Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Justice. Everyone thinks they know what it means is. Unfortunately, as Yuval Noah Harari says in 21 Lessons for the 21 st Century : “Our sense of justice… has ancient evolutionary roots.” Unfortunate why? Because it evolved to come up with rules like not stealing from your neighbor. But the world we live in is nothing like the world of our hunter-gatherer ancestors: “An inherent feature of our modern global world is that its causal relations are highly ramified and complex.” Thus, as Harari exaggerates only-a-bit to make a point: “I can live peacefully at home, never raising a finger to harm anyone, and yet…  according to the socialists, my comfortable life is based on child labour in dismal Third World sweatshops.” Once you start thinking deeper about almost anything, things get very murky. Say, you own shares in a petrochemical company. You’re getting good returns, but they dump toxic waste into the river, thereby harming people’s health and wildlife. And they ha...

In The Power of Moments , the authors describes a campaign in one city in the US to remove segregation, specifically the whites-only lunch counters. Here’s the surprising aspect of that (successful) movement: “What’s less well-known about this story is that the demonstrators didn’t just show courage. They practiced it. They rehearsed it.” Huh? A civil rights leader from the era, James Lawson explains: “The difficulty with non-violent people and efforts is that they don’t recognize the necessity of fierce discipline and training.” Lawson taught the crowd “how to behave”, how to avoid breaking other laws, how to step-in for others, even how to dress for the occasion! But he didn’t stop there: he had them engage in role-plays. He got in white friends to come in, to crowd the protestors, to try and provoke them, even push them a bit. “The simulated attacks were brutal but essential… (Lawson wanted to teach them how to) suppress the natural urges to fight back or run away.” ...

The physicist, Albert Allen Bartlett, once said, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” I thought this only mattered in matters related to finance, where the effects of compounding over time makes a large difference. One man who does get the effects of compounding is the investor Warren Buffett. That’s probably why his authorized biography is titled Snowball . But, as Shane Parrish writes , the effect of compounding matters in other areas too. And people have been saying this for decades! Like Roy Amara: “Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.” Or take the famous Moore’s law that predicted that the number of semiconductors on a chip would double every 2 years or so: “Sure, it’s not that hard to imagine your laptop getting twice as fast in a year, for instance. Where it gets tricky is when we try to imagine what that means on a longer timesc...

In 1899, the first pedestrian was killed by a car in the US. It sparked off a debate: was this to be treated as murder? That seemed too harsh given that the driver had no intention to kill. But calling it an accident felt… too minor. There were no clear rules about all this back then. Are we at the same junction today wrt driverless cars, asks this Secret History of the Future podcast . When the first pedestrian was killed by a driverless car, questions for which no clear rules existed began to come up. Was it the pedestrian’s fault since she didn’t look where she was going? Or was it the fault of the human driver, the one who is expected to be alert and override the system? Or is it just too unreasonable to expect a human to stay alert behind the wheel when he doesn’t need to do anything most of the time in a driverless car? Or should we blame the software? In fact, the logs indicated that the car had detected something on the road 6 seconds before impact, but it couldn’t make ...

Here’s an assorted collection of Calvin and Hobbes parallels from home. I was reminded of that strip when my 8 yo daughter was told about something that happened when she was 3, couldn’t remember the incident at all, and then commented very sagely, “Ah, the memory problems of young age…”. Of late, my daughter complains a lot about… well, pretty much everything that we do. And don’t do. I would so love to do what Calvin’s dad did, but she wouldn’t get the mockery, thus robbing me of even that small satisfaction (sigh). Thanks to the new normal caused by the coronavirus, we have to take our daughter for a walk/cycling everyday, else she doesn’t get tired and can’t sleep easily. And so, sadly, she’s experiencing this sad aspect of life way too early:

In his wonderful book, How to Win an Indian Election , Shivam Shankar Singh dedicates a chapter on fake news. One of his points was this: “Most (rural) voters believed that being added to a political WhatsApp group gave them access to some kind of insider information.” Ergo, they think of it as a “credible source”. Something to be repeated/forwarded. We like to think that people vote based on rational, well thought reasons, but it’s all too often emotion based. Political parties know this and so try and exercise control over public opinion. By any and all means at their disposal. Fake news feeds perfectly into human psychology. All of us have our biases and views, and a message that aligns with that tends to be accepted without too much (any?) scrutiny. More problematically, it reinforces our bias/view setting off a vicious cycle. And the effect is practically irreversible: “The ugly truth is fake news does its job even when it is identified as fake.” WhatsApp, eve...

My 8 yo daughter loves to watch how-to-prank videos on YouTube. Inevitably, she decided that I should be the victim of her newly acquired, er, skills. But even before she had pulled them off, she announced that she had earned the titles reserved for people who are masters at pranking people: The Prankster. And Prankenstein. She kept telling me that she’d planned a long sequence of pranks for me, that they would hit me first thing I woke up next morning. Beware the Prankster, she warned. Prankenstein will get you, she cackled all day. I knew she’d do something, but was confident that she’d not have the patience or ability to execute most of the pranks, whatever they were… She set her alarm for 5 o’clock with the ominous sounding description, “It’s prank time”. And she actually woke up at that unearthly hour. She then woke up her assistant, er, mom. And this is what she setup before going back to sleep. The Dare : A note was next to my pillow when I woke. It said, “Would y...

Even as Napoleon was still a possible threat, Richard Wellesley became the Governor General of the EIC. And he came with two goals, says William Dalrymple in The Anarchy : secure India for the British and: “… to eradicate all traces of French influence before any French military expedition could arrive.” Wellesley used the fact that the four powers in India, the EIC, the Marathas, the Nizam of Hyderabad, and Tipu were at odds with each other, always switching alliances based on whoever seemed the greater threat. At the same, Nelson sunk the French fleet “wrecking Napoleon’s hopes of using Egypt as a secure based from which to attack India”. That, however, didn’t change Wellesley’s policy: by now, he had converted the EIC into a “privately owned imperial power with a standing army and territorial possessions far larger than that of its parent company”! Tipu was killed in battle, the factionalism in the Marathas ensured they’d never stand united against the British, and the Niz...

Warren Hastings’ replacement was Lord Charles Cornwallis, writes William Dalrymple in The Anarchy . Cornwallis, the man who had surrendered the thirteen American colonies to George Washington. Never again, he swore, would he allow a colony to gain independence. Cornwallis brought in “unembarrassedly racist legislation” to prevent the British from mixing with the natives. After all, wasn’t that exactly what led to the American freedom struggle? Never again… And so began the phase of discrimination and contempt for non-whites. By now, the EIC’s revenue streams were so large that Cornwallis could out-finance all the EIC’s rivals, buy off enemies or hire armies to defeat them: “The colonial conquest of India was as much bought as fought.” It was this new, well financed army that now bore down on Tipu and forced terms of surrender that cut down his power to a point where he was no longer a possible rival to the EIC. Cornwallis also introduced the zamindari system: “just get EIC ...

In The Anarchy , William Dalrymple writes that in the aftermath of the Parliamentary inquiry into the EIC, Warren Hastings was put in charge. He accepted that the responsibility of the ruler was to govern (not trade), with long term sustenance in mind. And so he took steps to create an administrative service, unified the currency system, codified Hindu and Muslim laws, reformed the tax laws, and put an end to the worst excesses of individuals of the Company. He created an efficient postal system, and built a series of granaries to prevent a Bengal like famine from happening again. Like all men in positions of power, Hastings had his enemies. Philip Francis was the most powerful of them and their feud soon divided and paralyzed the EIC. They say every crisis is an opportunity, and the war within the EIC was just that opportunity for the rise of the Marathas, Tipu Sultan and the Mughal scion, Shah Alam. Shah Alam joined forces with the Marathas and was soon on the Peacock Throne o...

As the Mughal empire slid into anarchy, in the south, the French and the British often supported opposing kingdoms against each other as they jostled for influence and trading privileges, writes William Dalrymple in The Anarchy . Their involvement gradually led to a very consequential realization: “The Europeans now had a clear and consistent military edge… and small numbers of them were capable of altering the balance of power.” All those centuries of continuous warfare in Europe had perfected their military strategies, tactics and weaponry. Yet the Europeans only aimed to use their military power to support someone on the (regional) throne for trading privileges. There were new kingmakers in town: “(EIC) would become the focus for the attentions for all the dethroned, dispossessed, and dissatisfied rulers.” But increasingly, the Europeans got a share of the kingdom’s revenue for installing (and preserving) the man on the throne. At the same time, the EIC knew that the ...

How could a single private company, the East India Company (EIC), have conquered all of India? If you’re looking for a simple answer, then avoid William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy . But if you like superbly researched, insanely detailed narratives (even if they are super-long), then the book is just for you. Right in the introduction, Dalrymple sets the expectations straight: “It is always a mistake to read history backwards… (It’s only) in retrospect, the rise of the company seems almost inevitable.” So he starts at the beginning. Formed in 1599, it was a time when England was a “relatively impoverished” country. Those who invested in the company were “mariners and adventurers”, men better at piracy and looting than the “far more demanding skills of long-distance trade”. The success of the Dutch with their private company model made the British feel, “Huh, maybe we can do it too”. The British Crown had few expectations of success when the dominant players were Spain, Portu...

Is there one strand (variation) of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus, out there? Or are there multiple strands? On 30 th April, a lab in Los Alamos, announced that a second strand “began spreading in Europe in early February”. And in Europe and the US, it rose in dominance, said the report. First, let’s see why the multiple strands possibility seems probable to many. We’re told that evolution works through random mutations. A virus, with its short life span, reproduces very frequently. Thus, logically, over so many months, surely there must be multiple strands of the virus out there, right? Ed Yong wrote this brilliant article on the topic, explaining why things aren’t that simple. Yes, he says, mutations occur. But to call a mutated virus a new strand, it must differ significantly from the rest. The keyword is “significantly”. Since we humans use that term wrt its impact on us, here’s what “significantly” means: (1) Easier to spread, (2) Increased ability to cause disease, (3)...

When I started reading Calvin and Hobbes , I was always struck by the range of topics Bill Watterson could cover. On the topic of how kids view their parents, this line by Calvin says it all, across space and time:   “I am related to people I cannot relate to.” As I’ve grown older, I can still appreciate and enjoy how Calvin views the world, but I increasingly find that my 8 yo daughter too can relate to Calvin. Like the time she read this strip: So how do I know she could relate to the strip? Like all kids, she has the subtlety of a sledgehammer. She turned to me and said, “I feel the same way about you”. And then added the final nail to the coffin: “It’s almost as if Calvin is my brother.” Ouch! The shoe is now on the other foot, and I don’t like it one bit.

The ability to measure temperature became important in many industries in the 1800’s. But how could one measure temperature? Scientists still doesn’t understand what caused heat, and the idea that temperature was a measure of the speed with which atoms move was not universally accepted. Early systems tapped the thermal expansion of liquids stored in narrow tubes as a way to measure temperature, writes Jeremy Webb in his book, Nothing: Surprising Insights Everywhere from Zero to Oblivion . The level of the liquid was marked at two “fixed temperatures”, such as the melting and freezing temperatures of water. And everything in between was marked as intermediate values. But this created a catch-22! “The scale-marking process assumes that the liquid expands an equal amount for every unit rise in tem­perature. But this assumption cannot be verified unless one measures the thermal expansion of the liquid, and to do that one requires ... a thermometer.” It was in the 1840’s th...

This blog is based on one of the best articles I’ve read on the whole coronavirus scene. Here’s what Ed Yong has to say. What’s in a Name? The “coronavirus” is the name of a class of viruses (500 of them till date), not the one virus that has made it so (in)famous: “SARS-CoV-2 is the virus. COVID-19 is the disease that it causes. The two aren’t the same. The disease arises from a combination of the virus and the person it infects… Some people who become infected never show any symptoms; others become so ill that they need ventilators... The virus might vary little around the world, but the disease varies a lot.” The silver lining so far? “There are no signs of “an alarming mutation we need to be worried about,” Gralinski says. For now, the world is facing just one threat.” Wide Range of Impact : Unlike good old measles and malaria, SARS-CoV-2 has a wide range of impact on patients. This makes it very hard to analyze: “The disease seems to wreak havoc not only on ...

One time, my 8 yo daughter said she wanted to be a lemonade vendor. Another time, as someone who loves dogs, she said she wanted to be a vet. My wife suggested that she should be the vet at a zoo so she could treat the widest (and wildest) variety of animals. The next time the topic came up, my daughter shamelessly claimed that the zoo idea was her’s all along: “You think I can’t come up with ideas? I have brains”, she declared, tapping her head. When it comes to studies, like most kids, she dislikes maths. I tried reasoning with her in terms of what she cares about. You want money, right? All the best paying jobs are based on doing well at maths. I made as much progress with that argument as Calvin’s dad had made. In recent times, my daughter has learnt the word, “hacking”. Hacking is a very positive term in her peer group, apparently. She announced that one of her friends has hacked her classmate’s account and thus gets to copy their (online) homework! Isn’t that cool,...