Viswanathan K's Thoughts

At one point, a kauri tree fell somewhere in New Zealand. The tree rotted away leaving behind just the stump, “leafless and apparently dead”, writes Ed Yong. But when botanist Martin Bader knocked on the stump, it didn’t sound like deadwood. Was it alive? If so, how? They found the stump is connected to other kauri trees, probably via its roots: “The water flowing through the full-size trees also drives water through the stump, keeping it alive. It will never green again, never make cones or seeds or pollen, never unfall, never reclaim its towering verticality. But at least for now, it’s not going to die, either.” And that just raised questions: “How best to think about the living stump? Is it a vampiric parasite that sustains its undead existence by leeching the supplies of its fellow trees? Is it a beneficial partner that extends the root network of those other kauri in exchange for water? Is it even an individual entity anymore, or just a part of its neighbors?” I...

I found these two articles on the attempts at a COVID-19 vaccine both informative and depressing. The first one was by Sarah Zhang: “Nearly five months into the pandemic, all hopes of extinguishing COVID-19 are riding on a still-hypothetical vaccine.” But, as she writes, there would be so many challenges, even when we have a vaccine. Starting from things as basic as the glass vials to store it in. To the speed at which it can be rolled out. Consider the storage and transport challenges if the vaccine needs to be stored at very low temperautes. And that’s assuming we can even manufacture it on the needed scale in the first place. Graeme Wood points out the technology of some of the promising vaccine candidates are based on new technology: they’re RNA vaccines. Huh? Normal vaccines are protein vaccines whereas the COVID-19 candidates? “An RNA vaccine injects instructions to your cells, and hopes that your cells receive these instructions and follow them, and build the ...

When I got this Hourly History e-book on two Roman emperors, Marcus Aurelius and Caligula , I expected the part on the former to be interesting. Boy, was I wrong. Caligula was the third Roman emperor. In the first 6 months, here’s what he did: “Caligula restored voting rights, distributed bread and gifts, and hosted games and theatricals for the people’s entertainment…. (He) built two aquaducts… He restored vassal kings to their thrones… He annulled unpopular taxes and gave magistrates the right to make decisions without consulting him.” In short, “Caligula was the very image of a good and benevolent ruler”. Then in 37 A.D., he fell very ill, including a swelling of the brain and/or epilepsy. When he finally emerged, he was a “very changed man”. He was convinced he had been poisoned, and ordered his co-regent to be murdered without trial. He began to have incestuous relationships with two of his sisters. He declared himself to be not just the “Greatest and Best Caesar”, ...

Tim Harford gives a quick and dirty list of actions to tackle COVID-19: China and South Korea imposed severe curtailments, south east Asia and India imposed slightly milder versions, Germany focussed on massive testing and contact-tracing, Sweden focussed on herd immunity and the US? “The response has been so diverse across different states as to defy easy description.” Then there’s the issue I’ve mentioned many times: the West stubbornly refuses to learn from the East. Harford digs into why that is the case: “One problem they identified — which is both pathetic and all too human — is that it is simply more convenient to learn from countries with a shared language. There is plenty of information in the UK about what is going on in New Zealand, the US, and Anglo-fluent Sweden. Dispatches from South Korea or Vietnam seem to come from a different planet.” But having access to that info isn’t enough: “The people in the UK government with contacts in Hanoi and Seoul are not...

Parents keep correcting their kids all the time. And we say things, far more often than we’d like to admit, based on patterns without even checking. Did you put your things back? Did you water the plants? Inevitably, some of the things we say based on patterns turn out to be wrong.   And the kid will pounce on any such errors. Back-and-forth’s like this should be all too familiar. You always talk as if I don’t do anything right. That’s because you don’t do it most of the time. Everybody makes mistakes; are you saying you never make mistakes? Nobody wins such “spirited discussions”, but they happen with increasing anger on both sides. After one such incident, later that night, I was reading my 8 yo daughter Calvin and Hobbes , and we stumbled upon this strip: Triumphant, I turned to her and told that her righteous outrage is often just as fake as Calvin’s. She had the decency to remain silent, to not deny it… Parents: 1, Kids: 0. Oh c’mon, one is allowed to savour ...

The Hourly History biography of Michelangelo makes for great reading. The man, of course, is synonymous with artistic genius: Florence was home to the uber-rich Medicis, who were huge patrons of the arts: “(Lorenzo Medici) encouraged local artists of all stripes to volunteer their time creating sculptures for a sprawling garden near the Medici Palace.” And that is how Michelangelo was “found” by the Medicis. And when the Medicis began to fade, Michelangelo set off to the greener pasture that was papal Rome. Soon enough, he came pulled back to Florence, for an art project depicting the famous slayer of giants, David. Not just for old time’s sake, but also because the other contendor for the project was his rival, Leonardo da Vinci: “Not wanting to be outdone by an artist that he considered only a part-time sculptor… Michelangelo decided to seek out the project for himself.” The statue of David became one of the greatest accomplishments of his career...

Back when Dimitri Mendeleyev came up with his famous Periodic Table of elements, only atomic weights were known, not atomic numbers. And yet, when Mendeleyev arranged the elements in increasing order of atomic weights, writes Paul Strathern in Mendeleyev’s Dream : “(He found) their properties repeated in a series of periodic intervals.” But there were anomalies: -        The elements with similar properties didn’t always fall in increasing order of atomic weights. But: “Mendeleyev questioned the atomic weight of the element, suggesting that it had been calculated incorrectly.” -        In some cases, no element seemed to fit the “next” slot. Undeterred: “Where no element fit the pattern, he left a gap. He predicted that these gaps would one day be filled by elements which had not yet been discovered.” He went even further by predicting the properties of such yet to be discovered elements. Not everyone was...

Roma Agarwal wrote this awesome book on constructions (buildings, bridges etc) titled Built . Like many Westerners, she switched fields during college, from physics to structural engineering. The reason for her pivot? She stumbled upon engineers making the stuff that would be used by physicists! “One was designing a metal holder for a glass lens – a simple task, you might think, except that the whole apparatus had to be cooled to minus 70 Celsius. Metal contracts more than glass, and unless the holder was cleverly and carefully designed, the cooling metal would crush the lens.” It was an eye-opening moment for her: “Suddenly, it became very clear to me: I wanted to use physics and maths to solve practical problems.” And boy, did she become a passionate engineer, as the book shows. “A major part of the engineer’s job is figuring out how structures can withstand the manifold forces that push, pull, shake, twist, squash, bend, rend, split, snap or tear them apart.” The so...

We now have a city specific lockdown in Bangalore. This is why that happened, the daily case count has been spiking sharply for some time now: At an all-India level too, the daily case count has been rising: So what is causing the spike? Is it because people started taking it easy? Is it because the lockdown had worked but (obviously) cannot be continued indefinitely? Or did the easing of inter-state travel mean it was no longer contained to the worst-hit states only? All of them are possible reasons, and they have all probably contributed in different amounts. While India is now 3 rd on the case count list globally, it’s still very low on the fraction of population that has been infected. For every million citizens, 616 citizens have been infected in India. For the US, that number is 10,126. Brazil is at 8,658; Sweden at 7,415; UK at 4,256; Italy at 4,016; Germany at 2,385… you get the drift. Does this mean things are going to get a whole lot worse in India? Or does ...

What’s the outcome of the Galwan standoff? In the immediate now, China has obviously come out on top. But the longer-term outcome is far more murky. The banning of Chinese apps, taken at face value, hardly meant anything, beyond hitting the profits of Tik Tok. But has it set India thinking more concretely along certain new lines, wonders the Deccan Herald : “It has also signalled that it is willing to bear economic costs with its decisions to keep Chinese companies out of government contracts, infrastructure and critical strategic sectors.” A significantly lower share of the largest growing economy in the world (other than China itself) will hurt China. Or are the Chinese hoping that the cost advantage of Chinese companies can’t be wished away? Or will India, if more such incidents happen, take that plunge anyway? Can China be sure of what India may or may not do on the economic front? On a bigger scale, did China push once too often in its territorial disputes? Conside...

The scientist, Robert Boyle, is famous for the gas law named after him. But he contributed to far more things in science, writes Paul Strathern in his wonderful history of chemistry, Mendeleyev’s Dream . For starters, he revived the atomic theory. Almost everyone agreed that that since gases could be compressed (without any increase in their weight), it implied that “gases consisted of particles separated by a void”. Boyle extended the reasoning as follows: the “particles separated by a void” principle should apply to water vapour, a gas. Therefore, shouldn’t the same principle apply to water in liquid and solid states as well? And if it applied to water in all states, shouldn’t it apply to all substances? And thus was revived the atomic theory. Boyle also defined what an element is: anything that could not be broken down into a simpler substance. But this definition had a problem: “When a substance was found to be an element, this could only be a provisional state of affa...

This summer vacation, we subscribed to this online course called Logiqids for our 8 yo daughter. It’s about developing logical thinking, and they provide online worksheets, each with 10 multiple-choice questions. The format and the skills it helps develop all reminded me of those IIM entrance papers back when I was at college… The site offers the option to download the worksheet, solve it offline, and then submit the answers online. That’s the option she uses. Of late, I let her solve it herself, then we go over her answers (or questions she couldn’t solve), before submitting them. There was this one question she did that both impressed me and annoyed me. I was impressed because it was complex ( X is 10 years older than Y; Y is 6 years younger than Z; Z is 18, so how old is X? ), and yet she had identified the way to solve it (the right additions and subtractions) correctly. But I was annoyed she’d done the calculations wrong. She got the hard part right, but had messed u...

“Light years”. It is one of those highly misleading units in science. It suggests we are talking about time: light years . Instead, it is a unit for distance: the distance light would travel in those years . Why come up with such misleading names, right? Except in one scenario, where it is the perfect unit, as I discovered while reading Cixin Liu’s sci-fi novel, The Dark Forest where mankind makes contact with an alien civilization. But it is not human-to-alien contact, but radio contact (radio signals sent into space). Now the distance between the human and alien is stated in (what else?) light years. The aliens then decide to come to earth. But of course, they can’t travel at the speed of light, which means it would take them centuries to get here. See why it is the perfect unit now? All we want to know is how long it will take them to get here. After all, if the aliens are hostile, surely having centuries to prepare for their arrival is a good thing, right? And if they’...

The standoff between the Indian and Chinese armies over disputes over territory, which in turn led to the killing of 20 Indian soldiers is obviously a charged and emotive issue. The good news is that neither government is the least bit interested in all out war since they both subscribe to this line attributed to the Chinese leader from a generation back, Deng Xiaoping: “To get rich is glorious.” Economic growth and prosperity is paramount to both sides. Plus, of course, if China gets too beligerent, they risk India falling into America’s arms and the Chinese absolutely do not want the US on yet another one of their borders. So no, I don’t think there is any risk of a war here. That said, it is also clear that this won’t be the last standoff between the two countries. Simply because the border is too long and there are far too many stretches that are disputed by one or both sides: it’s not just Arunachal and Kashmir, there are plenty of areas in between that are disputed too...