Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Steven Johnson’s book, Enemy of all Mankind , is about a British pirate who set off a world-changing set of events when he attacked and looted a ship that belonged to the Mughal emperor, Aurungzeb.   I learnt several new things about the Mughals, Aurungzeb and that age. First: “When a Mughal died, his power did not pass directly to the eldest son. Each male descendant was considered to have a legitimate claim to the throne.” Inevitably then: “The death of a Mughal was often immediately followed by an outbreak of royal fratricide, as the surviving sons battled one another…”   Also, from the time of Akbar onwards: “Sisters of the Grand Mughal (i.e., the emperor) were not allowed to marry for fear of producing offspring that might challenge the already fraught line of royal succession.”   Vicious, murderous moves. Pre-emptive moves. It was all par for the course when it came to succession – the stakes were that high, after all.   We hear a lot of...

In 1980, a philosopher named John Searle came up with a famous thought experiment called the Chinese Room experiment. It goes like this: “Searle imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he sends appropriate strings of Chinese characters back out under the door, and this leads those outside to mistakenly suppose there is a Chinese speaker in the room. ”   The narrow conclusion was that a digital computer could only appear to understand language, but it could never truly understand it. The broader conclusion was that the thought experiment disproved the idea that the mind was just a computing/analytical machine. Its implications thus fell into semantics, language, mind, consciousness, computer science and cognitive science.   Does Google’s Pathways Langu...

Andrey Mir wrote this interesting article on how and why American media has become so polarized. He starts from the very beginning. Once upon a time: “Since the revenue from copy sales was not sufficient to maintain news production, news outlets needed to attract advertising.” The dependence on ads for revenue had a side-effect – ads only made sense only when aimed at those who had money to buy! And so, the media’s market became the “buying audience—the affluent middle class”. It also led to another trend (most of the time, anyway): “If the audience was supposed to be affluent, mature, and capable, so, too, were journalists expected to avoid judgment when reporting.” The audience could be trusted to draw its own conclusions. And this lack of judgment by the media had an interesting side-effect: “All of this cooled the political activity of the public.”   And then the Internet came along. And suddenly the classified ads moved online (eBay, Craigslist) – the media outlets had lost a...

Reading the Hourly History biography of the German Field Marshal nicknamed the Desert Fox, aka Erwin Rommel, reminded me how complicated the time he lived in was, how messy wars are, and how complicated real life is.   Like many Germans, Rommel had felt betrayed by the German government that had surrendered in World War I. As Germany imploded under the weight of the harsh terms of the peace treaty, the government looked to its army brass to train folks “not as wartime soldiers but as a quickly assembled force of riot police”: “Instead of fighting glorious battles against foreign aggressors, Rommel now had to fight his own people.” Unhappy at the prospect of Germans shedding German blood, Rommel would often lean towards “negotiation than force” when dealing with internal mayhem.   In an increasingly dysfunctional republic, made worse by the Great Depression and runaway inflation, the possibility of German communists taking control grew larger. Rommel was horrified ...

In the Victorian era, the complexity of the eye was often cited as proof of “intelligent design”, that God had created the world (and living things). Bill Bryson, in his romp through the human body, aptly titled The Body: A Guide for Occupants , points out that: “It was an odd choice because the eye is really rather the reverse.”   First, it is “built back to front”: “The rods and cones that detect light are at the rear, but the blood vessels that keep it oxygenated are in front of them.” Even worse: “There are vessels and nerve fibres and other incidental detritus all over, and your eye has to see through all this.” And: “All the nerve fibres leave the eye via a single channel at the back, resulting in a blind spot… in our field of vision.”   If you’re wondering why we don’t see a “gap” in our field of view (corresponding to the blind spot), it’s because “your brain continually fills the void for you”. And since the blind spot is not exactly tiny, it leads...

The visit to Taiwan by the American Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has resulted in an (I loved this phrase from the Financial Express ) “overdrive of fire and brimstone” from China. That China considers Taiwan a breakaway province is well known. That the US considers Taiwan a quasi-independent entity that should not be forcibly occupied by China is equally well known. What then was the purpose of Pelosi’s visit?   That’s a question for which I’ve not heard any clear answer. When China protested and ranted as Pelosi’s visit approached, did the US find itself in a position where to back down from the visit would mean a loss of face, a signal to China of change in the power equation? Was the US forced to go through with the visit then?   But once Pelosi landed and left, the Chinese government found itself in a problem – it left them red-faced that she’d ignored their protests. Worse, so did a lot of Chinese citizens, who poured scorn on their country’s leadership for...

Long, long ago, when I was still at school, teachers didn’t just frown upon kids in the same school being boy/girlfriends, they actively tried to shoot it down. The intention was understandable – given how competitive the environment is, it’s best you focus on academics for now, and not get distracted by other things. There’s always time for all that after 12 th …   In today’s world though, one never knows what will go viral on WhatsApp/ Twitter/ Facebook if teachers did something like that. Freedom of choice. It’s his/her life. Stick to your job, i.e., teaching. Stop being the moral police…   I realized that when my 11 yo daughter mentioned that a boy in her class dropped a folded piece of paper accidentally. The teacher picked it up, opened it, found it was a love letter to a girl in the class, and read it aloud (I guess the teacher was not one of those who believed in asking the dreaded, rhetorical question – “Do you have something you’d like to share with the class...

On the one hand, one hears Joe Biden is too old, too sick, too unaware of what is going on. On the other hand, he himself has never indicated that he won’t run again for President. In a Western country, one would assume that his party supporters would ask for a different candidate next time.   But, as Andrew Sullivan wrote earlier, in a super-polarized America, with the prospect of Trump trying again to be President, Democrats are OK with anyone. Just not Trump. Even Biden for a second time.   The FBI raids on Trump’s home recently may have just added fuel to that fire, writes Sullivan. Did the FBI find what they were looking for? With no official word, it’s great for Trump: “Appropriate official silence allows him to flood the zone with his own bullshit, gin up his fevered base, and burnish his case for returning to power as a triumphant victim of the Deep State .”   Why didn’t Trump return the documents in question? Why did he resist the subpoena? With Tru...

Where do good ideas come from? This sounds impossible to answer. Don’t ideas come in a flash, a la the Eureka moment, the lightbulb moment? How can that be explained? Surprisingly, Steven Johnson’s book, Where Good Ideas Come From , argues that there are certain patterns to the origin of good ideas.   Take Charles Babbage, the man called the father of the modern-day computer. Sure, it was a great idea, but it took centuries before his idea could be realized. Which is why Johnson prefers to call him the great grandfather! And that quip brings us to Johnson’s first point: most good ideas need to come from the area that scientist Stuart Kauffman described as the “adjacent possible” : “The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things.” Most change and innovation is usually restricted to what lies just beyond the current state. Anything too far outside the realm of the adjacent possible is an idea “ahead of its time”. This i...

That the existing economic system isn’t perfect is obvious and undeniable, but most proponents of capitalism then fall back to paraphrasing Winston Churchill: “Capitalism is the worst form of economic systems – except for all the others that have been tried.”   I’ve never heard anyone explain a deep, structural problem with the system as well as Yanis Varoufakis does in Talking to My Daughter About the Economy . At one point, he quotes Agent Smith from the movie, The Matrix , who has this say to say about humans: “I'd like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this ...

Until I read an excerpt from Steve Phillips’ Brown is the New White , I had not realized the extent and speed of the demographic change in the US: “People of color now comprise more than 37 percent of the U.S. population, greater than triple the 12 percent in 1965.” The “color” that has increased the most is brown, thanks to the influx of Latinos (Mexicans and South Americans) – 9 to 54 million – and Asians – 2 to 18 million.   Consider the daily change in the composition of America’s population: “Each day, the size of the U.S. population increases by more than 8,000 people, and  nearly 90 percent of that growth consists of people of color .” The absolute birth count on a daily basis is 50-50 between whites and the rest. But since most old people are white, the death rate is far higher among whites. As if all this wasn’t enough, 90% of daily immigrants to the US are non-whites.   The short extract explains the rising fear among the whites, and how Trump ...

Why do we repeatedly see banking induced financial crisis? In poorer countries, and countries where a small group has inordinate control, one can see that the political top bosses force bankers to lend to their cronies, regardless of the viability of the loan. But banking induced financial crisis are a phenomenon of the West too. What exactly is the problem with banking?   Yanis Varoufakis answers the question in Talking to My Daughter About the Economy . It is all rooted in something we discussed in an earlier blog in the series – the need for debt (loans). Quick recap: One needs money now to build a factory, to pay for raw materials and employee salaries on a continual basis, in order to make a profit in the future . So how does one get that money now ? By taking a loan. From the banker, of course.   Put differently and vividly, Varoufakis says one can almost think of the entrepreneur as a “time traveller” –He goes into the future and gets money for his needs in th...

Like so many other species on the verge of extinction thanks to poaching, the rhino too has needed active human intervention to preserve it. Not just efforts to protect, but to also transport them to other places because (1) they are a “density-dependent” species (put too many in one place, and their numbers will decline), and (2) they are so few in number that if they all live in the same place, they’re almost sure to have father mating with niece scenarios, and all the problems to the genetic pool that comes with incest.   Transporting them in trucks isn’t practical since the places they live in and the places to which they need to be moved to are (and need to be) remote places. Ergo, the method has to been to airlift them. No, not in planes (how would a plane land in those remote places?), but by helicopters. Here is a side by side of how rhinos have been air lifted, after being tranquilized, of course : If you’re like me, you’d think the pic on the left is better, the one...

In Talking to My Daughter About the Economy , Yanis Varoufakis talks about the attitude of society towards debt, spending and saving at different times via 3 famous tales.   The first one is from the 16 th century. It is Christopher Marlowe’s tale of a demon who promises Dr. Faustus 24 years of absolute power and limitless pleasure. In return, at the end of that period, he must give his soul to the demon. Faustus agrees. (This is the origin for that phrase, “ Faustian bargain ”). But as the time approaches, he has regrets and tries to get out of the deal. To no avail. The tale ends with his soul being taken by the demon. A contract was binding – that was the mindset of the time.   The second tale is the same story, except it was edited in one important way by Goethe at the dawn of the 19 th century. What was the change Goethe made? Faust, when he has regrets as the 24-year mark approaches, performs lots of acts of public service. This time around, when the time came,...