Viswanathan K's Thoughts

As someone who can appreciate good photography and art, I love Instagram (Yes, there’s a lot more to it than just pics of whatever people are eating). Every now and then, I’d show some really nice pics on the app to my 8 yo daughter. And since there is literally an endless stream of pics the app shows you, she’d then immerse herself of what is called “infinite scroll”, scrolling without end. Then one day, when I showed her yet another pic on the app, here is the conversation we had: She: “Isn’t this app for young people?” Me (wondering how she even knows such things): “Yes, what’s your point?” She: “Aren’t you too old for it then?”, adding pointedly, “Just as you say I’m too young for some things?” Me: “No, I’m not too old for it.” She: “Really? Aren’t you forty-whatever?” Forty-whatever? This from the same kid who gets mad when I can’t remember how old she is… FYI, kiddo, I don’t even remotely subscribe to the view expressed in this rant by an “adult”, Ni...

When it comes to changing how people are/behave, the trigger for that change, by definition, has to come via either self-reflection or by others providing feedback on how one is. All that’s obvious. But is there a fatal flaw in both those drivers of change, as pointed out by Thomas Bernhard in his novella, Walking ? Take self-reflection: “If we observe ourselves, we are never observing ourselves but someone else. Thus we can never talk about self-observation, or when we talk about the fact that we observe ourselves we are talking as someone we never are when we are not observing ourselves, and thus when we observe ourselves we are never observing the person we intended to observe but someone else. The concept of self-observation and so, also, of self-description is thus false.” That sounds uncomfortably true, doesn’t it? And if that’s true, what else isn’t? “Looked at in this light, all concepts (ideas)… like self-observation, self-pity, self-accusation and so on, are fals...

Given the future we are headed towards with its AI, self-driven cars and drones (and who knows what other forms of “smart” software”?), governments world over worry about security implications. And yes, governments can look outside the bureaucratic box, as seen in Bruce Schneier’s description of one such US initiative a decade back: “The Department of Homeland Security hired a bunch of science fiction writers to come in for a day and think of ways terrorists could attack America. If our inability to prevent 9/11 marked a failure of imagination, as some said at the time, then who better than science fiction writers to inject a little imagination into counterterrorism planning?” Schneier though sees a problem with consulting sci-fi writers: “More imagination leads to more movie-plot threats -- which contributes to overall fear and overestimation of the risks. And that doesn't help keep us safe at all.” Rather, he prefers this model: “Science fiction writers are c...

In her Reading & Comprehension passage, my 8 yo daughter was horrified to learn that there were no TV’s in India around 50 years back. And that we got to 2 TV channels only around 30 years back, and even then only in the metros first. She didn’t believe me when I added that TV broadcast were not 24 x 7, that they were only available in a certain time window: As someone born in the age of cable and who now lives on Internet based TV (Netflix etc) only ever since we cut off cable, these are alien concepts for her: Then again, the move to Internet TV means kids these days are not guilty of being like this in front of the TV, something our generation was very guilty of: Watching Internet TV is not “passive entertainment”; they actively search for what they like and watch it. As one comedy serial put it, the definition of Hell used to be that if you went to the bathroom, you missed it for good; if you missed an episode, it wouldn’t come again for years. Not ...

Immigration is becoming a major problem world over. Europe, never an immigrant friendly place, finds itself facing immigrants from North Africa and Syria and is clueless on how to deal with non-white, non-Christian folks. Even America now struggles with Hispanics who don’t even learn English. India refused to allow Rohingya refugees largely due to right-wing fears (world over, not just India) that Muslims-don’t-assimilate. The debate over immigration is 3-fold, writes Yuval Noah Harari in 21 Lessons for the 21 st Century . The first point of contention is whether allowing immigrants in is a duty or a favour? Left-leaners are closer to the duty view whereas the right considers it a favour, which means it can be denied. To aggravate matters, many immigrants add fuel to the fire: “(They) come with a list of demands as if they own the place.” There are also those who want it both ways. Like the US who knowingly look the other way at some illegal immigrants because, hey, they’...

In his page-turning history of chemistry, Mendeleyev’s Dream , Paul Strathern describes John Dalton, the modern reviver of the idea of atoms thus: “Dalton seems to have had a knack for wasting his scientific enthusiasm, and considerable talent, for inappropriate subjects.” Building on Louis-Joseph Proust’s law of definite proportions (all compounds consisted of elements in simple ratios by weight e.g. 2:1 or 3:2, but never 3.23:1), Dalton realized this could be explained if all matter consisted of tiny indivisible particles: if one particle of one element could only combine with N (any integer) particles of the other, it followed the ratio of the two would always be N:1 (an integer ratio). We take the idea of atoms for granted today that it is hard to grasp that “this momentous idea transformed our understanding of matter”. Richard Feynman did understand the point, which is why he famously said that if only one scientific idea could be passed onto future generations, then ...

Today, when we talk of the Internet of Things (IoT), we can imagine the washing machine telling Alexa to order detergent. Or of the wind turbine that tells the company that it may stop working soon unless its components are replaced soon. But generally, we don’t think of what will happen next when some of those “Things” in the Internet of Things are the robots of the future. Maybe we should, I felt when I was reading sci-fi author, Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest . At one point, one of the main characters finds himself being targeted by multiple automated entities of the future. So what was going on? “It’s a murder virus. First it establishes the identity of the target by a variety of methods… When it locates the target, the Killer virus manipulates every possible piece of external hardware to carry out the murder.” You’d think that such viruses would get found as they killed more and more people. But what if the virus was written for one particular individual only, not as a ...

Edward Snowden is the man who leaked the extent to which the US government was spying on its own citizens. He’s in his 30’s now, but that still makes him old enough to have experienced the way we used to connect to the Internet before the always-connected age we live in now: “I’d wake the computer up and go online, holding my pillows against the machine to stifle the dial tone of the modem and the ever-intensifying hiss of its connection.” His book, Permanent Record , is very, very interesting. So why did he leak the extent of US government surveillance? Obviously it was ideological, and the journey to that set of values makes for interesting reading: “(At twenty), like most young people, I had solid convictions that I refused to accept weren’t truly mine but rather a contradictory cluster of inherited principles… Much of what I believed, or of what I thought I believed, was just youthful imprinting.” Around that time, 9/11 happened. And the US government totally changed...

My 8 yo daughter is beginning to relate to Calvin more and more. Some time back, I pointed out how she called Calvin her brother . But that was before she read this strip : Having read this, she announced that she agreed with all of Calvin’s points on how school could be improved, except the one on taking away the other kids. And then she said: “Like Calvin, I too have stuffed toys. And like him, nobody asks for my opinion on anything. Even though, I too have many ideas.” She also shares Calvin’s dinosaur fascination and loves his attempts at using a time machine to, er, avoid homework. Is it then at all surprising that she ended her rant with this line? “Calvin’s my twin.” On a tangential note, I find it scary that at 8, she’s already complaining about her voice not being heard. I shudder to imagine how she’ll feel when she’s a teenager…

I love to read. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve diversified the stuff I read (the Internet helped immensely). And I try and do what Charlie Munger says: “(Just reading is) not enough: You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things.  Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.” But how does one enthuse a kid to read? After all, most of their reading is the kind “forced” by the education system, on subjects they don’t always care about, in a style that, well, let’s just say it isn’t riveting. Kevin Kelly wrote this passage trying to encourage kids to read. You decide whether he achieves its aim: “Imagine you can choose your own superpower. You get to pick one of these three: flying, invisibility, or being able to read. Which one do you choose?” Most kids would obviously pick the first two. Which is why Kelly writes next: “Flying is not so useful without other superpowers; invisibility is okay for being naughty or...

Kids complain all the time about being bored. Adults complain far less on that front. Here’s an interesting explanation of why that might be the case. The authors of The Power of Moments point out that the most important events in a person’s life fall overwhelmingly in a “relatively narrow window of time: roughly age 15 to 30”. Psychologists even have a term for this period of life, the “reminiscence bump”. But why does such a narrow window “dominate our memories”? In her book, Time Warped , Claudia Hammond says the reason is that’s the “time for firsts”. First crush, first job, first time living away from home, first time we get to make choices about our lives. And novelty changes our perception of time. Anything new feels like it lasts last longer. Experiments show that when successive images are shown for the same time, say lots of brown shoe images with the odd alarm clock image inserted in between at random, people will insist that the alarm clock was shown longer. Ye...

Why don’t the Chinese people rise against the lack of political freedom, the suppression of dissent etc? Westerners ask this a lot, and Anna Vignet tries answering just that question. First, she says, history matters. The relevant history here started with the British forcibly creating a “market” for opium resulting in large scale drug addiction. Next, the betrayal at Versailles after World War I: “The great powers handed to Japan the colonial possessions of the defeated Germany, despite China having entered the Great War on the side of the Allies.” When your history with the West is like that, you don’t exactly embrace the values (liberalism, democracy) of the betrayer. Instead, you decide to get strong. Never again do they want a weak China that will be treated like dirt by the West. And so the average Chinese prefers reform within, not revolution. Second, writes Vignet, is the America led West’s mindset after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, namely the desire to push...

Thanks to the coronavirus, and thus the absence of the maids, our 8 yo daughter is called upon more than before to chip in with housework. Obviously, my daughter has no interest in doing any such thing. Unsurprisingly then, interactions like this are all too common: Given all that, I am sure my daughter can relate to this Calvin claim, but I hope she’s smart enough never to say it: When you see someone doing something all the time, if you’re 8, you assume they must like doing it. I realized this when my daughter saw her mom doing housework, but for the first time, with her earphones on. Upon which she commented: “Finally… even amma finds housework boring. That’s why she has her headphones on.” There’s hope for her yet, my daughter seemed to be saying.