Viswanathan K's Thoughts

One day, over lunch, my wife and I were talking of Star Trek . When my 9 yo daughter insisted on being part of the conversation, the topic became how so many things we take for granted today were considered were futuristic/hi-fi when Star Trek was made. Like sliding doors, walkie talkies , computers that could speak and answer your questions.   Continuing in that vein, she couldn’t believe that we had lived through the dark ages before the Internet, Wi-fi and smartphones had been invented. I could almost see her wondering if this strip spoke the truth after all: And it’s not just in technological aspects that things have improved overwhelmingly over the ages, writes Kevin Kelly. He starts by asking the reader a hypothetical question: “I give you a ride in a time machine. It has only one lever. You can choose to go forward in time, or backwards. All trips are one-way. Whenever you arrive, you arrive as a newborn baby.  Where you land is random, and...

Digital currencies like Bitcoin have been around for many years. But they’re all unofficial currencies, i.e., they’ve never been issued by any government. China has now initiated “large scale internal testing” of a digital wallet app, “moving a step closer to the official launch of the world's first sovereign digital currency”.   I found this interview with Qu Qiang and Edgar Perez quite informative on the topic. First, what difference does make if a digital currency is government issued or something like Bitcoin? Well, for one, it becomes legal currency. Which means it can be used for everything, not limited to situations where the buyer and seller are willing to trade Bitcoins. Plus: “The money will be anchored to the nation's credibility.” Remember how Bitcoin exchange rate against physical currencies has fluctuated like crazy at times? That’s not a very attractive feature for any currency. Whereas a government would be incentivized to keep its own digital currency ...

Ed Yong wrotes this excellent article explaining how the immune system works. First up, keep in mind that the word “immunity” means different things to different people. To the layman, it means “protected from”. To the immunologist, it just means the “immune system has responded to a pathogen”.   There are three phases to it. Phase 1 is called the “innate immune system”: “(The body sounds) alarms, summoning and activating a diverse squad of white blood cells that go to town on the intruding viruses—swallowing and digesting them, bombarding them with destructive chemicals, and releasing yet more cytokines. Some also directly prevent viruses from reproducing.” This part happens practically instantly, it’s ancient “technology” shared with most other animals, and is the same for almost every person. As you noticed, it doesn’t care about the details of the invader (non-human = dangerous): “What the innate immune system lacks in precision, it makes up for in speed.” Redness,...

In an earlier blog , I went over the history of TikTok. If all the app does is show you short videos of the kind you like, why is it suddenly in the cross-hairs of the Indian and American governments?   First off, pretty much every app tracks your whereabouts, collects data and who knows what else on your phone. We don’t worry too much about that when the app is by a company with no great skills at mining large data or proven machine learning capabilities. But when the algorithm is as great as TikTok’s, it makes people (and increasingly governments) wonder what other algorithms the company may be using… Or as Eugene Wei puts it: “I like to say that “when you gaze into TikTok, TikTok gazes into you.”   Ok, but don’t Facebook and Google do the same with data, “vacuuming up as much as it can”? Why pick only the Chinese app? Yes, but that’s where the image of the US and China differ, writes Ben Thompson: “All Chinese Internet companies are compelled by the country’s ...

The video sharing/watching app TikTok is all in the news of late. First, India banned the app following Galwan. And then the US is forcing it to either sell off or get out of the US market. So what is the story of TikTok?   Eugene Wei wrote this excellent history of the app. In 2014, the app started off in Shanghai as an “educational short-form video app”! It was a big flop. It was rebranded as Musical.ly, an app to “lip-synch music videos”, and went to the US: “Finally, an app offered users the chance to lip synch to the official version of popular songs and have those videos distributed to an audience for social feedback.” But “there are only so many teenage girls in the U.S.”, and thus, after some time, growth flattened out. At which point they were bought by Bytedance, a Chinese tech company, for $1 billion. Who rebranded it as TikTok.   Bytedance did 2 things to make TikTok the phenomenon it is. First, they spent a lot of money to get users for the app. Secon...

Starting from 1979, China’s changed in policy to focus on economic growth rather than ideology, a stance famously captured in Deng Xiaoping’s quote: “It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.” Sure, the CCP (Communist Party of China) still maintains controls with an iron fist. Sure, they still tightly control what topics cannot be spoken about. Sure, they built the Great Firewall of China to control information flow via the Internet. But all that’s about staying in power, not about ideology.   Ironically, it’s the US that focuses on ideology! No, I am not talking about their wars against communism during the Cold War era because those were understandable. Rather, I am talking about the Iraq war which was as much as about those non-existent Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction as it was about the Bush-Cheney idea that toppling Saddam (and later Gaddafi) would set off the spread of democracy in the Middle East.   Being from a country t...

Janine Benyus wrote her book on “innovation inspired from nature”, Biomimicry , in 1997. The year I graduated. At one point, she lists all the things computers couldn’t do at that time: 1)     “Instead of typing into them, we would simply show them things…” Today, your phone can be unlocked by looking at it. You show something that interests you to Google Lens and it can do a reasonably decent job of pulling up info about it. 2)    “…or they would notice for themselves.” The lights in smart homes can turn on when you step in. 3)    “They would be able to answer not just yes or no…” Siri. Alexa. OK Google. We’re spolit for choices. 4)    “Spotting someone who looks familiar, they would venture a fuzzy guess as to the person’s name…” Facebook does it so well it’s almost creepy. Be careful what you wish for… 5)    “As they got older, they’d get wiser.” This is debatable even for humans. But sure, as computers get ev...

Amazon’s founder and boss, Jeff Bezos spoke in front of a US government hearing on an increasingly common topic: are the top tech companies in the US too big, monolpolistic, and thus bad for the custome r? Given that backdrop, it isn’t surprising that Bezos’ speech to the US government is filled with all the good Amazon brings to customers, its schemes for employees, and all the employment it creates. But dismiss all of that, and there’s still lots of interesting stuff left over in his speech.   Humility isn’t a Bezos characteristic, because he starts with: “I founded Amazon 26 years ago with the long-term mission of making it Earth’s most customer-centric company.” Unlike most of the huge tech companies that were founded by college dropouts (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs) or kids still at college (the Google guys), Bezos had a well-paying job when he decided to form an online bookstore on this thing called the “internet”: “When I told my boss I was leaving, he took me on a lo...

  Sometimes, when we don’t have change, we borrow the money from my 9 yo daugther. One time this happened, her friend was in the room, and told her, “Ask them to return it with interest ”. Talk about corrputing influences… Since my daughter still doesn’t know what “interest” is, I thought I’d fill her in. Later that day, I drew it up on a whiteboard. “Why would you put your money in a bank?”, I asked rhetorically, “Not just for safety, but also because they give you back something extra, something more than what you put in”. She was very interested (pun intended). “What do you think the bank does with your money?”, I asked. I had her undivided attention now, “You mean they do something other than keeping it safely?” . “Yes”, I said, “they lend it to other people”. “What?”, she was alarmed, “They give my money to others?” “Not ‘give’, they ‘lend’”, I repeated. Lending implied getting it back, but she was still not thrilled with this idea. I explained that when she deposits ₹1...

This book I bought for my daughter, The Bacteria Book , said that the an E. coli bacteria cell divides into two every 20 minutes. If there’s enough food: “After 12 hours, one bacteria cell can grow and divide into 70 billion.” Whoa! How short is their life if they reproduce like this, I thought.   But I’d forgotten nature is red in tooth and claw. The point was brought home in Carl Zimmer’s (very) short book, Rabbits with Horns and Other Astounding Viruses , where he wrote: “Marine viruses are powerful because they are so infectious. They invade a new microbe host ten trillion times a second, and every day they kill about half of all bacteria in the world’s oceans. Their lethal efficiency keeps their hosts in check.” Take cholera, a water-borne disease caused by the bacteria named Vibrio : “Vibrio are host to a number of phages (viruses that kill bacteria). When the population of Vibrio explodes and causes a cholera epidemic, the phages multiply. The virus population...

Ben Thompson wrote this excellent article on the different models of the Internet, and the economic impact of those models: US model of practically no regulations, that has in turn kickstarted the Internet in the US now to all the top Internet companies being American; China model of maintaining tight control over content, which required locking out Google, Facebook, Amazon etc, and in turn forced China to come up with their own versions of each of those companies; EU model of regulation around data privacy impacts the existing players but also means new EU based players can’t come up easily (too many regulations!), what Thompson calls the “worst of all possible outcomes”; (And this was the surprise) the emerging India model. But first, some context. India, he says, has given unfettered access to digital goods, but “kept a much tighter leash when it comes to the physical layer of tech”, ergo the ban on FDI in e-commerce and high tarriffs on electronic goods. As the US and Ch...

Thanks to the new normal that is COVID-19, my 8 yo daughter had to make new friends (The parents of her old friends weren’t willing to let them play together). As it turned out, her new friend is a kid who goes to an international school (of the real “international” variety: different sylabbus, iPads instead of books, and hi-fi facilities). Therein lies a tale. I soon realized her   old gang of friends was responsible for her English being cringe-worthy (“Off the light” instead of “Switch off the light” being the worst offender). Because the international kid has caused her spoken English to improve by leaps and bounds in such a short interval. The ultimate proof? My daughter can spew insults in English… Her Computer Science teacher has this horrible practice of having them write half the answers in the text book, the rest in the note book (I hate it because it means I have to switch books when making her study) . So I told her that I’d copy the stuff onto her text book ...