Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Once we have GPS co-ordinates for every place, you know where every place is, right? Wrong, writes Greg Milner in his book, Pinpoint : “Those GPS coordinates do not mean much to us without a map on which to peg them.” Huh? The maps of the world, regional or global, are called Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Combining GPS with GIS is not one bit easy, rather it is a “creative merger of computer science, cartography, and database management! But why should that be the case?   Map making has historically involved a method calling triangulation. Like the name suggests, it involves measuring triangles and laying them next to each other. An alternate method is to find the latitude and longitude of a place using astronomy. Ideally, the triangulation and astronomical methods should match. Except they don’t. Why? Because the earth isn’t a perfectly shaped ellipsoid. Rather, as it is a “complicated potato shape”. Therefore, to make the two methods align: “The early land surve...

When someone says “blitzkrieg”, we immediately think of the Germans in World War II. But do you know who came up with the concept of blitzkrieg and when? The surprising answer: the British in 1916!   Tim Harford explains it all in his wonderful podcast . In 1916, Major JFC Fuller of the British Army saw a demo of the tank and realized this was the solution to the problem of World War I: how to get through the mud, trenches and barbed wire under a hail of machine gun fire? He wrote a paper spelling out how tanks could go deep behind enemy lines at a fast pace. Aided by air fire, they could create confusion and chaos in the enemy camp. It was called “Plan 1919”. As we know all too well, Plan 1919 was never put in action. Rather, it was put in action… but 20 years later... and by the Germans to run across Europe in weeks.   This is a pattern that seems to repeat itself, says Harford. Xerox, the huge photocopying machine maker in the 70’s, invented the personal computer, G...

The term “virus” comes from Latin for “poison, sap of plants, slimy liquid”. A non-living thing, in other words, writes David Quammen in Spillover . Evidence to the contrary came not from medicine but from agronomy!   The tobacco mosaic disease had hit tobacco production. It was transferrable via the sap. Filter the sap using filters through which bacteria can’t pass. No effect. The filtered sap could still spread the disease. This thing was tinier than bacteria.   A Dutch researcher, Martinus Beijerinck diluted the sap, and then infected another plant even with that diluted dose. Weirdly: “Whatever it was, (it) regained its full strength even after dilution.” That meant it was “reproducing itself”. No poison can do that. No by-product of a bacteria can do that. This was something else.   Trial and error yielded new information: “In a container of filtered sap alone, it wouldn’t grow.” Which meant it wasn’t feeding on the sap: “It needed something e...

GPS. Something the US military created. And something that makes navigation via Google Maps possible. That’s how I thought of it. That’s so much the norm that Greg Milner writes in his book, Pinpoint : “In the age of GPS, we don’t require the environment to locate ourselves.” Who needs landmarks when you have GPS to tell you where you are?!   The idea of GPS was conceptualized when the Soviets launched the first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. To prove they had really done it, the Russians put an on-board transmitter. Check the strength, movement and pattern of the signal, they said. It could only come from something in orbit. Two American scientists, William Guier and George Weiffenbach, flipped that point around and realized that the satellite could detect the position on land by the same principle. In theory.   To achieve it in practice, GPS needed multiple satellites. And to make GPS accurate at the level we take for granted, “the clocks cannot falter”: “A timin...

Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, two traveller writers of the ancient age, with diametrically styles and views on regions they visited. The former, a Genoese Christian; the latter a Muslim. But the reason for the difference in their attitudes didn’t lie in their religion per se : rather, it lay in who was in power back then, writes William Bernstein in his book on trade, A Splendid Exchange .   With the rise of Islam, the trade routes from India and China to the West fell entirely under Muslim control. The Europeans were literally locked out. Ibn Battuta, being a Muslim and thus a part of the power of the age, thus behaved like a “surly Western package tourist”: he complained about the food, the quality of hotels and the fact that the locals cheated him during his visit to China. So unhappy was Battuta in China that he didn’t even appreciate the Chinese invention of paper money. Like the “archetypal American”, he was instead exasperated by the “funny money” of China: why don’t they ...

What led to the insurrection in Washington DC? There are many in the US who believe that Trump’s supporters know their guy lost and yet refuse to accept the result. But I suspect that’s too simplistic. Rather, I think Andrew Sullivan gets it right . The legitimacy of the electoral process, he writes, has been hammered away, bit by bit, over a period of… decades!   It started off with close elections that were then pursued via the right channels. When Bush won in 2000, the narrowness of the victory meant that it had to be decided by the Supreme Court. In 2004, there was a “nasty spat over counting Ohio’s Electoral College votes”. That “spat” was limited to their parliament, not the streets.   Then came the result of 2016 when Trump’s win stunned everyone: “In 2016… many, many Democrats kept insisting that the election had somehow been rigged by the Russian government, in collusion with the Trump campaign, and the US media went on to beclown itself with innuendo, rumo...

Fredrik de Boer wrote this anguished piece in the aftermath of the insurrection in the US to overturn an election that Trump lost. While he condemns the levels to which Trump and his supporters will go, his article was more about “my despair over the response from the left”. He wasn’t talking of the American left’s reaction to the rioting in particular, but what the left seems to have become.   The left, he says, seems to be only interested in identifying injustices: “I sometimes wonder if people understand that there is more to politics than saying “this is wrong.” But they show no interest in proposing solutions: “Proposing meaningful solutions is much more fraught. Solutions are hard. Solutions are messy. Solutions are inherently unsatisfying.”   The left demonizes all forms of power so much that they then have no option but to “constantly make appeals to the heavens because they believe, very deeply, that if you identify injustice often enough some cosmic ...

Remember those award ceremonies where the person on stage reads out the winner after opening an envelope? In 2016, at the Oscars, the winner of the best movie was called out wrongly on stage… and to millions on TV.   Tim Harford’s podcast explores how that happened. Far more importantly (and scarily), it cites the same pattern to be behind other far more disastrous events. And to top it off, that pattern had been pointed out by good old Galileo!   So what led to the Oscars gaffe? The Best Movie envelope had the name of a movie and an actress . Why the actress name? Because it was the wrong envelope! But wait, there’s more. The previous award had been for the Best Actress: this envelope was for that category. Wait a minute, wouldn’t the previous award not have been called out wrongly in that case? Aha, they kept duplicates of each envelope. It was the wrong duplicate that had been handed on stage. But why did they keep duplicates? As a safety measure, as a backup syst...

In an earlier blog , I talked of the rich country – poor country divide when it comes to getting the COVID-19 vaccine. In that, there was one chart on the number of doses pre-ordered per citizen for various countries. Here is a chart of the total number of doses ordered by countries, in decreasing order: It’s good to see India is 2 nd on the list. But did you notice the fourth row named COVAX? You’ve heard of EU, SAARC, ASEAN, but what is COVAX?   To answer that, you need some background. It doesn’t help if some countries get vaccinated while others don’t, because the virus will just spread again. While everyone understands that point, it is politically impossible for any country to care about other countries over themselves. Hence, COVAX : “It is the only truly global solution to this pandemic because it is the only effort to ensure that people in all corners of the world will get access to COVID-19 vaccines once they are available, regardless of their wealth.”   A...

We don’t seek out the views of people from fields totally different from the ones we know or like. I don’t mean opposing views, I am referring to views on topics we never give a second thought to . The odd time we do venture out, we often feel lost or find it uninteresting, which only makes us even more reluctant the next time around. But every now and then, one runs into a gem.   One such gem was this podcast with Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather, the ad agency. The man threw up so many provocative questions and interesting points of view that are food for thought. And his best point comes at the end of the interview (and this blog).   Yes, he’s an advertising man. Most of us look down upon advertising because, to paraphrase Sutherland, if you make something more attractive without changing anything about it, it feels like cheating. Sutherland counters by asking why then we don’t say that Tom Sawyer cheated when he made the chore of painting the ...

Alex Danco made a very interesting point about how technology is shifting us away from a world where we owned things to a world where we access things. As we demanded 24x7 access to all our content, sure enough, technological solutions propped up: “Everything under the hood just gets magic-ed away, and provided for us as a service. No files, no updates, no maintenance; just access.” We don’t buy music anymore, we stream it on our apps. Nobody buys maps because there’s Google Maps.   But that anytime, anywhere access comes with a price: “The more you can access, the less it’s yours.” Huh? Take Uber, for example. It has led many to stop driving their own cars: “You just push the Uber button and somebody comes and picks you up. But it’s also not funny, because we’ve all experienced the particularly modern frustration of seeing the Uber drive in the opposite direction, spin around 4 times, then cancel. Access feels like the real thing, until it’s taken away from you .”...

World over, many countries have approved one or the other COVID-19 vaccine. India too is doing dry runs to test the entire process end-to-end (transport, storage, delivery, crowd management). From Wikipedia : Now look at the map of the world based on the transmission of COVID-19, from WHO’s dashboard : Among the rich countries, there is a very high correlation between authorization of the vaccine and the fact that they’re in community transmission mode. The other thing you see in these maps is the rich-poor divide on the vaccine: This was expected, since the rich West had the ability and experience to do the research and trials and they’d obviously prioritize themselves; mRNA vaccines need between −80 and −60 °C for storage, so they’re not suited for poorer countries; (Notice South America and Africa, which despite being in community transmission mode, haven’t authorized vaccinations).   Approx. 10 billion doses have already been pre-ordered . Most vaccines need...

Did a rise in oxygen levels in the atmosphere lead to the rise of complex life forms? The question doesn’t make sense at first. We know life adapts to whatever is available. By that token, oxygen levels can at most be the backdrop for however life evolved, but surely they cannot be called a causative factor…   In case of oxygen though, things are very different, writes Nick Lane in his book named (what else?) Oxygen : “The most obvious basis for a causal link is energy production.” Huh? “Oxygen releases more energy from food than do sulphur, nitrogen or oxygen compounds acting as oxidants… The length of any food chain is determined by the amount of energy lost from one level of the chain to the next.”   Without oxygen, that efficiency is less than 10%. Put differently, it means each step of the chain gets only 10% of the previous step. Here is the key point: “Below a 1% threshold, there is not enough energy available to eke out a living.” Do the maths, and ...