Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In her terrific book on (middle-class) parenting, All Joy and No Fun , Jennifer Senior has a chapter on how (over)involved parents are in their kids’ activities. Apparently, there’s even a term for it: “overscheduled kids”! It refers to all those play dates and extracurricular activities, almost “as if (kids had) all suddenly acquired chiefs of staffs”. And the term for this aspect of parenting? It’s called “concerted cultivation”. Most Indians can relate to all this, but it’s bit surprising that the same is increasingly true of American middle-class parents as well. In fact, in the US, there’s an increasing backlash now against (hold your breath) meritocracy! Huh? Joan Wong put together 10 academics’ take on what this is all about. One panelist, Agnes Callard, makes an interesting point on two types of merit: “(backward-looking) honor and as a (forward-looking) office”. Most people are OK with the first, it’s the second one, the future-looking one (aka college admission) t...

Everyone complains that we live in a world of lies and fiction, where truth is hard to differentiate from everything else. There’s even a term for it: the “post-truth” age. But, asks Yuval Noah Harari in 21 Lessons for the 21 st Century : “If this is the age of post-truth, when, exactly, was the halcyon age of truth? In the 1980s? The 1950s? The 1930s?” Habits like denying the very existence of certain countries is an age-old tactic. In 1931, Japan created the fake country of Manchukuo to justify their conquest of China. China itself claims Tibet was never independent. And the British occupied Australia saying it was “nobody’s land”, thereby wiping out 50,000 years of Aboriginal history. All of which is why Harari says: “Humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions.” It’s been that way long before Facebook and WhatsApp, Trump and Putin: “For millennia, much of what pas...

The most famous thought experiment in quantum theory, Schrodinger’s cat, raised a highly problematic question: At what size does the weirdness of quantum phenomenon give way to the “normal” behavior we observe all the time? Nothing in the maths of quantum theory put a size limit. Nor does the maths explain what constitutes an “observation” of a quantum entity. Could only living entities could make an observation? Or did instruments count too? The accepted answer today is something called decoherence, writes Charles Seife in Decoding the Universe . “Decoherence” refers to any interaction between two items in the universe (light, matter, anything else). Every such interaction constitutes a measurement made by nature. An extraction of (there’s that word again) information. The tinier or colder or more isolated something is, the longer it can stay without interacting with any other piece of nature, i.e., the longer it takes before another part of nature can “measure” it. But ev...

My 8 yo has never taken to Lego , something that always pricks at me. Thankfully, the Spock in me knows that you can’t force a kid to play with a particular toy, so I never push her on this. Just when I’d abandoned all hope, she took to this Android game called Multicraft . It’s like a very crude, digital version of Lego , and very limited in features since it’s a free game. Call me a geek, but once I saw the game allowed her to build (digital) structures like buildings and bridges, zoom in and out, and view objects from various perspectives, the engineer in me was happy. Good, I thought, she’s getting trained on using tools like CAD… Plus, you know how they say we might be living in a simulation and not even know of it? This might be her baby steps in creating such a simulated worlds… She’d save stuff she built and give each “world” (a term from the game) a name. Better that she be a creator of (digital) worlds, I thought, than her having “Now I am become Death, the des...

Cersei Lannister’s line from the first book/season of Game of Thrones sums up the theme of the series: “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.” This willingness to kill any character in the story anytime is one of the most appealing things (oh c’mon, this is fiction) of the series. On that front, author George RR Martin acknowledged the influence of The Lord of the Rings : ““The minute you kill Gandalf, the suspense of everything that follows is a thousand times greater, because now anybody could die,” Martin says. “Of course, that’s had a profound effect on my own willingness to kill characters off at the drop of a hat.” What were (some of) the other inspirations for Martin? “The Wall” was based on Hadrin’s Wall (Roman empire); Lord of the Rings: ergo, a story world that is similar and different from the world we know + a “restrained use of magic” through the story; Martin’s own TV writing experience: End every chapte...

Moving on, Charles Seife next looks at the theory of relativity in Decoding the Universe . One of the most famous dictums of that theory is that “nothing can go faster than the speed of light”. Except that’s not what the theory says. That statement is an oversimplification: “Some things can go faster than the speed of light. Even light itself can break light speed, in a sense.” Huh? Both those statements have been proven in multiple experiments, and no, they don’t necessarily involve quantum mechanics! Even good old non-quantum experiments have shown those two statements to be true. The exact details of those experiments aren’t relevant to this blog, so I won’t get into them. Regardless, don’t such experiments prove that the speed limit imposed by relativity is being violated? It gets a bit murky, but this is what most scientists say relativity really says: “The true rule is that information can’t travel faster than the speed of light. You cannot take a bit of inform...

A while back, we gave my 8 yo daughter my old smartphone so she wouldn’t keep taking our phones to play games. It didn’t have a SIM card, so it was really a computer + camera she had, not a phone that could make calls. And now she finds some kids in the apartment having smartphones with SIM cards, ergo the demand that she be given one too. So far we’ve stood firm but the question is when she will have one, not if . Since I’d started thinking about this topic, I decided to listen to this Short and Curly podcast on the next question that comes with giving a smartphone to your kid. Should you put tracking apps on your kid’s phone? Is it right and necessary? Or are you becoming like the KGB, Stasi and every surveillance state in history? It’s a tough choice: trying to balance privacy v/s safety. Kids feel they can take care of themselves, that they are not animals to be tracked continuously. But how do you as a parent know if the kid is mature to be out there without supervi...

Indian child labour activist, Bhuwan Ribhu, points out there are over 3,00,000 missing children in the country. And there are over 1,00,000 children in various institutions. Matching them manually is obviously a practical task. In July this year, he launched a pilot program to match the digital databases using facial recognition technology. The outcome was very good: “We were able to match 10,561 missing children… They are currently in the process of being reunited with their families.” Given the severe shortfall in police (144 officer per 1,00,000 citizens) as opposed to, say, the EU (318 per 1,00,000), India needs to try and find different ideas to bridge the gap. Including, as it turns out, turning to facial recognition technology.   Delhi adopted it in 2018, along with Andhra Pradesh and Punjab. And now the central government wants to expand the scope: “It wants to construct one of the world's largest facial recognition systems. The project envisions a future in...

What other topics does information theory answer, Charles Seife asks and answers in Decoding the Universe . How about that question from philosophy: what is the purpose of life? And the answer increasingly seems to be: “Duplicate your (genetic) information. Sure, the programs go about the task in different ways, but the goal is always the same. Reproduction. All else is decoration – decoration that helps the program to achieve its ultimate goal.” Wonder if that’s true? Isn’t the individual trying to reproduce the entire organism? How can one say that information within is trying to reproduce (only) itself? Are we stuck with a chicken and egg question here, each left to his own preference with no way to prove/know? Aha, but organisms in nature increasingly align with one view: “That the organism reproduces is just a by-product of the information duplicating itself… sometimes .” This view explains why an ant colony has only fertile organism – the queen. By the co...

In this interesting podcast , Alex Tabarrok repeatedly points out there is no one answer on what works, and there’s no certainty on what comes next. Nah, he wasn’t talking of life in general; he was making those comments on the topic of what it takes to sustain economic growth:   Traditional wisdom says the must-have’s for economic growth include strong institutions, rule of law, free markets and democracy. But then, he says, there’s the elephant in the room: China. It used to be fashionable to point at India and China’s populations as problems not just for those countries, but increasingly for the world as they get richer, and consume and pollute more. Then again, both countries will invest more in R&D as they get richer, and having more people would increase the odds of new ideas and solutions to today’s problems. “People as stomachs” or “People as brains”, he calls the two views. Which is right? Today, China’s growth looks unstoppable. But he points out, a couple of...

As someone who hadn’t seen the first Maleficent movie, I didn’t know what to expect from the second movie. But of course, I had to go for the second one since my 8 yo daughter wanted to see it. Plus, it had stuck in my head when she’d recently pointed at a giant poster of a wax museum in Goa and identified the statues as being those of Harry Potter, Modi, and… Maleficent . (Apparently, she only knows Angelina Jolie in her Maleficent avatar). The movie was a pleasant surprise. It was “not a fairy tale”, like one of the characters in the movie said. There’s the evil, scheming Queen Ingrith who knows how to push Maleficent’s buttons, thereby starting a war that she can blame on the latter. And the men in the movie are mostly inconsequential props. The woman-as-central-and-bad-characters theme reminded me of a line by Laurie Penny where she expressed her (and everyone else’s) disappointment with how Game of Thrones ended: “by insisting that the women were crazy all along a...

How can a theory about information and noise be considered as profound as relativity and quantum theory? Sounds ridiculous, right? So let’s check out the first big science-y problem that information theory solved. The second law of thermodynamics forbids the existence of a perpetual motion engine (That’s a machine that can run forever without any intervention that involves more work than the work you get from the machine itself). Why not, asked James Clark Maxwell, with his famous thought experiment known as Maxwell’s demon, devised in 1871. But first, a recap of some basics. Heat flows from a hotter to a colder place. As that heat flows, you can use (part of) that heat flow to do work. By definition, this means that once the two sides are at the same temperature (same heat), heat stops flowing (neither end is hotter anymore). And without heat flow, no work can be done. We also know that heat is just a measure of the average speed of molecules. And since those molecules...

In their biography of Claude Shannon (the founder of Information Theory) titled A Mind at Play , Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman explain the theory in a layman friendly way. Of course, it needed a genius to come up with the theory: “Turning art into science would be the hallmark of Shannon’s career.” And what could be more art-sy and non-science-sy than an abstract concept like information? Shannon, building on the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley, considered an example. If a biased coin always landed heads, you have no uncertainty about how it lands, and so the information conveyed by announcing its state is zero. But if it is a perfectly unbiased coin, then the information conveyed on how it lands is the maximum. Ergo, Shannon decided that “information” is a measure of the reduction in uncertainty on the subject . Now Shannon needed a unit for this thing called “information”. He realized the smallest piece of information is a Yes/No answer. Further, all information ...