Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Online gaming and gambling in India got hit with a 28% GST tax. This was a huge increase, by a factor of 10-11 times . In theory, this means additional government revenue of ₹20,000 crores annually. (In practice, who can say? Maybe demand and supply will change due to the new tax rate. Maybe some of it will go “underground”, i.e., be done illegally).   Is this any different from other “sin taxes”, like the high tax rates on alcohol and tobacco? Not really. The question though is what is the purpose of sin taxes – to reduce consumption of something “bad”? Or for the government (and thus the country) to collect money that could be spent on other things? Historical data suggests that if the aim is to reduce consumption, it doesn’t make much of a difference (Yes, cigarette consumption has reduced as taxes increased, but that’s because of the growth in awareness of the link between tobacco and cancer).   This blog asks an interesting question - what should be considered a ...

As AI gets better at more and more things, it invokes fear. Of job losses. Ben Evans wrote this excellent article on the topic. On the one hand, he says: “Every time we go through a wave of automation, whole classes of jobs go away, but new classes of jobs get created… over time the total number of jobs doesn’t go down, and we have all become more prosperous.” But that is just historical data. In practice we worry: “When this is happening to your own generation, it seems natural and intuitive to worry that this time, there aren’t going to be those new jobs. We can see the jobs that are going away, but we can’t predict what the new jobs will be, and often they don’t exist yet.”   Then there’s what economists called the “Lump of Labour fallacy”: “The Lump of Labour fallacy is the misconception that there is a fixed amount of work to be done, and that if some work is taken by a machine then there will be less work for people.” Say, machines reduce the price of productio...

Why didn’t the BJP introduce legislation on the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) all this while? After all, they have been in power for almost a decade now, with an absolute majority. If they could remove Article 370, why no traction on the UCC? And as some ask, why is there no draft of the UCC bill yet?   This long, informative but often unfocussed, article has hints on the answers to those questions. The story starts with Nehru’s attempt at driving social changes via the Hindu Code Bill soon after independence. “It was about to turn society inside out and make it stare at an uncomfortable question: What kind of modern nation did India want to be?” But even if that was Nehru’s intention, the bill (as its name, Hindu Code Bill, suggests), was limited to reforming only Hindu society. “(It) granted women the right to property and divorce, amended inheritance laws, and introduced provisions on inter-caste marriage.”   As you might have expected, the opposition then did co...

For a long time, mathematicians had been trying to see if there was a formula that could generate primes, writes Marcus du Sautoy in Music of the Primes . Euler found a curious formula that did just that. Upto a (very small) number. The formula is absurdly easy to understand: x 2 + x + 41 , for all values of x from 0 to 39 He then noticed that the formula: x 2 + x + q would spit out primes if q = 2, 3, 5, 11 and 17 when fed numbers 0 to (q – 2).   I was surprised there’s actually a formula for finding all primes. Yes, all primes. Assign any integer values to the 26 letters, a to z. Then calculate the equation below using the values you selected: If the answer is positive, then that number (the answer) is a prime. The problem with this formula, though, is that it will throw up negative results a lot of the time – those don’t count as prime numbers, obviously. But all the positive ones do. And every single prime can be found via some combo of values assigned to th...

One of the more viral songs of this year, “Heart on My Sleeve” sounded like a collaboration between two well-known rap artists. But that, as Rahul Matthan writes , wasn’t the reason the song went viral. “That success was entirely down to the fact that even though the vocals on the track were unmistakably those of the two artists in question, neither of them had actually performed on it. Instead, the entire song had been generated using an artificial intelligence (AI) software that had been trained on voice samples of the two artists”   AI thus raised new questions, yet again: “If a song becomes a hit because of the fame of artists who sing it, are those artists not entitled to a share of its profits? After all, it is their voices that listeners are coming to hear. But does anyone have the right to be paid royalties if they do not actually put in any work to sing the song? ”   Already, there are some musicians who are willing to embrace the change. “(A ...

In maths, the list of items that are taken-to-be-true are called axioms (e.g. “A straight line may be drawn between any two points.”). What has been proven is called a theorem (e.g. Pythagoras theorem). And then are aspects a mathematician suspects may be true, but nobody has proven yet. This last set (unproven items) can have different names. Some of them are called conjectures , while others are called hypothesis .   In Music of the Primes , Marcus du Sautoy explains the basis for the two terms. Anything new that is proposed as possibly being true but not yet proven starts by being called a conjecture e.g. Goldbach’s conjecture (“Every even number can be expressed as the sum of two primes”). Sometimes, as mathematicians work on other things, they find something they are trying to prove depends on a conjecture being true. If more and more things that mathematicians try and prove end up depending on the same conjecture to be true, then that conjecture is upgraded to the stat...

Some time back, the Titan , a submersible took 5 people to the Titanic wreck 4,000 meters below sea level. As we know, everyone died. Rahul Matthan wrote a piece with an interesting angle to the tragic events.   He writes: “The company steadfastly refused to submit its vessels for classification by third-party agencies like the American Bureau of Shipping.” And passengers had to sign legal undertakings that they understood that the vessel was not certified by any regulatory body; and of course, things could go horribly wrong.   At this point, you’d be shaking your head and muttering about corporate greed and callousness. But wait, there is more. The article is about thinking from first principles. In this case, the first question is – What is the purpose of regulations? Usually, it is to ensure a minimum level of safety and quality.   The company had been claiming that they had far superior and different safety features, but the existing regulatory syste...

Pictures like this aren’t exaggerations. How does a snake digest it? You’d probably say, “Like any other living thing”. You could not be more wrong, Carl Zimmer explains in Life’s Edge . When most mammals (include humans) digest food, their metabolic rate increases by almost 50%. For rattlesnakes though, it rises seven times . For pythons, it is even more extreme - it rises ten times . In fact, depending on the amount (by weight) that a python ate, it sometimes rose forty-five times .   But wait, there is one more comparison to make. The metabolic rate of a horse at full gallop rises thirty-five times. That means a python’s rate rose even more than a galloping horse… when it was doing nothing but digesting! Further, a horse can’t gallop at that rate for very long; whereas a python can keep at that metabolic rate for the two weeks it might take to digest its food. All this makes it clear that there’s something very different in how snakes digest their food, even when the prey is...

There’s the regular meaning of the word, “savage”. And then there’s the other meaning of the word: “When something or someone is "savage," it is "viciously cool.”   When a kid in class asked my 11 yo daughter’s English teacher to move a bit (so he could copy what she’d written on the blackboard), she snapped back, “If I move away from the board, who will write the words you are copying?”. Methinks she did have a valid point.   Another time, in the same teacher’s class, some kid announced (without rhyme or reason) that he was a nerd. The girl next to him asked, “What is a nerd?”. Upon which, this genius said he didn’t know either! The teacher decided to educate the class on the meaning of the word. “A nerd”, she said, “is a kid who thinks they know everything, takes out their book, and then keeps staring at the teacher instead of looking at the book”.   Continuing in the spirit of things, a girl then proved she wasn’t a nerd by declaring that she couldn’t f...

I used to think that the difference between alchemy and chemistry was like the difference between astrology and astronomy: the ignorance–wisdom split. But something always felt jarring with that view: how then did so many of the great scientists like Newton and Robert Boyle (he of the gas laws fame) believe in alchemy? Was it just greed and hope? That felt too simplistic…   Philip Ball’s book on water, H2O , explained the reasons. The first one is obvious. Given what was at stake with alchemy (gold, riches), it is not surprising that none of its practitioners shared information or made their techniques public. That in turn meant that independent confirmation, or attempts to redo the process, were out of the question. Further, they encrypted their notes to ensure that even if stolen, they wouldn’t make sense to others. Which in turn ensured there was no way to compare two methods or attempts.   But it’s the other reason that goes far deeper, and is built on ancient, oft...

Why does Scotland want to break away from the UK? Or is it Britain? I am always confused by those terms, but you know what I am asking. Tim Marshall’s The Power of Geography gives a lot of background relevant to that question.   For centuries, England (the southern half of that island) understood that they were open to invasion from all sides – Roman, Viking, and Norman invasions had proven that. Given England’s size and thus its population, the invaders would always have larger armies. As if this wasn’t bad enough, it would be disastrous if an enemy force allied with Scotland – the enemy would be at the gates. Worse, England would have to fight a two-front war: on sea and on land.   Inevitably then, England felt it had to control the entire island. The Scots, on the other hand, had no interest in being subsumed into a unified island where the English would dominate.   An uneasy and intermittently violated peace existed between the two. Until other things h...

Brain imaging. It was anticipated as far back as the 18 th century by Lavoisier , writes Stanislas Dehaene in Reading in the Brain ! Lavoisier noticed that an organ uses more energy when it is at work than when it is at rest. Shouldn’t the same principle apply to the brain, wrote Lavoisier: “One can evaluate… how many pounds of weight correspond to the efforts of a man who recites a speech… One might even assess the mechanical content in the work of a philosopher as he thinks.” It would take another 200 years before this “simple idea” could be put into practice. Via what we call a PET scan, which stands for Positron Emission Tomography. It involves the injection of a small amount of radioactive water, where the normal Oxygen 16 has been replaced by its isotope Oxygen 15 . This water spreads over the entire body quickly via the blood.   In the brain in particular, radioactivity accumulates in regions where blood flow is the fastest, which are the same regions where brain ...

Recently there was news that Italy had banned an AI chatbot named Replika. Rahul Matthan’s blog identifies the reason for that – the EU’s GDPR regulation (simplistically put, GDPR is an EU regulation on data privacy). So what are the base principles of GDPR? And what are the problems with those principles when it comes to AI?   Number 1 on that list is “ consent ” – seeking explicit permission before using data. An exception is allowed if said data collection is “necessary” for some “legitimate purpose”. The way AI’s work, they just scour the Net for info and stitch it together in unimaginable ways to derive conclusions from it. By definition, the company that created the AI cannot know to what purpose the AI might put that info to use. GDPR was framed in simpler times when companies could be expected to know what they would do with the data. Not anymore.   Number 2 is that data collection be restricted to what is relevant to the task at hand. And that the data be re...