Viswanathan K's Thoughts

England, the US, and India – all of them are bicameral, i.e., they have two houses of parliament. It happened for pragmatic reasons. As democracy started to make inroads in Britain, existing lords would not accept losing all their power and privileges, while a democracy could not guarantee that they’d always have some power. Was bloodshed the only way? Britain solved the problem by creating two houses – the House of Commons where anyone could be elected, and the House of Lords which allowed the erstwhile lords to get direct entry and to pass on those rights to their heirs. That system of inheritance only stopped in 1999.   Since India copied the British model, we ended up with the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. Except that membership to Rajya Sabha didn’t come by inheritance – it came via the votes of the state legislatures.   In both Britain and India, the upper house has repeatedly been used as a way to “insert” people into parliament – sometimes, to enable competent peo...

In the last blog , we saw how “endosymbiosis” complicated the idea of the tree of life. David Quammen’s book, The Tangled Tree , continues.   Why have bacteria gotten resistant to antibiotics? The usual culprits are indiscriminate over-use, and the evolution of bacteria themselves. But here’s a less known point. The genes that evolved in one bacterial species to confer resistance to the antibiotics seemed to become prevalent in almost all bacterial species. How could this be? Sure, it could happen by chance in one species, but how could the same exact solution popup in other species?   Wait, it gets weirder. Did you know that some of these antibiotics resistant genes existed even before the first antibiotics were discovered by humans? Huh? This sounds like a reversal of cause-and-effect! What was going on?   But before we answer those questions, let’s go to the 1920’s, when Fred Griffith stumbled onto something when testing two variants of a bacteria. Type ...

When we think of evolution, most of us have the “tree of life” view. Life started. Mutations occurred. Most were harmful, but a few proffered some advantages, and became more widespread. Over time, the extent of change due to cumulative mutations was so large that they couldn’t mate, and that’s when we say a new species has arrived. Or to use the tree of life analogy: the trunk of the “tree” has split into two branches. And the process repeats itself. The branches fork further and so we eventually see so many species.   This is also the view Darwin himself had. But over time, science and technology is showing that the tree of life view isn’t entirely right. Since the “tree” view is so widespread and easy to understand, David Quammen calls his book on the topic as The Tangled Tree .   Evolution moves slowly. Or so we are taught. Yet, the difference between bacteria and pretty much all complex life forms is colossal. How did that happen? Lynn Margulis noticed a key diffe...

ChatGPT is making a lot of news. It is an AI software to which you can ask questions, and it will then give answers. Unlike, say Google, it isn’t pointing you to links to other articles. Rather, as Stephen Shankland says : “It's an AI that's trained to recognize patterns in vast swaths of text harvested from the internet, then further trained with human assistance to deliver more useful, better dialog.”   Here’s an example of a response it generated: “When I asked, "Is it easier to get a date by being sensitive or being tough?" GPT responded, in part, "Some people may find a sensitive person more attractive and appealing, while others may be drawn to a tough and assertive individual. In general, being genuine and authentic in your interactions with others is likely to be more effective in getting a date than trying to fit a certain mold or persona.” Not bad, right? But beware: “ The answers you get may sound plausible and even authoritative, but they might well b...

I was surprised when my 11 yo daughter showed interest in the ongoing FIFA World Cup. On the plus side, it meant one could watch the 8:30 p.m. match, without getting into a fight over the TV with her, so I wasn’t complaining.   It turned out she wasn’t really interested in the game. She just wanted to make sure she didn’t look lost in class when her classmates talked about the matches, the teams and the players. Like so many people, it turned out that she only knew of 2 players – yes, Messi and Ronaldo.   On Instagram, I showed her many of the endless stream of Messi’s brilliant goals and dribbling skills to get through the entire defense. The word “G.o.a.t.” (Greatest of all time) was a recurring theme in the comments section.   In the Morocco v Portugal match we watched together, I told her I supported Morocco and she imperiously declared that she supported whoever would win at the end. In other words, Morocco.   Next day, she mentioned that her cla...

“Wood or cow dung cakes under mud stoves in their homes” – that is how Vijay Mahajan says the world’s poorest 3 billion still cook, in his book Digital Leapfrogs . Even though the benefits of switching to cleaner stoves is evident – both to the individuals and the environment – nothing much has changed in the last 30 years. Why not? The reasons include inertia, newer stoves not being designed for how poor women actually cook, limited financing options, and no repair or maintenance services.   In India, one recent attempt at addressing this problem is by Nexleaf. In addition to means like providing loans, it uses digital technology to attack the problem. The company calls it StoveTrace. A sensor is attached to the stove that registers (1) when the stove is in use, and (2) temperature of the fire. This sensor connects to a device on the wall that records the data and sends it onwards to Nexleaf via good old phone lines.   Nexleaf uses this data to identify whether a stov...

As it became evident that mass extinction events had happened in the past, Christianity scrambled to explain them. Yes, they were cataclysmic events, but they were “directional and purposeful” went the argument, writes David Quammen in his wonderful book The Tangled Tree .   In the 1800’s, a geologist, Charles Lyell, published a book that said the processes and events that shaped the earth were erosion, deposition, and volcanic eruptions. And he added that those forces also led to extinctions. Edward Hitchcock was aghast at this view of a planet that could “exclude a Deity from its… government”. Lyell was a believer in God, not an infidel, but the risk Hitchcock saw was that the theory might drive others into godless ideas…   He was right. Well, at least in the case of one particular reader. His name was Charles Darwin and he combined three points to form his famous theory:         Offspring resemble their parents - inheritance     ...

I read an interesting interview with Amanda Ripley on the topic of “high conflict”. Here’s how the interviewer, David Epstein, defines the term: ““High conflict” isn’t normal, healthy tension. It’s when disagreements devolve into “us versus them,” zero-sum combat (i.e. politics right now). ” How does one end high conflict? That is the theme of her book and this interview.   Ripley says that individuals need to break out of their identity group to break this vicious cycle. The fine print here is key. She does not mean someone on one side suddenly surrenders their core beliefs or defects to the other side. Rather, while they continue to hold onto their fundamental beliefs, it’s just that they stop agreeing with the extremes to which their group has gone .   Note here: high conflict can only happen when both sides behave in extreme ways. For the situation to de-escalate, what Ripley is saying needs to happen by more and more individuals on both sides.   Thi...

It’s easy to curse and lament the fact that new ideas don’t get accepted easily. Sure, the reason is vested interest and factionalism at times. But often, there’s a very far less malicious reason for it: inertia, as Seth Godin wrote : “We stick with what we know, with what feels safe, with the status quo… (After all) the status quo is the status quo precisely because it’s good at sticking around.” Also, as venture capitalist Paul Graham wrote , there’s the inevitable asymmetry between new v/s established ideas: “When a new idea first emerges, it usually seems pretty feeble. It's a mere hatchling. Received wisdom is a full-grown eagle by comparison.”   So how do we learn to recognize new ideas worth pursuing?   For one thing, Graham says we should give weightage to who is proposing it: “Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts. If the person proposing the idea is re...

For most millennials , the smartphone has made everything hassle-free. No queues, no waiting, no commuting, no cooking. So much so, writes Cliff Kuang in User Friendly . “The real world was getting to be disappointing when compared with the frictionless ease of the virtual world.”   Apps are individualized, not shoehorned for everyone: “We all use the same containers – whether it’s apps or smartphones – but everything inside is different for each of us.” Digital ads are highly individualized too. Carpet bombing everyone with the same ads is history, thanks to how much Google and Facebook know about us. It can even feel creepy, how much your phone seems to know about you.   Which is why Kuang says: “User-friendliness wrought a world in which making things easier has morphed into making them usable without a second thought. That ease eventually morphed into making products more irresistible, even outright addictive.”   From a ‘pilot error’ mindset to ‘de...

Xinjiang is big – it’s larger than France, Spain, and Germany combined. It lies nestled between the Karakoram range and the Tibetan plateau, writes Ananth Krishnan in The Comrades and the Mullahs . Throughout its history, it was looked at as a buffer zone by the Chinese, separating China proper from Central Asia. That probably explains why though it has been part of China for centuries, Xinjiang has never truly been integrated into China. (Their Muslim identity hasn’t helped either).   Ironically, the Chinese reforms of the 80’s allowed slightly greater ethnic autonomy (at least, on paper), created conditions for the Uighur identity (natives of Xinjiang) to solidify, set off the movement for self-determination, something they had been promised in the 1950’s. China responded with a two-fold approach – a rapid attempt to integrate the Xinjiang economy with the hinterland, and to tighten security control over the region. In 1997, riots happened in Xinjiang, and the Chinese governm...