many of their peers are around”. If you thought the bacteria are literally doing a head-count, you’d be wrong. Instead, each bacterium releases the signaling molecule. The concentration of the overall signal indicates the head-count. A derivative signal. But why do bacteria signal at all? It allows them to sit dormant until enough of them are around and only then launch certain actions. Like an infectious attack. And if the concentration of the signal becomes too high , then they switch from infect mode to scatter mode. This explains why diseases like cholera are so problematic. They wait and wait and spread only when the numbers are right. Fascinating, right? Next up is the virus. Turns out viruses too can do the quorum sensing of the bacteria’s signaling molecule. Just as the bacteria infers its own head-count via the concentration, so ...

Paul Davies’ The Eerie Silence was an eye-opener on the topic of extra-terrestrial life. Would we even recognize a life form that is totally different from “life as we know it”? After all, our techniques to identify microbes today are “customized and targeted to life as we know it”. 1)       One idea is based on the term ‘chirality’ from chemistry. It means that the mirror image of the molecule is different from the molecule. Notice the similarity with your hands? Ergo, chirality is called the “handedness” of a molecule (right-handed or left-handed). Ok, so what’s that got to do with life? Well, known life always uses right-handed sugars and left-handed amino acids. If we found things different in a life form, it may be a sign of life from elsewhere. 2)      All known life on earth is based on DNA. And DNA disintegrates at temperatures above 120˚C. If we found a life form that can live even at, say, 170˚C, it means it isn’t DNA based...

Take these lines from Hector Macdonald’s book, Truth: How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality : “On most issues, there are multiple truths we can choose to communicate.” Your instinctive reaction was either disgust at the everything-is-grey stance or a resigned it’s-not-true-but-this-seems-to-be-the-common-belief-these-days shrug. But wait, and consider all the too common scenario where a company has to drastically change the way it operates. The need can (truthfully) be presented in two ways, writes Macdonald: 1)       “Golden opportunity”: Incredible potential, money to be made etc; 2)      “Burning platform”: Either we change or we perish. Both reasons are probably true in such cases, but they leave very different impressions in the minds of employees (excitement v fear). So managers rarely go for the balanced both-reasons-apply presentation; they go with only one truth based on which incentive would work bette...

When we think of robots in the real world, most of us think of industrial robots used in factories. We rarely think of personal robots. And yet personal robots are increasingly common in… Japan. And for now, only Japan. Alec Ross explains why personal robots are common in Japan in his book, The Industries of the Future . The one phrase answer: ageing population. -        25% of its population is older than 65 years; -        Life expectancy continues to rise; so the above percentages will increase to 29% by 2020, and 39% by 2050; -        Add to that low birthrates and you have very few caretakers; -        And Japan doesn’t exactly welcome foreign workers, so using them to fill the gap isn’t an option. Even as the set of tasks personal robots can do remains low for now, it is likely to increase with time. Some already have “almost-spiritual doubt...

When the recent terrorist attack in Christchurch (New Zealand) was broadcast live on Facebook, many went ballistic at social media for having no filters/checks against such material. And many have been cursing Facebook and WhatsApp for circulating “fake news”. Few would deny that we have major problems on these fronts. That said, there is no clear solution either. Let’s see why it is so hard to fix these things. As Ben Thompson writes , on the Internet, we are used to things being free. And there are three types of “free”: “ “Free as in speech” means the freedom or right to do something “Free as in beer” means that you get something for free without any additional responsibility “Free as in puppy” means that you get something for free, but the longterm costs are substantial” Many of us agree with the “Free as in speech” part to varying degrees. But what the world gets via social media is a combo of two free’s: “Facebook and YouTube offer “free as in speech” in conju...

Ok, so there are benefits and privacy risks to video games. But did you know there is an actual attempt to make it a physician prescribed mode of therapy?! It started off in a university lab, where Adam Gazzaley noticed that the benefits of playing certain video games (sustained attention and improvements to working memory) extended beyond the duration of game play. He found that certain areas of the brain “lit up” when you focused or tried hard. Further, hitting those areas of the brain with waves of certain frequencies when they lit up increased one’s cognitive ability even more. And yes, those benefits too extended beyond the period of game play. So his team designed video games whose difficulty level adjusted based on the feedback received from sensors attached to your body: push you enough to challenge you but not so much that you got frustrated! And so Gazzaley formed a company to productize such games as therapy. A couple of pharma companies like Pfizer and Me...

In an earlier blog , I’d written about the benefits of (certain) video games. But of course, not everyone buys an Xbox or Sony Playstation. Instead, we download the free ones onto our phones. And that’s where our kids play most of the time, on the phone. Think Angry Birds or Temple Run or Candy Crush . And therein lies the rub, writes Kaitlyn Tiffany. Because “free” means the makers of the video games make their money via ads and in-app purchases. Now every game developer (or company) cannot build its own ad-delivery system, so who do they turn to? Facebook, Twitter and Google, of course. The ad-giants give libraries that the game developers integrate into their games. In other words, it’s a black box: “These third parties collect information that allows them to keep intricate histories of your behavior, and use it to make money from you in ways you might not expect or even see.” Sound confusing? Aha, writes Tiffany: “The fact that it’s all so confusing is kind of the...

Can playing video games be anything more than a (very addictive) timepass? Yes, says this Note to Self podcast with Jane McGonigal. For starters, video games are known to help those suffering from depression and anxiety. How come? Because the “opposite of play isn’t work; rather, the opposite of play is depression”. And we always knew this at an intuitive level, says McGonigal . After all, when we’re playing games, we’re excited, optimistic about our chances, full of physical energy and joyful. Take the opposite of all of that, and you have the “clinical definition of depression”! This has even been proven clinically: the areas of the brain that are chronically under-stimulated when we are depressed are over-stimulated when we’re playing games. Ergo, McGonigal recommends playing video games for, say, 10 minutes when you are very upset or replaying a very annoying conversation in your head. Playing the game will change your state of mind. Then stop, and continue with your life ...

Back in 1922, the 23 year old Ernest Hemmingway, a then unknown unpublished writer, asked his wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, to join him in Lausanne. For reasons unknown, his wife packed all his writings into a suitcase and brought it along. Possibly because she was sick, or maybe in a hurry, she packed everything: originals, and carbon copies. At the station, she left the bags unattended to buy something. When she returned, the bags were gone… and so too were Hemmingway’s writings. All his works were lost. If asked for the learnings from this incident, most of us would list what we could learn from Hemmingway: not give up, resilience, picking oneself up, continue doing what one had been trying… you get the idea. And we miss the other side, writes Shane Parrish: “But almost everyone misses the lessons—hiding in plain sight—offered by Hadley. And when it comes to avoiding catastrophic errors, we should pay close attention.” The lesson from Hadley is subtle, not th...

Alexander Graham Bell. All I knew of him was that he was the guy who invented the telephone. Which is why pretty much everything I read about him in Edwin S. Grosvenor’s book was new to me. And fascinating. As a boy, Bell’s father introduced him to Sir Charles Wheatstone who had built a machine that could pronounce human words. It “made a great impression upon my mind”, wrote Bell later, “although the articulation was disappointingly crude”. Bell and his brother tried to make a similar machine themselves. It was a good learning experience to “learn how the sounds of a voice are reproduced”. They also learned persistence. These were Bell’s first steps to the telephone… His father meanwhile catalogued every sound the mouth could make and invented a system of symbols that indicated the “position and action of the tongue and lips as they made sounds”. He called it Visible Sound. This system was deemed useful to teach the deaf. When Bell went to teach at the Clark School for the...

Imagine yourself getting defined for life by a single act. People don’t want to know your reasons and, if they do hear them, they dismiss them as a coverup. Jamie Lannister faces exactly this situation in all of Game of Thrones . He is one of the bodyguards to King Aerys Targareyan. And yet, during a civil war, he assassinates the king whom he was sworn to protect. The new king pardons Jamie, retains him as his own bodyguard, and appoints Jamie’s father as the (right) Hand of the King. How well things ended for Jamie, right? No wonder everyone assumes that it was Jamie’s intent from Day 1 to get close to the King and assassinate him: “Why don the white cloak if you meant to betray all it stood for?” But unlike the characters in the story, let us hear Jamie’s version: -           King Aerys, the man he was sworn to protect, was er, the Mad King: “Aerys was mad and cruel, no one has ever denied that.” -    ...

I remember reading somewhere that Facebook may not last more than one generation. That may be hard to imagine today, and no, it wasn’t based on the nothing-lasts-forever reasoning. Instead, it said teenagers don’t wants to have any contact with their parents, and so they’d never come onto Facebook, a site inhabited by people their parents’ age (shudder). Ergo, each new generation would have a new social media site, one that didn’t have parents on it! The other mega social media outlet, WhatsApp, is the way for parents of kids in the same class to interact with each other. As a kid, I remember how one struggled to get notes for days one missed at school. Even if you had a kid from the same class in the neighbourhood, you still had to hope that the other kid took notes. But now, thanks to WhatsApp groups, that’s not a problem: Ask and ye shall received photos of the notes taken by any other kid in class. I thought that was the only purpose of these class WhatsApp groups. Turns...