Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The mathematical number ‘e’ has a celebrity status in maths, writes Steven Strogatz in The Joy of x : “A few numbers are such celebrities that they go by single-letter stage names, something not even Madonna… can match.”   That line got me thinking. Why did it take me a very long to understand why ‘e’ is such a famous number? I mean, I am an engineer and all those years of maths and physics prior to that meant I had run into ‘e’ in all kinds of places. Within maths itself, the “natural” logarithm is to the base ‘e’, not 10, but that I dismissed as an arbitrary human choice. But I could also see ‘e’ in real world phenomenon, from the charging of a capacitor and inductor to the rate of radioactive decay.   I’d always dismissed ‘e’ popping up in all kind of real world phenomenon as a coincidence. I mean, my idea of ‘e’ was based on how schools introduce ‘e’. Via an equation that seems contrived: How can the occurrence of such a ridiculously defined number popping up e...

Golden Krishna’s Best Interface is No Interface is a criticism of the “slap an interface on it” mindset, the idea that if you put a touchscreen on anything, it must be an improvement over the old way of doing things.   He cites those self-checkout kiosks at many supermarkets as an example. Many stores in the US found that the incidence of shoplifting seemed to increase with the advent of self-checkout machines. Did people really start stealing once those machines came? Possible, of course. But it’s also possible that people are often confused – am I buying the supersized packet? Or the large one? If the buyer isn’t clear, guess which option he would be selecting…   The author’s point is not that the old systems and interfaces should not be changed. Rather, his ire is at the tendency to put a touchscreen’y “solution” to everything. Sometimes, an improvement can be without a screen. Take, he says, the problem of coming out of the supermarket with all those bags in both...

One of the chapters in Steven Strogatz’s The Joy of x is about prime numbers. Everyone knows what a prime number, so I needn’t get into that. Except, there’s the awkwardness about the number 1. Is 1 a prime or not? “Given that 1 is divisible only by 1 and itself, it really should be considered prime.” But maths doesn’t consider 1 as a prime. Why not?   For convenience. Huh? “If 1 (0ne) were allowed in, it would mess up a theorem that we’d like to be true. In other words, we’ve rigged the definition of prime numbers to give us the theorem we want.” What the hell? Which theorem is this? It’s theorem we’ve all learnt in middle school. But before we get to that theorem, let’s recollect what prime factorization means. It’s breaking into a number into its prime factors e.g. 6 = 2 x 3. Or 40 = 2 x 2 x 2 x 5 etc.   Now let’s look at the prime factorization theorem. The theorem says that any number can be factored into primes in a unique way . The part in italics would...

The Hourly History book on Marco Polo is disappointing. Lot of info of where he travelled to, but very little of his experiences there. And his period with Kublai Khan is barely touched upon. All that said, the chapter on what happened when they (Marco, his father Niccolo and his uncle, Maffeo) returned to Venice was very interesting.   They had gone native during the 24 years of absence, and barely fit in Venice anymore. Their “worn and unusual clothing” was mocked. Their mannerisms were Mongol. They’d forgotten their native language. Their home had been taken over by relatives, who assumed they were long dead. Uncle Maffeo’s wife was so aghast with his dressing sense that one day, when he was away, she took all his Mongol clothing and gifted it to a homeless man. Big mistake. All of the jewels and pieces of gold he had accumulated were sewn into those clothes! Maffeo went crazy at the loss, and went searching for the beggar. Luckily, he found the man and seized his clo...

I read this amusing, informative, cynical and analytical post by Pranay Kotasthane on the US primaries to decide the opponent against Biden. The latest charges against Trump go to the very heart of the democratic process: “That when you lose an election as an incumbent, you transfer power to the winner.”   And yet, Trump is still the lead runner among the Republicans. And he is not polling too badly against Biden either. Which would suggest: “(The) danger doesn’t seem to matter to the Trump supporters and maybe to American voters too.” The prosecution only makes him come across as the persecuted one. And so Kotasthan writes only half tongue in cheek: “We must be ready for a scenario where Trump runs his campaign from a prison and wins. And then pardons himself.”   Then he makes an interesting point about criminals in governance: “We Indians have had a long experience of voting for politicians indicted for crimes.” But none of our criminals break one partic...

Governments (rightly) get criticized for so many policy decisions. But, as Rahul Matthan reminds us, policy making is hard – the real world is messy; practical aspects have to be considered; there are rarely any perfect solutions; trade offs have to be made; and yes, conflicting interest groups have to be managed.   Pranay Kotasthane wrote of the problems with a (well-intended) directive that doctors in central government hospitals should only prescribe generic medicines (unbranded, but equivalent and cheaper options), not branded ones (more expensive). That sounds like a perfectly good policy, right, esp. in a country like India with a huge number of poor people?   And yet, even that policy has so many issues, as Kotasthane explains. Circumventing via chemists : Could pharma companies “incentivize” chemists to say the generic isn’t available and suggest the branded option as the alternative? Obviously, yes: “So from doctors having the power, the balance will sh...

“Why do phones ring?” That is how Ellis Hamburger’s foreword to Golden Krishna’s Best Interface is No Interface starts! To draw our attention, obviously: “They sounded like alarms, shrill electrical burps and gurgles that duly represented the urgency.” That was when the phone was invented. With the advent of the cell phone, and now the smartphone, the sound of a phone ringing is annoying, even disruptive. “Why couldn’t someone just text to see if I’m available instead of calling and interrupting what I’m doing?”   Hamburger points out the solution of one app, Snapchat. You try chatting with someone on Snapchat, and only if they respond will the app allow you to call. While not perfect (there are many scenarios where this isn’t approach isn’t OK), it certainly is an improvement in many cases.   But, as Hamburger says, not all old interfaces are wrong or bad. Sometimes, the new interface can indeed be an improvement: “The ‘Hey, want to chat?’ text replaces th...

Dilip D'Souza asks and answers an interesting question: “Indian scientists have been going to Antarctica for four decades. What exactly do they do there?”   It started in the 70’s, when Indira Gandhi decided that India too needed its presence in Antarctica. Easier said than done, of course. The selected few had to first undergo brutal training at the High Altitude Warfare School (HAWS) in Ladakh and then under the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP). “The first two Expeditions had to live in tents, their members helped build the Dakshin Gangotri station.” Today, India has two functioning stations – Maitri and Bharati. Their logistical support and maintenance is the Indian military’s responsibility.   In Antarctica, there are geological studies to be done. Remember how all the continents were once joined together in a supercontinent called Pangea? “This Pangaean jigsaw is the great geological attraction of Antarctica.”   Another reason is the study of ex...

One Nation, One Election. ONOE. It can be evaluated from two different angles: (1) how it would work, and (2) whether it is a good/bad idea. Let us look at both. ~~   The “how it could work” question raises several questions from an implementation perspective only (not from a desirablity/undesirability angle).   One , since both state and national legislatures are elected for 5 years, how can they be made to synchronize? Would we need to cut short some and extend others so that the next cycle synchronizes? The answer to that lies in constitutional amendments for exactly that purpose (extend and cut short so they get synchronized to get the new system started).   Two , such changes require agreement not just in parliament but also from the majority of states. In any political environment, the probability of getting any such consensus across states is remote, at the best of times.   Three , even if such a change could be made, what happens if a sta...

The arena of confrontation between the US and China that is most visible is Taiwan. Another arena is semiconductor chips and America’s increasing its steps to prevent chips getting to their foes. It started with Russia over the Ukraine war, and then the US decided to ban certain specialized chips to China, and now the US banned chips key to AI from the Middle East.   The other aspect of the chip wars is that the US is trying to de-risk itself from its dependency on chip manufacturing being in China, or too close to China for comfort (aka Taiwan). Hence the urgency to move some of that chip manufacturing to the US itself. It is in this context that countries like India have seen an opportunity – after all, some fraction of the manufacturing moving out of China could come to India. If India plays its cards right. ~~ In that context, Pranay Kotashane cautions that the role of the government in semiconductors historically has been at most as an enabler rather than the one runn...

These words by BR Ambedkar surprised me: “However good a Constitution may be, if those who are implementing it are not good, it will prove to be bad. However bad a Constitution may be, if those implementing it are good, it will prove to be good.” How can “good” people compensate for a “bad” constitution – were they expected to violate the constitution?! Conversely, doesn’t a “good” constitution prevent make it harder for “not good” people to do harm? And since making changes to a constitution is hard, surely a well written constitution is very critical, right? What was Ambedkar thinking, I wondered.   Bibhudutta Pani wrote this piece on some interesting tidbits of the Indian constitution. While the Indian constitution allows for amendments, it also has a Basic Structure Doctrine , i.e., a Lakshman Rekha – the legislature should not meddle with those parts. (They include the preamble, rule of law, fundamental rights, federalism, and secularism).   While there are...

To learn and keep improving, AI needs large data sets. Of text. Images. Videos. Whatever. But already, writes Rahul Matthan: “The trouble is that the availability of high-quality content needed for training these models is fast dwindling.”   There are multiple reasons for this. One , the cost of storage media keeps falling, so you can store more data at the same cost. The processing power of CPU/GPU’s keeps growing, so they can process more data in the same time. This combo, in turn, means that the rate at which the training data set is fed to the AI far exceeds the rate at which humans produce new content (that could be used as new training material).   Two , as the importance of data sets for AI is understood, Internet sites (which were the biggest source of such data) have started to put restrictions on how much data can be “scraped”.   Three , content producers have started to file lawsuits on copyright infringement, further reducing the available data ...

Vir Sanghvi wrote this piece on rising hate levels in India. He starts by citing two recent incidents. The video of a school teacher getting her students to slap their Muslim classmate. And the railway constable who went through a train killing Muslim passengers.   You’d think this would be a Modi/RSS bashing article, but no: “It is popular among people opposed to the current political dispensation to act as though the hate we see all around us emanates from the top and is the result of some careful political calculation.” Why does he feel that way? “I don’t think that is true. Every Muslim-hater is not a sangh supporter who is acting on orders from Nagpur. Like fire, hate takes on a life of its own. Nobody can tell where the next conflagration will occur, where the fire will spread or who the flames will devour.” After all, as he rightly says: “Nobody ordered the school teachers to target Muslims. Nobody asked the railway cop to kill Muslims.”   But yes, he...