Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Marcus Chown’s book, Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand , asks and answers many, many fascinating questions. I’ll mention a few of them here.   Why is there no pic of Neil Armstrong taking his famous “one small step for man”? The iconic photo of the moon landing, instead, is a pic of the other astronaut, Buzz Aldrin! How on earth moon could that have happened? Well, the camera was mounted on the astronaut’s chest and: “It had no viewfinder and they had to guess what was visible through the lens.” Unbelievable, right? But more problematically: “The surface of the moon poses unique challenges for photography.” It’s got to do with the fact that there’s no air on the moon. Yes, but what’s the connection? On earth, sunlight is scattered by the air, “softening its harshness” and “spreading it even into the shadow so they are not completely black”. On the moon, with no air: “A camera must contend with dazzling brightness alternating with utter blackness, the two zones separated

The understanding of DNA – its famous double helix structure, its 4-letter code (A, T, G, and C) – led to multiple fields of study in biology. Some biologists began to focus on code reading, i.e., how to make sense of the sequence of A, T, G and C’s. Others compared DNA sequences of species to identify how similar they were in molecular terms. Yet others used the predictable mutation rate of DNA as a “molecular clock” (if two species had X number of differences in parts of their DNA, then given the rate of mutation, one could calculate how long back the two species must have forked).   Another group became curious as to how the code (A, T, G and C) was translated into physical proteins. The answer? It involved something called a ribosome. Matt Ridley gave this metaphor a long while back: “The ribosome did not contain the recipe for the protein: it was a tape reader. It could make any protein as long as it was fed the right tape of “messenger” RNA (which in turn was based on the

When the vaccine was offered to hospital employees in India at the beginning of the year, many questioned whether it had been tested enough, and didn’t take it. After that, there were reports of many 60+ folks across the country not wanting to take it either. It was so easy to book a slot back then, even pick hospitals and dates! Today, everyone wants to get a shot but it’s so hard to get it…   The US is much worse than us on such behavioral matters. Remember the US was doing badly at the time the first vaccines became available. And yet, even then, there was a clear split along political party lines: one set was keen to take the vaccine, the other set was not keen. Even today, the US actually has to take measures to incentivize people to take the vaccine. For example, states like New York, Ohio, Maryland and Oregon have introduced (believe it or not) vaccine lotteries (if you take the vaccine, you get a lottery ticket, and a few lucky folks would win some prize). And then some loc

In one of his books, Nassim Nicolas Taleb wondered why it took so long to invent the suitcase with wheels? After all, he said, both the suitcase and the wheel had existed for long, so what took so long to put them together? He didn’t have the answer, which is why Anton Howes’ article caught my eye. Even better, the scope of his article was the generic question: why did so many such obviously simple yet useful inventions not come up much, much earlier? It’s not like they needed some other technology to be available first, or the use or need wasn’t evident.   But first, suitcase on wheels apart, a few other examples: “My favourite example is John Kay’s flying shuttle, one of the most famous inventions of the British Industrial Revolution. It radically increased the productivity of weaving in the 1730s, but involved simply attaching a little extra wood and string . It involved no new materials, was applied to the weaving of wool — England’s age-old industry — and required no specia

Bill Bryson’s awesome book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants , has a chapter titled “Food, Glorious Food”. It starts with the topic of calories: “We all know that if we consume too much beer and cake and pizza and cheeseburgers and all the other things that make life frankly worth living, we will add pounds to our bodies because we have taken in too many calories.” The weird thing about the unit we call ‘calorie’ in the context of food is that it’s really kilocalorie in physics lingo! That’s the amount of energy needed to heat 1 kg of water by 1˚ C: “But it seems safe to say that no one ever thinks of it in those terms when deciding what foods to eat.”   The father of the caloric measurement was Wilbur Atwater. He did his study at a time when people thought the only purpose of food was to give energy: “Nobody yet understood the concept of vitamins and minerals or even the need for a balanced diet.” Thus, he concluded wrongly that a pure meat diet was better than one with v

When a precious metal is used as currency (gold, silver), it creates a weird situation. The metal itself has a price (aka the price of gold or silver), which can fluctuate over time. But the value of the coin made from that same metal remains fixed: 10 rupees, 50 cents, whatever. Inevitably, there are periods where the price of the metal is higher than the value of the coin. When that happens, the following action is profitable: Melt the coin to get the metal. Then sell that melted metal for its market price. Put simply, melt a 10 rupee coin and get say, 11 rupees for the melted metal.   This has always been a problem with all metal-based currencies throughout history. But I didn’t realize it even happened in the 1950’s. Yemen found that its currency, the Rial, that was made of silver, was “disappearing from circulation”. Officials traced the disappearing coins to Aden, then a British colony. Even more specifically, the open orders to get as many Rials as possible came from an In

After Sulla, it was Julius Caesar who seized power in Rome. I wrote on that a few years back here and here . Tom Holland’s Rubicon has an excellent account on what happened next. Remember, Caesar himself had never declared himself a king, just “dictator for life” (Now you know where Calvin got that phrase!). That may sound like wordplay, but Caesar didn’t want to provoke a backlash: “Caesar knew that the Romans would never tolerate a King Julius.”   Besides, his experiences in the East and Egypt had taught him something else: “The forms taken by greatness were relative, varying from nation to nation.” Kings, pharaohs, dictators – those were just forms of power: “What mattered was not the form but the reality of power.” Just to be sure, Caesar tested the Roman waters anyway: “(Caesar) ostentatiously (and publicly) refused (Mark) Antony’s offer of a crown.” Antony repeated the offer publicly again and Caesar turned it down again. Firmly. That’s what Shakespeare talked

The year was 89 BC. General Sulla had put down a rebellion in the Roman province of Campania. The war hero came back to Rome and become counsel. He intended to use his consulship to “serve as the ticket to an even juicier prize”, writes Tom Holland in Rubicon . And what might that prize be? Command of the war over Mithridates, a rebel king on the eastern end of the Roman empire. Another war with the prospect of great riches and popularity...   But the Senate, as always, was a snake pit. Sulla, who got the Mithridatic command, joined his troops at the end of his consulship. Even before the war started, he found himself relieved of his post by the Senate! But the Senate had miscalculated: they’d driven Sulla “into a corner where there were six battle-hardened legions ready at hand”. They’d taken it for granted that Sulla wouldn’t do the unthinkable, namely use the Roman army as his private militia.   From Sulla’s perspective, he was justified. How could the Senate arbitrarily rel

(Ancient) Rome was unique. It didn’t have a king. Instead, it had a power sharing system with (1) a Senate for the upper classes, (2) another body for the lower classes (plebians) with lesser powers, (3) 2 counsels (heads of government) elected for a period of 1 year who then had to leave Rome on some assignment (this was to ensure the two most powerful men in Rome didn’t get to stay in town beyond their tenure), and (4) the provision to appointment a dictator in times of emergencies, but only for the duration of the emergency .   If you’re wondering why they had 2 counsels, it was for each to act as a check against the other becoming too powerful. Distribution of power, checks and balances, limited tenures, elections. Reminds one of modern-day governance systems, right? That is why Tom Holland says in his wonderful book, Rubicon : “We flatter ourselves, in the democracies of the West, as if we trace our roots back to Athens alone. We are, for better as well as ill, the heirs of

Over the past year, due to COVID-19, my 9 yo daughter has switched to a new group of friends in the apartment (One-line reason: You play with whoever comes down). As a result, her new group of friends is a motley collection of kids (at times, it even includes boys, something unimaginable in the pre-COVID era) in a wide-ranging age group of 7 to 15. And therein lie the origins of this blog.   The older kids know far better English and are good at, er, insulting. The younger ones, including my daughter, pick a bit of the English and all of the insults. And when we went into lockdown again, I got to experience everything she’d learnt. Terms of addressing like “bro”, “dude”, and the South Indian “ da ”. She used them tentatively with me at first (not “da” , the other two), testing the waters. But when I use those terms on her, she’ll snort: “Adults. Can’t use such words properly, and yet they won’t stop.”   Then there are those words which drive all parents up a wall. Yes, I am r

In his awesome book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants , Bill Bryson says that for a very long time, almost everything we knew of the stomach was due to an unfortunate accident in 1822. A rifle being examined went off accidentally tearing a hole in the lower chest of a bystander, Alexis St Martin. While the man survived, the wound never healed giving him the “most famous stomach in medical history”.   His doctor, William Beaumont, realized the inch-wide hole gave him an “unusual window” into his patient’s insides and a “direct access to his stomach”. Back then, nobody knew what happened to food once it went down the throat. So Beaumont would suspend different foods on lengths of silken thread into St Martin’s stomach, leave them for different time periods, then “pulling them out to see what had happened”.   At times, in the interest of science (of course): “(Beaumont) tasted the contents (of the extracted food) to judge their tartness and acidity, and by doing so deduced that

The Secret History of the Future podcast takes topics that feel like state-of-the-art today, and then shows you the parallels to anything from the distant past. The examples are usually unintuitive: who’d imagine driverless cars of today and the start of the automobile era a century ago bring up similar questions!   This blog is about an episode on the similarity between fingerprinting (been there for centuries) and DNA (far more recent) in the use of crime solving. Both are considered unique to an individual, and the judicial system treated both as clinching evidence in their heyday (Ok, DNA is still in its heyday).   That’s the problem, says the podcast. TV shows and movies have reinforced the belief that they are clinching evidence. But there were errors in matching fingerprint: 1 in 1,000 positive errors (called a match when it wasn’t really a match), and 1 in 20 negative errors (not called a match when it was really a match). Think about how many wrong convictions (or “

Freedom at Midnight does an awesome job of describing the events leading upto and following India’s independence and partition. By the time India became a Republic on 26 th January, 1950, writes Sanjeev Sanyal in Land of Seven Rivers : “India’s borders were recognizably like those that we know today.” The keyword there is “recognizably”.   Because there were still some things to wrap up, says Sanyal: “The Indian government now turned to the tiny enclaves along the coast held by other European powers.” France, for examples, still held 5 enclaves, as scattered as Pondicherry and Karaikal (on the TN coast), Chandannagar (north of Calcutta), Yanam (on the Andhra coast), and Mahe (on Kerala’s coast)! The French were reluctant to hand these over, but the writing was on the wall: their holdings were too tiny and too scattered. And so, unlike the brutal way they tried to hold on in Algeria and Vietnam, the French handed their 5 enclaves to India by 1954.   That now left the P