Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Simon Winchester’s book on the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is quite interesting. Since the topic of the book doesn’t exactly sound like riveting material, Winchester decided to narrate it with emphasis on one particular aspect, the one with the most masala in it.   The editor of the OED, Dr. James Murray was keen to meet one of the prolific volunteer contributors to the effort, one Dr W.C. Minor. While they’d corresponded over 20 years of effort, the two had never met! If the mountain will not come to Mohammed, then Mohammed would go to the mountain. And so Dr. Murray got on a train from Oxford, got off at Crowthorne Station, and took a carriage to the address, a mental asylum. He met the governor and requested a meeting with one of the doctors who worked there, his contributor.   The governor’s answer stunned Murray: “Dr. Minor is most certainly here. But he is an inmate. He has been a patient here for more than twenty years. He is our longest-serving res

The weekend basketball class for kids in our apartment soared in popularity during COVID-19. Initially it was because it became the one venue where enough kids would turn up – back then, not too many kids would come down to play in the evening. But the bigger reason was that it provided some exercise – parents could see their always-at-home kids were ballooning up by endlessly munching and watching TV/streaming channels all day. Kids as young as 5-6, who can barely toss the ball a few feet above their heads, are being sent to the class! The coach has smartly adapted these classes to try and ensure the kids move around, exert themselves, and last and definitely least, even learn to throw the ball in the general direction of the target. The first thing he has them do in class is to take do a lap of the complex – no, the aim isn’t to warm up; rather, it is to ensure the kids tire themselves a bit. He tried incentivizing things by offering chocolates to the first few to cross the line. Of

As reigning world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen, is getting ready for his title defence, San Ingle mentions something very interesting he said: “The biggest advantage is that I am the better chess player… Having said that… there’s a famous quote: It’s not enough to be a good chess player. You also have to play well.”   Since Carlsen has an excellent record in tiebreaks (if the main series of games ends in a tie, they play rapid games), Ingle asked whether he intended to aim for “a thumping victory, or is he prepared to win ugly?”. Carlsen’s answer: “I am happy to win in any way possible. I’m somebody who puts more emphasis on the sporting aspects of chess than the artistic. And even more so during world championship matches. It’s about getting results.”   Carlsen’s focus on winning, with artistry relegated as a good-to-have, not a must-have, reminded me of something I read in the autobiography of tennis great Andre Agassi titled Open . Agassi, of course, was an artist – s

In his terrific book on the impact of software on the world, Coders , Clive Thompson points out that: “In recent years, a welter of computer languages aimed at children – like MIT’s popular Scratch language – and initiatives like Hour of Code and robotics competitions (have sprung up).”   In the US, privacy concerns have hit even such for-kids options. In Chicago, for example, public schools suddenly found the plug pulled on many such popular options because, hey, they violated some students online protection laws. “Among the software products that violate the law, CPS (Chicago Public Schools) now says, are programs like Code.org, which is widely used in computer science classes, and Adobe applications used for artistic design and newspaper page layouts. That left has many high school newspapers unable to produce their print editions. Also off limits is Scratch, software to create interactive stores, animations and games.” Most for-kids languages these days work online, the

By definition, any statistical analysis is based on data. Setting aside genuine errors (wrong sample size, unrepresentative sample set, wrong questions asked), Tim Harford talks at length about the problem of data used by governments, in his book, How to Make the World Add Up .   As we know all too well, data can be misleading, even without malice. With governments though, the danger of such wrong data is enormous: “It’s one thing to be wrong… (but) because the state is powerful, its misperceptions of the world often take physical form, producing well-meaning but clumsy and oppressive schemes.”   But of course, with governments, the problem is worse. They often pressurize agencies to come up with data that suits them. I’ll avoid such examples from India since that just becomes a political discussion in no time.   Independent agencies are not a magic bullet that solves the problem: “(Independent) official agencies often get them wrong… (just that) they don’t make politic

The Modi government caved in and announced the repeal of the farm laws, “a game in farmland corporatisation”, as Jagdish Rattanani termed it. Some were happy for the reason Pratap Bhanu Mehta mentions : “The movement has forced the government to, uncharacteristically, eat humble pie.” Is this a sign of the tide (finally?) turning, wonders Mehta: “It emboldens civil society and social movements. This government has pretty much had a free run in containing or suppressing social movements.”   Or one could wonder if the BJP is just making a strategic retreat based on its bigger picture calculations (staying in power), points out Rattanani: “The action comes close to key state elections in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab… New allies are waiting but won’t shake hands till the hated laws are out of the way.”   Or should we not be extrapolating this one topic, as Ashok Gulati says . Should this be looked at as one issue only – farming reforms? Perhaps there is merit to both sides, h

Yet another wave of COVID-19 is slamming into Europe. “The spread of the more infectious Delta variant, an increase in communal activity, a return to the workplace and a sluggish rollout of booster vaccines, which are recommended six months after the second jab, have been blamed for the increase in infections.” No wonder then that patience among the vaccinated majority wrt the unvaccinated “holdouts” has begun to run thin.   In Austria , for example, 65% are vaccinated. Until recently, the unvaccinated weren’t allowed into restaurants and cinemas. Now they won’t be allowed to step out of their homes. Except to go to work or buying food. Huh? Won’t every unvaccinated person who gets “caught” outside claim he was going for one of those activities?! In any case, protestors say such moves are unconstitutional, and there are placards saying, “Our bodies, our freedom to decide”.   Germany ’s vaccination rate is practically the same as Austria, at 67%. As cases spike, their sit

The bar code. There on almost every product. Here’s a sample for what follows: Officially, it’s called the Universal Product Code (UPC), writes Charles Petzold in Code : “In its most common form, the UPC is a collection of 30 vertical black bars of various widths, divided by gaps of various widths, along with some digits.”   If it’s just a series of bits (1’s and 0’s), why is it so large then? “To give the checkout person something to aim the scanner at.” Each line is read as a 1. A thicker line conveys multiple 1’s, proportional to the thickness of the line. Each white gap is a 0, and a thicker gap conveys multiple o’s, again proportional to the thickness of the gap.   The left-most and right-most are always 101, and called the guard patterns: “It allows the computer-scanning device to get oriented.” Those guard patterns also tell the scanning device how thick a 1-line is, and how thick a 0-gap is: “Otherwise, the UPC would have to be a specific size on all packa

IPO’s are big news these days. The Nykaa IPO just made Falguni Nayar India’s richest self-made woman billionaire, at $6-7 billion. Even a loss-making delivery app like Zomato listed on the stock exchange at a price that made it more valuable than the entire hospitality sector ! The Policy Bazaar and PayTM IPO’s are other mega-valuations in the pipeline for loss-making companies.   On that point of loss-making companies with huge valuations (Nykaa is an exception on that front), Santosh Desai had written that Zomato made some wonder if the market “had lost all touch with and indeed interest in, reality”. It feels surreal: “ The apparently breezy efforts of some young kids out of college who not only are able to raise funds of a scale that boggle the imagination, lose money extravagantly and still generate staggering valuations, all in the blink of an eye. It does seem unfair.” Or is this a sign that many believe that such companies, while loss making today, will make a lot of m

My 10 yo daughter went back to school last week. After a year-and-a-half of COVID-19 imposed study-from-home regime. Some parents are still scared to send their kids; and the school bus isn’t operating either. As a result, in my daughter’s class, only 7-8 kids came this first week in a class of approx. 40.   Not surprisingly, kids have forgotten a lot of “school etiquette”. One girl, for example, sauntered into class without remembering to ask for permission from the teacher. Unabashed, she then glanced at the teacher and said (believe it or not), “Sup?”. Here’s how Urban Dictionary defines the term: “Sup is something cool people say. It can be used as a greeting. People say "sup" when they don't feel like saying “what’s up” because it's too long .” Upon which a boy reminded her, “Bro, you forgot the hand gesture that goes with ‘Sup’”. This happened in English class. Sup, bro. I can imagine the teacher frothing at the mouth…   Another time, between c

An Indian student from Pune named Siddhesh jotted down his initial observations about the US where he has gone for higher studies: “To be fair, I haven’t experienced any culture “shock” per se. Exposure to tons of American pop culture and the internet helped make sense of a lot of things. But there have been plenty of surprises - some hilarious, some puzzling, some impressive.”   His first comment is about the “bigness” of everything: “Every single thing here is at least twenty percent bigger than it is in India: street widths, road signs, cars, people, footpaths, beverage sizes, houses, wall posters, general equipment, food servings, lawns.” On the language front, he writes: “Spanish seems to be almost sort of like a second official language here.”   After a lifetime of Indian beverages, not surprisingly, he says: “I have to say this - for a country this obsessed with coffee, the cappuccinos really aren’t that good.” The absence of neighborhood shops takes time to

Anne Duke wrote this book called Thinking in Bets , that made me look at the phrase “Wanna bet?” in a very different way: “Suddenly, you’re not so sure… Ideally it triggers us to vet our belief.” How do I know this? What is the reliability of my source? Is my information upto date? What could I be missing?...   Here’s how we’re wired to form our beliefs: (1) Hear something, (2) Believe it by default (unless it’s outrageous or contradicts what we already believe), (3) Only occasionally, check whether it is true or not: “`Wanna bet?’ triggers us to engage in that third step that we only sometimes get to.”   Duke is a (very good) poker player, an area where betting is, er, the whole point of the game. The feedback in poker is not like physics or chess. You could make all the right moves and still lose. There’s luck involved, there are factors you weren’t aware of, a beginner could beat a master… just like life.   This makes it very hard to know what to learn from a loss

I was reading this article by Andy Mukherjee about the upcoming PayTM IPO, from which I learnt several interesting things. The focus of this blog though is about one aspect only – how critical the underlying UPI technology layer is, and the importance of government policies wrt the same.   Just 5 years back, there was no UPI. Which meant a company like PayTM had a lot to do – create the technology for digital money transfer, convince shopkeepers to accept it, and convince customers to use it. Worst of all? Banks weren’t going to be on its platform on Day 1, and they would only join (if at all) one at a time. Hence, a customer would have to “load” money onto the PayTM app, which would then transfer it to the shopkeeper. This created the nuisance that having loaded some money, one had to find a way to use it. On the other side of the transaction, shopkeepers would get their money from PayTM periodically, not immediately. Not an appealing proposition for them. No wonder digital payme

Shivshankar Menon’s book, Choices , talks of India’s decision to not go to war after the 26/11 Mumbai attack. That chapter of his book isn’t very satisfying; but I guess that’s inevitable due to the very nature of the problem called Pakistan.   The option of going to war was considered, writes Menon. And dismissed. First, he said, war would have converted 26/11 into “just another India-Pakistan dispute” in global eyes. External powers (US, China) would have forced an early stop to the war and India would have achieved nothing. Second, even a limited “surgical strike” at LeT facilities would have been pointless – their key cadre would have been evacuated long before, and worse, their facilities were deliberately built in densely populated civilian areas, and one knows how the Western press would have painted any such casualties. But more importantly, even such a strike would achieve nothing in the bigger scheme of things – Pakistan would continue to sponsor, train and send in more

In his book on the road to quantum computing , John Gribbin made this remark about the multiverse: “In (David) Deutsch’s words, ‘all fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.’ So all of Jane Austen’s stories recount real events in parallel realities to our own; but The Lord of the Rings does not.” By that token, many things Calvin did in Bill Watterson’s books must happen some parallel universe. Or worse…   Calvin, like all boys his age, found girls repulsive. This 8 yo friend of my 10 yo daughter announced that she and a similar aged boy were now a couple. The older girls made fun of her singing the same K-I-S-S-I-N-G song Hobbes is singing above. The 8 yo brazenly said she didn’t care, and romped around holding hands with her “boyfriend”.   Kids are notorious for drawing totally wrong + self-serving conclusions: We have 2 car park slots, and had rented one of them to a neighbor. During play, their kid announced that since his car was in the slot, it me