Viswanathan K's Thoughts

After a certain age, some students feel terrified by exams. This goes far beyond the usual nervousness everyone experiences prior to an exam. But, being a subjective experience, how does know what a particular student is feeling? Conversely, has the pendulum of concern/compassion swung a bit too far nowadays?   Lisa Marchiano, a psychoanalyst, describes a student who’d experienced what she (the student) described as a panic attack during the first exam, but “successfully completed the first exam — and did okay on it”. And yet, that student didn’t take the second exam because she was afraid she’d have another panic attack. Marchiano tried telling the student that the fact that she had “pushed through the fear feelings” meant she could deal with it. “But I had a panic attack,” responded the student and did not budge. Marchiano asks the forbidden question: “I found myself wondering where she had learned that she ought not to be expected to tolerate ordinary distress or discomf...

I talked of the why-China is the origin of so many zoonotic diseases in recent times (SARS, bird flu,  COVID-19). The key point in those wet markets is the presence of live animals of multiple species, giving viruses opportunities to make the multiple hops across different species.   On the other hand, we haven’t seen zoonotic disease transfer from the temples of India and Buddhist countries, where monkeys are all over the place. They are so numerous, and come close to humans all the time. In his awesome book, Spillover , David Quammen writes of one such temple: “Thousands of bites, thousands of scratches, thousands of opportunities, and zero cases (anyway, zero reported cases) of humans sickened.” So why have no zoonotic diseases started off from those temples? Is it because there aren’t other species in close proximity (just monkeys and humans), which means the multiple hops can’t be made? Or is it because the monkeys aren’t under threat around these temples, which...

As part of the Anglosphere (the English-speaking world), I am acutely aware of the bias my sources of information (the paper, websites, books) creates: they’re all in English. If you don’t see what I mean, consider this: which Western country do you hear endless praise for in its handling of COVID-19? Is it New Zealand? Or Germany? Even though Germany is far bigger, shares borders with numerous countries, matters far more globally, and did more tests than almost anyone else in the West, we only hear of English-speaking New Zealand…   Consider this my humorous effort to get a different opinion. A Frenchman’s opinion. And one with views that one, er, doesn’t hear often. From Niccolo Soldo’s interview with Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, here are a few snippets.   The interview started with the usual complaint against the French, of “looking at you like a filthy peasant when you dare ask them a question in English”, and that the “French are the epitome of snobbery”. Gobry’s respo...

It takes time for the law to understand a scientific principle. We may take finger prints and DNA as cast in iron evidence today, but that takes time. Carl Zimmer talks about one such instance involving the famous actor, Charlie Chaplin, in his book on heredity, She has her Mother’s Laugh . A serial womanizer, Chaplin had an affair with Joan Berry, got bored with her, and dumped her for the next girl.   Berry, however, would not go away quietly. In 1943, she filed a paternity suit claiming that her in-the-womb baby was Chaplin’s and demanded he pay for the child’s upbringing. Back then, DNA comparison wasn’t an option, so lawyers tried an inherited trait as a test instead: the blood type.   At that time, scientists knew that the blood variant proteins (A, B and O) had certain characteristics: A and B both dominated over O. This implied certain patterns: if you got A from one parent and O from the other, you’d be an A. To be an O, you needed an O from both parents. Conv...

In their very short romp through history titled The Lessons of History , Will and Ariel Durant, start by flipping that famous quote and ask: “Is history “a fable” not quite “agreed upon”?” And on a related note, they ask: “As his studies come to a close, the historian faces the challenge: Of what use have your studies been? Have you found in your work only the amusement of recounting the rise and fall of nations and ideas?” Or: “Have you derived from history any illumination of our present condition, any guidance of our judgment and policies, any guards against the rebuffs of surprise or the vicissitudes of change?”   Some believe that history repeats itself. Others, like Mark Twain, believed that history rhymes, but doesn’t repeat. James Carse, in his book, Finite and Infinite Games , says there are other historians who believe that history can never be objective, that it is affected by the observer (Heisenberg would probably have agreed!). Carse then says: “The ...

What is it about Chinese markets that seems to unleash viruses on mankind? SARS, bird-flu, now COVID-19. No, this isn’t China-bashing. Spillover , David Quammen’s awesome book on inter-species disease transfer, looks into this question in the spirit of genuine curiosity. He cites a (true) point: “Southern Chinese have always noshed more widely through the animal kingdom than virtually any other peoples on earth.”   Quammen then cites major changes in those “wet markets” (animals for eating are alive in the market, killed only when you buy) between 1993 and 2003: The volume of wild-animal trade had increased enormously; Cross-border trade of animals with Southeast Asian countries had shot up; Commercial breeders had sprung up for species like snakes, civets etc. You can see where this is going. Like all such places across the developing/poor world, wet markets cram these animals in tiny spaces. Crates, one on top of the other. And remember, the animals are alive, whi...

In his awesome book on pathogens that jump species, Spillover , David Quammen has one section on how the process of identifying a pathogen proceeds. He uses the SARS breakout of 2003 as an example. When it went global starting at Hong Kong, he writes nobody knew what caused it, hence the name: “Ebola is a virus. Hendra is a virus. Nipah is a virus. SARS is a syndrome.”   Most tests in medical labs are designed in a particular way: “Such tests essentially give you a positive, negative, or approximated answer in response to a specific question: Is it this ? Finding an entirely new pathogen is more difficult. You can’t detect a microbe by its molecular signature until you know roughly what that signature is.” So when trying to identify a new pathogen, scientists try growing it in a culture and then peer at it through a microscope. Then they tried peering through an electron microscope, and thus realized it was a coronavirus, i.e., viral particles “encircled by a corona of k...

As a COVID-19 vaccine looks to be round the corner, how is the “race to roll it out everywhere” looking, asks Tim Harford. First up, he points out the worry that the tremendous desire to have a vaccine asap may be circumventing many of the checks and balances. Pfizer announced 97% effectiveness, not based on peer-reviewed data, but by a press release…   Is the world capable of manufacturing hundreds of millions of vaccines in a hurry? Some problems, like those glass vials predicted early, seem to have been solved. But others like dry ice (used to keep things cold, including food) are beginning to see a shortage. There are so many links in the chain, and it’s impossible to be sure every link can scale up.   On the cold storage aspect, don’t we already have systems for other vaccines like diphtheria, tetanus, TB, and polio? Yes, but: “The polio vaccine… needs to be kept at -20C, a temperature achievable by a domestic freezer. But the new Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine needs ...

In his book on how COVID-19 might (re)shape the world, Fareed Zakaria has a chapter on whether the epidemic is accelerating the rise of a new bipolar system. Even as America got bogged down by the war on terror, the Iraq war, the 2008 financial crisis, China grew and grew. And while China hid the COVID-19 danger for far too long, when they did launch into action, they got it under control (within China). On the other hand, America’s (mis)handling of the epidemic has been so hopeless that it has evoked a feeling that has rarely been directed towards America, as columnist Fintan O’Toole wrote: “There is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.” Some take all these as signs that China is going to take over the world even as America keeps fumbling.   On the other hand, as Zakaria points out, America is still the world’s largest economy. The world’s reserve currency is still the US dollar, which gives America the enormous advantage of printing m...

In the age of COVID-19, David Quammen’s 2012 book Spillover is beginning to be viewed as almost prophetic. The book is about the, er, spillover of diseases from animals to humans. The technical term for such inter-species diseases transfer is “zoonotic” . Such occurrences shouldn’t be surprising, he says: “Just as a lion might occasionally depart from its normal behaviour – to kill a cow instead of a wildebeest, a human instead of a zebra – so can a pathogen shift to a new target.” It’s just how nature operates. There are no rules: whatever works will happen.   The significance of zoonotic v/s non-zoonotic diseases in humans is this: “Zoonotic pathogens can hide (in other species).” Ergo, even if you eliminate it in all humans, it’s still out there (in other species). And so it can always come back, either as-is or with some mutation. This explains why we could eliminate smallpox: it is not a zoonotic pathogen. In other words, it had nowhere else (no other species) to...

In the last blog , we saw how to draw a maze on paper. It should be a lot easier on a computer, right? After all, so many video games from my childhood involved mazes: try and find a way out of the maze before the monsters/zombies/aliens caught you.   As you might have guessed, the tale of those video game mazes is far more interesting. A computer scientist decided to check out the source code of an Atari game called Entombed . Now keep in mind that memory was a severe constraint: “Although the blocky, two dimensional mazes from entombed might look simple by the standards of today’s computer graphics, in 1982 you couldn’t just design a set of mazes, store them in the game and later display them on-screen – there wasn’t enough memory on the game cartridges for something like that .”   And so, such games had to come up mazes on the fly, via an algorithm, instead of keeping them hard-coded in memory. Of course, this was a good thing because it meant no two mazes from t...

As a kid, I always wondered how one drew a maze. Then, as I started learning programming, the curiosity only increased. Could I write a program to generate a new maze each time? But that was the pre-Internet age, so they remained questions without answers.   And then recently, I read an article that reminded me of the topic again. But that’s part 2 of this blog. This one’s about the obvious-once-it’s-told answer to the first question of how to come up with a maze on paper.   Start, said the site , by drawing a square or rectangle. Punch 2 holes in it: they’ll be the entrance and exit points: Next, draw a similar shape within the above. Punch a few more holes at random places (you can punch more than 2): In fact, you can draw different shapes inside. Just make sure you punch 2 or more holes in each shape. Keep repeating and you’ll end up with something like the shape below. Now trace a path from entrance to the exit that you want to be the “solution”: Now start dra...

In Belgium, something had obviously gone wrong with an electronic voting machine: it was showing a mathematically impossible distribution of votes. The analysis of what had happened makes for an interesting podcast , as narrated by Simon Adler and Annie McEwen.   The experts were called in. They got all the ballots and reinserted and recounted them. The difference between the first and second count was 4096 votes. If you’re from a maths/computer science background, that number would be familiar. Yes, it 2 x 2 x 2… 13 times . I won’t get into how computer memory works, but suffice to say that the number mismatch (4096) is a hint that something had flipped (only) the 13 th bit of the vote count on that one machine.   The team tested the software. No bugs there. Then they checked the hardware on the machine. No issue there either. Ok, but if it’s not hardware or software, what are we left with to look at?!   Well, in theory a cosmic ray could flip a bit if it ...

Here’s how Carl Zimmer defines a scientific law in his awesome book on heredity, She has her Mother’s Laugh : “A scientific law predicts some aspect of the universe, usually with a short, sweet equation.” By that token, he says something almost blasphemous for a book on heredity: “The patterns (Mendel) saw wasn’t really a law.” Huh? Is it because Mendel’s Law doesn’t have a “short, sweet equation”? Nope: “(Other scientific laws) were as true thirteen billion years ago in the universe’s infancy as they are true today. Mendel’s law has far narrower boundaries.”   For example, take microbes: “None of them follow Mendel’s Law.” Why not? Two reasons. One, microbes reproduce via the parent splitting into two (children). Whereas Mendel’s Law describes heredity from two parents (aka “vertical inheritance”). Two, bizarre though it may sound: “(Microbes) can also inherit genes from unrelated microbes, through horizontal inheritance.”   Next, here’s a reminder tha...