Viswanathan K's Thoughts

As the Ukraine war completes its first year, Andrew Sullivan’s article asks the pragmatic question: “It (the war) is indeed right and just. But is it prudent?” Ironically though, both sides (West and Russia) believe the war is “right and just”. Russia views a Ukraine that joins NATO as an unacceptable, existential risk. The West considers the invasion of a European country as unacceptable.   Sullivan wonders about the wisdom or folly of Biden’s declaration that Ukraine “must triumph”. Won’t any attempt to retake all of Ukraine, he asks, inevitably mean the war will spill over into “Russia proper at some point”? “My worry is that the West is committing itself to an end-goal — the full liberation of all of Ukraine — that no Russian government could accept, without regime change in Moscow itself. Which means, as Biden’s gaffes sometimes reveal, that this is ineluctably a war for regime change in a nuclear-armed country — which is an extremely hazardous enterprise. It’s righ...

Sarcasm. Play on words. All these are lost on kids whose English is beyond pathetic. Which, by the sound of it, includes my 11 yo daughter’s entire class. Herself included.   I guess her English teacher learnt that lesson the time one kid in class announced, “I bred my dog and it had 8 babies”. Upon which the teacher asked, “You’re saying you had 8 babies?”. The kid just stared at her with that did-I-say-anything-like-that look on his face.   Of course, any such claim by one kid only sets off counter claims. Another kid scoffed at the first kid and declared, “So what? I bred my hamsters and they had babies too”. The teacher tried again, “You had babies?”. “No”, replied the kid, “The hamsters did”. This time, the teacher tried a different tack, “Oh! I got confused because you look like a hamster”. A direct insult – this all the kids understood.   When I was teaching my daughter computer programming for her school exam, I told her that she should check the prog...

In the last blog , I went into the philosophical angle to the question that Siddhartha Mukherjee asks in The Song of the Cell : how does the immune system differentiate which cells are the “self” and which are from “others”?   This isn’t just an academic question. The answer has practical applications, since it gives clues on how to prevent organ or skin graft transplants from being rejected. Or to proactively identify which donor is compatible with the recipient.   In the 1930’s, George Snell bred mice in a lab and found that sometimes grafts from one mouse to another were “compatible” while at other times, they weren’t. He narrowed the reason to one set of genes – he called them the H genes. Eventually, Snell realized that the H genes define the boundary of the immunological self. “If organisms shared the H genes, you could transplant tissues from one organism to another. If they didn’t, the transplant would be rejected.” (The answer – the H genes – extends acros...

Siddhartha Mukherjee is an excellent writer. I’ve loved both of his earlier books, and the latest one, The Song of the Cell , is just as great as the others. The immune system, as we know, fights and kills invaders. But that raises a new question: how does the body which cells are the “self” v/s which ones are the “other”?   Before he answers that question, Mukherjee gets into Hindu philosophy. Why?! What’s the connection?! Technically, there’s no connection. But if you’re as great a writer as Mukherjee, well then…   Western philosophy, he says, differentiates the body from the soul, us from them. Whereas Vedic philosophy does the opposite, he writes: “(It) welcomed the erasure of the individual self and its fusion with the universal… The self was an ideal fusion of atman and Brahman .” And adds: “The phrase ‘ Tat Twam Asi ’ – ‘That you are’ – permeates the Upanishads and is an expression of the boundless self that permeates not just a single body but also the ...

Alexander Alekhine was the fourth world champion in chess. As Jonathan Rowson puts it in his book, The Moves that Matter , his longevity is unbelievable: “(Alekhine) held the title for most of the second quarter of the twentieth century (1927-35; 1937-46).” Alekhine is quoted as saying that a chess Grandmaster needs to be a “combination of a beast of prey and a monk”. Or as Rowson rephrases it: “We need aggression, but our fire has to be under control.”   Rowson describes the state in one of Alekhine’s games, seemingly “an utterly lifeless endgame position”. Can black win from here, asked Rowson’s instructor. It seemed impossible. But Alekhine had found a way. A very long route. “Seemingly out of thin air, the monk conjured an elaborate scheme that we were supposed to have guessed, while the beast of prey executed it with precision.”   Obviously, most of us (even Rowson, a Top 100 player) couldn’t dream of figuring out such a sequence. But there’s still a lesso...

If we think we understand something, we feel we are capable of making an informed decision on the topic. Companies know this, and thus as the authors of The Invisible Gorilla said: “Companies often prey on the illusion of knowledge to hawk their wares, emphasizing technical details in a way that leads people to think they understand how a product works.” Audio companies wax eloquent about the quality of their cables. Phone manufacturers list a gazillion details of their models. So do car manufacturers. The term for this “information”? Technobabble.   The same thing happens when explaining (irrational) human behavior. A popular answer almost always involves evolution and the wiring of the brain. Sure, that’s often the real reason. But when it’s thrown in just to make an answer sound more scientific and believable, it’s called “neurobabble”.   And then there’s the cousin of neurobabble: “brain porn”. Huh? “(Brain porn refers to) the colorful images of blobs of act...

As I wrote earlier , Donald Hoffman’s boo k , The Case Against Reality , makes for an interesting read on why reality may be nothing like what we perceive and yet why it should be taken seriously (In simple terms, that means that just because the bus may not be really what it looks like to you doesn’t mean you should go stand in front of that bus when it is moving).   This blog though is about some thought-provoking points he makes. The quotes are self-explanatory, so I won’t elaborate on them.   As science advances, many of us (including scientists) believe we are getting closer to the “true” reality, whatever that is. Not necessarily, says Hoffman. He points out the time when Rutherford discovered that the atom is mostly empty space: “This claim by physicists is not as radical (as it seems)… Their claim is more like saying, “I know that the icons on my desktop are not the true reality. But if I pull out my trusty magnifying glass and look really closely at the des...

Stephen Davies wrote a thought-provoking article on how history is written and taught. History, he says, focuses on one kind of events – the political ones. “(It) implies that the driving force in history, the thing that shapes and determines the world we are in and that is crucial for our future, is politics and political power. The dates given are all about political power: Who has it, who contests it, and who wins it.”   An unintended side-effect of this is that it influences us, consciously or unconsciously, into “what we should see as important here and now”: “This story is of the growth and development of government, the forms it has taken, and in particular the historical evolution of particular states or political entities.”   As an alternative, he says, consider these events. The publication of Newton’s Principia Mathematica . Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations . Darwin’s On the Origin of Species : “These are all landmarks in a quite different kind of stor...

I found Donald Hoffman’s book, The Case Against Reality fascinating. It felt like a description of one aspect of Hindu philosophy explained via analogies I am familiar with. The aspect in question – do we perceive reality as it is?   The answer is No. He says our senses convey a picture of reality that can be compared to icons on the computer or smartphone: “The purpose of a desktop interface is not to show you the “truth” of the computer – where “truth”, in this metaphor, refers to circuits, voltages, and layers of software. Rather, the purpose of an interface is to hide the “truth” and to show simple graphics that help you perform useful tasks such as crafting emails and editing photos.”   Evolution, he says, has made us evolve in a way where we seek not truth, but whatever increases our odds of survival: “Perception is not a window of objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.” Helpful wrt survival, tha...

All the stories in David Eagleman’s book, Sum: Tales from the Afterlives are about the afterlife. Each one has a new, interesting scenario with deep, sometimes troubling, commentary on how we humans are. The story called “Absence” starts with what sounds like a mystery: “God is gone. The rumour is that He stepped out long ago, saying He’d be right back.”   So people did what they always do. They came up with explanations of what might have happened. Perhaps He left for good. Or did He go crazy? Did He leave to spawn other universes? Maybe He’s angry with us. Or stopped caring about us. Or gone on a long vacation.   What followed is what we can easily relate to: “People have belligerently taken sides based on their disappearance theories… Now war has broken out on the consecrated plains of Heaven.” Inevitably then: “We have ascended and brought the front line with us… The new religious wars do not pivot on God’s definition but instead on His whereabouts.” ...

Last year, we changed schools for our then-10 yo daughter because it felt like she was taking studies too lightly… and the old school allowed her to. The new school was one that cared about academics. A lot . So much so that while they are a CBSE school, they taught based on ICSE books till the board classes… since the ICSE curriculum is much tougher.   If there was any doubt on joining the school, it was removed by a brief interaction during the online interview (those were still COVID days). When the principal wished her good morning, my daughter replied, “Good morning”. The principal said, “Good morning what?”. My daughter was zapped, so the principal told her the answer, “Good morning, m’am ”. Academic rigor and discipline – just what the doctor had ordered for my daughter.   After one round of a test and exam cycle each, I saw some patterns: The focus was heavily on maths and science. Application oriented. In Geography, for example, the exam cited the longitudes...

When we went to Singapore, I saw that my American bank issued credit card would not ask for an OTP for online transactions (even though in India, the same card would ask for the OTP). Whereas the Indian bank issued credit card would ask for the OTP even in Singapore .   I wondered yet again why the US doesn’t have an OTP equivalent system. I stumbled upon the answer while reading Patrick McKenzie’s article on the history of the American credit card system. The short answer? It is a “legacy system”: “A legacy system is any outdated computing system, hardware or software that is still in use.”   How is the American credit card system a legacy system? How can the same system of credit cards then have the OTP security mechanism in India? Why can’t the US shift to the OTP equivalent system? Answers below.   McKenzie starts with the history of the credit card in the US. It was designed in the pre-Internet age, and therefore several choices were made which made perfect s...