Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In The Subtle Art of not Giving a F*** , Mark Manson talks of a Japanese Second Lieutenant from World War II, Hiroo Onoda, who was told to defend Philippines, to “never surrender”. The Americans landed with “overwhelming force”, and  most of the Japanese soldiers got killed or surrendered. But Onoda and 3 of his men retreated into the jungle and continued the fight. For over 3o years .   He never got to know that Japan had surrendered! He disbelieved the pamphlets that the Americans, the Japanese and the Filipinos dropped over the years as lies and propaganda. Sound too crazy to be true? That’s exactly why Onoda became an urban legend in Japan: “The war hero who sounded too insane to actually exist.” Another Japanese, Norio Suzuki, went in search of Onoda, found him and convinced him the war was over. Onoda had no regrets: he had fought for a cause, he had followed orders. And so he returned to Japan. And boy, was he disappointed: “A consumerist, capitalist, superfic...

If you thought India is polarized, take a look at the US. Granted, it’s election season, and this isn’t a truly representative time, but still…   Just 18 minutes into the first Presidential debate, the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden got so fed up with the constant interruptions from Trump that he snapped: “Will you shut up, man.” Biden probably said that in the heat of the moment. But the kind of outpouring of support his remark got shows how polarized things are. For example, Jonathan Capehart wrote an opinion-piece in the Washington Post titled “Joe Biden spoke for millions when he told Trump to ‘shut up, man’”…   In normal times, we acknowledge many decisions are hard, with no right answers. Like dealing with COVID-19: benefits of lockdowns v/s economic cost to so many. But come election time, everyone gets into black and white mode : “Trump told attendees in Carson City that supporters of his opponent would surrender their “future to the virus,” saying: “H...

In the last blog , I went over one half of the China Ascendant book, the part of the inevitable dual purpose of most China’s policies wrt almost every other country -its attempts to create and secure trade and oil supply routes. All of which leads to the need to have connections to the Indian Ocean.   And that is where they run into India. Build a port and a corridor from the Arabian Sea in Pakistan, and it spooks India. When China tries to hedge its bets wrt Pakistan and hence tries to build an alternate corridor via Bangladesh instead, India feels encircled. Try to secure sea routes from Europe/Middle East to China, and India feels the Chinese Navy is getting too close to India. When China takes possession of that Sri Lankan port for failure to repay loans, China is suddenly right next door to India. South East Asian countries feel threatened by China’s expansionism. When India tries to get close to them with its Look East policy, China wonders if India’s approach is dual us...

Given the increasing and prolonged standoffs with China, I read this collection of articles by Indian analysts on a rising China named China Ascendant . Since it is an assorted collection, there’s no unifying theme to the book. On the upside, the same lack of theme allows for different, even contradictory, perspectives…   The key point that emerges is that China is flexing its muscles to become the next superpower. And India is caught in the middle of that rise. For most Indians, this is too emotive an issue to be able to see or acknowledge. So I’ll focus here on the parts that are not “aimed” at India. And loop back to India in the next blog.   Like it or not, China is viewed positively by many, many countries. Its model of “authoritarian capitalism” (i.e., no democracy) appeals in areas where democracy is not well established, from South America to even eastern Europe. And China fishes in troubled waters, like lending to Greece during the 2008 financial crisis, when ...

All that velcro-strapped stints on the treadmill can’t prevent the changes to an astronaut’s body, writes Chris Hadfield in “An Astronaut’s Guide…” : “Without gravity, we don’t need muscle or bone mass to support our own weight, which is what makes life in space so much fun but also inherently bad for the human body, long term.” Thus, when he returns to earth after months on the International Space Station: “My arms are so heavy I can barely lift them… It’s like being a newborn, the sudden overload of noise, color, smells and gravity, after months of quitely floating, encased in relative calm and isolation. No wonder babies cry in protest when they’re born.”   And the effect doesn’t go away… for months in his case (actually, its a one-to-one ratio between time in space and time to recover). Why? “After five months in space my body hasn’t just adapted to zero gravity, it has developed a whole new set of habits.” Walking is very painful: the legs find the weight of the body...

In “An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth” , Chris Hadfield says that unlike earlier times, when space trips were short, now they often last several months: “As the stints in space have gotten longer and longer, your temperament matters. Are you easy to get along with?” And you don’t get to pick your team-mates. So yes: “Sometime integration is not so easy, because we don’t get to pick our fellow travellers. It’s like a shotgun wedding.” When that happens, focus on building the wall with the bricks you have: “At some point, you just have to accept the people in your crew, stop wishing you were flying with Neil Armstrong, and start figuring out how your crewmates’ strengths and weaknesses mesh with your own.”   Why those months long space trips? To conduct experiments, fix and install things, and “help make space exploration safer”. So yes, a lot of work: “A lot of time the work isn’t glamarous, but that’s okay. The workplace itself is , after all, in a pretty great ...

The title of the book intrigued me: “An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth” . Apparently, it isn’t enough to be the guy who gets to “experience yee-haw personal thrills in space”; Chris Hadfield is also wise. And a great writer.   Hadfield points out the “ yee-haw personal thrills in space” can happen only if you go to space . And no, not all astronauts go to space: “Getting to space depends on many variables and circumstances that are entirely beyond an individual astronaut’s control, so it it always makes sense to me to view space flight as a bonus, not an entitlement.” Sure, you’re super fit and able to withstand all those G-forces, but a Challenger or Columbia- like disaster can put all programs on hold. Or the only vehicle that can dock with the ISS (International Space Station) is a Russian one whose restrictions on height that you, sadly, don’t meet.   Therefore, do any training without expectation of reward, he advises: “You can’t view training solely as...

In his self-help book, The Subtle Art of not Giving a F*** , Mark Manson describes two musicians who got kicked out of their music bands right when their unknown band was about to sign a record deal. This was a massive blow: “Record contracts don’t exactly fall out the sky, especially for raucous, upstart metal bands.”   The first guy decided to form a new band, one he hoped would be so successful that his old band would “forever regret their decision”: “He’d bathe in the tears of his betrayers, each tear wiped dry by a crisp, clean hundred-dollar bill.” He formed a new band, one that went onto become legendary with him as the guitarist. The band would sell over 25 million albums. Its name? Megadeth. The guitarist’s name? Dave Mustaine. So yes, Mustaine became hugely successful and rich. But not rich enough to “bathe in the tears of his betrayers”. Why not? “The band he was kicked out of was Metallica, which has sold over 180 million albums worldwide.” And so Mustai...

Fanfic. It’s a concept that’s become popular, thanks to the Internet: “A story written by a fan of a particular wordard/word (movie, book, tv show, video game, etc.), about the characters and world in that series, usually without the original creator's permission.”   Do you not approve? Well, that just makes you like those guys who were horrified by the printing press, writes Laurie Penny! “In the late 15th century, when printing technology first took off in the West and literacy became more common, the moral panic over ordinary unecclesiastical people being allowed to read, interpret, and have opinions about the Bible almost tore Europe apart.” Come to think of it, people have been writing fanfic for ages: “Fan fiction is, in a way, as old as literature itself.  Paradise Lost  was biblical fanfic; Dante's  Inferno  may well be the first self-insert fan story to make it into the Western canon.” And in more recent times, people wrote Star Trek fa...

  Latitudes are the (imaginary) lines running parallel to the equator. As Neil Armstrong wrote in his introduction to Dava Sobel’s book, Longitude : “(Early sea captains could measure latitude) by the elevation of the North Star above the horizon.” But knowing one’s longitude is a lot harder. Because longitudes don’t run parallel to each other, the distance between two longitudes isn’t the same everywhere.   In theory, the solution was simple, as Sobel explains: -        The earth takes 24 hours to rotate; or 24 hours maps to 360 degrees; and thus 1 hour maps to 15 degrees; -        In principle, here’s how one could then know one’s longitude: “Every day at sea, when the navigator sets his ship’s clock to local noon when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, and then consults the homeport clock, every hour’s discrepancy between them translates into another fifteen degrees of longitude.” In prac...

So we had the goldfishes . Next morning, it was time to feed them. Overfeed them and they will die, the pet shop guy had warned us. My daughter opened the lid, dropped the prescribed number of food pellets… and nothing happened. The fish wouldn’t come up and eat. After a few minutes, she was getting frantic. Perhaps they’re not used to the “system”, I said. Or us gawking at them. I told her to close the lid and move away from the tank. Sure enough, with the setup back to “normal”, they ate the food. I guess the lesson is to not make too many changes at the same time.   After lunch the same day, my daughter dipped her hand in the tank and expected the fishes to nibble away. Instead, they avoided her like toxic waste. Never the patient one, she got very frustrated. To make matters worse, the fishes in her friend’s house were apparently more, er, “friendly”. Our fish are boring, she declared. And we were only at Day 2 (sigh).   Over time, the fishes got used to things an...

When it comes to measurement, old data often turns to be wrong. But the reasons are not as obvious as might appear at first thought. But let’s get the obvious reason out of the way first: -        The length of the Spanish-Portuguese border was 987 km as per the former but 1,214 km as per the latter. Why? The size of the ruler used made the difference.   Ok, that reason’s trivially obvious, so let’s move onto more interesting reasons.   But if you thought the solution to the problem was to use a smaller ruler, that’s not always the answer either. Take the borders of countries like Britain or Norway: notice how they are not straight lines, rather they are broken and twisted? Ok, but doesn’t that just mean we need smaller rulers? At some point, the measured value would be close enough to the correct answer for all practical purposes, right? Aha, no, that won’t do because the term for such borders is one from maths: the borders are “fracta...

In his book on the future of AI (Artificial Intelligence), Life 3.0 , Max Tegmark talks of the importance of ensuring its goals are aligned with ours. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, warns Tegmark. Just think of King Midas: he got literally what he asked for, except that wasn’t what he wanted. Or all those stories where the genie grants three wishes, which almost inevitably end with the third wish being: “Please undo the first two wishes, because that’s not what I really wanted.” Be careful what you wish for: it might come true.   Put differently, this is the danger with an AI that takes our instructions literally:   “The real risk with AGI isn’t malice but competence.” So where does that leave us? “All these examples show that to figure out what people really want, you can’t merely go by what they say. You also need a detailed model of the world, including the many shared preferences that we tend to leave unstated because we consider them obvious, such as that ...