Viswanathan K's Thoughts

When Canada accused India of assassinating a Khalistani Sikh leader, Nijjar, I was curious how things would play out. On the one hand was the likely West-hangs-together groupism; on the other hand lay India’s growing economic power and its geopolitical value as a counterweight to China.   It started with the expected tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats which then escalated to the downsizing of embassies. When Canada tried to corner the remaining “Five Eyes” spying allies (US, UK, Australia and New Zealand) into confirming their allegations, they only got token statements from those countries.   As I saw this Netflix spy movie starring Tabu called Khufiya , I found another reason for the silence of the Five Eyes. In that movie, an Indian R&AW agent played by Tabu tells the CIA agent, “If I can prove that the US spied on an ally (India), things will get very messy”. That unwritten rule (countries don’t spy on their allies) is probably another reason the other “Eyes” h...

Steven Strogatz’s The Joy of x is a “guided tour” from “an adult perspective” to “math’s most compelling and far-reaching ideas”. Each chapter is short (“bite-size”), and the book can be read in any order.   Let’s look at one topic from the book: negative numbers. From early in life, most of us get the “use” of negative numbers. “Minus 1” meaning the basement is self-evident. Or it can mean debt (money owed). But there’s one aspect that doesn’t make intuitive sense to most people: “The most unsettling thing is that a negative times a negative is a positive.” And of course, as adults, we tend to ask “if these abstractions have any parallels in the real world”.   Strogatz gives a fascinating example. Say, you have 3 entities (people, companies, countries, whatever). A solid line designates the connected entities are friends, a dashed line conveys they are enemies. Take 2 such possible arrangements:   Social scientists refer to such triangles that denote rel...

When we think of north and south India today, we think favourably of the south. But, writes Pranay Kotasthane, this is a recent phenomenon. His article is based on a book called The Paradox of India's North–South Divide .   Imagine this. After independence, one report identified “UP (and Bihar) as the best governed states in the 1950s”! “In the first three decades since Independence, a significant number of people from the South went to the northern and western Indian cities in search of jobs… There was no such migration from the North to the South.”   And yet, even back then, BR Ambedkar wrote in Thoughts on Linguistic States: “The North is conservative. The South is progressive. The North is superstitious, the South is rational. The South is educationally forward, the North is educationally backward. The culture of the South is modern. The culture of the North is ancient.” Either Ambedkar was overstating things, or it took a really long time for the above-ment...

Niall Ferguson’s book, The Ascent of Money , has a fascinating account on how bonds (those pieces of paper that give a fixed interest) came into existence. It started off in the city states of Italy – Venice, Florence, Genoa, Pisa etc – which were at constant war with each other. But of course: “This fighting is possible only if you can pay for it.”   Collecting taxes wasn’t a reliable way for these Italian cities. Why not? Because, with the taxation model, if more money was needed, one would have to increase taxes (upon which the common man might revolt, and you didn’t want an internal rebellion while fighting an external enemy), and then spend effort collecting it (that takes time, which you don’t have during war time).   Ergo, they came up with a new system to raise money: the state would issue bonds. And expect demand that the rich families buy these “forced bonds”. After all, they had the most at stake, the most to lose if the city fell to the enemy, surely they...

In an earlier blog on why the number 1 is not a prime number, I’d quoted these lines from Steven Strogatz’s The Joy of x : “It pulls back the curtain on how maths is sometimes done. The naïve view is that we make our definitions, set them in stone, then deduce whatever theorems happen to follow from them. Not so. That would be too passive. We’re in charge and can alter definitions as we please.”   I found another such instance of this “(we) can alter definitions as we please” power in Jordan Ellenberg’s book, How not to be Wrong . It involves a topic everyone encounters at school maths – what is the value of the infinite series: 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009 + 0.0009 + … (the ellipsis means infinite terms) Common sense tells the sum keeps getting closer to 1 (0.9, then 0.99, then 0.999 and so on). Such examples led mathematicians to a deeper question: “What is the numerical value of an infinite sum?”   This is not just a silly, only-mathematicians-would-care query. It i...

In his book, The Ascent of Money , Niall Ferguson uses Shylock (from The Merchant of Venice ) as a representative of how money lending worked in the pre-banking era in the West. Say, a merchant in Venice expected to make money by some activity in the future, but he needed money today to get started. He’d need to borrow it. But the lender ran the risk that this merchant might fail, or run away, or refuse to repay. To compensate for these risks, the lender wanted a premium to be paid, what we could call “interest”.   But Christianity forbade usury – the charging of interest. That, and the fact that Jews were not allowed to hold property in Europe, meant Jews became the only group who could lend money. With high interest since each money lender was small and couldn’t spread his risk across too many loans, the way modern banks can. Also, without a strong legal system, some form of force (or the threat of it) was needed to get back the money. Add to this the Jews were a minority, an...

Is there any pattern to the letters across written languages, asks Stanislas Dehaene in Reading in the Brain . At first sight, it seems like an idiotic question: the Roman, Arabic, Devanagari and Chinese scripts hardly resemble each other in any way. But look at things a little differently, and a pattern emerges.   Perhaps, one hypothesis goes, certain letter-like shapes are omnipresent in what we see around ourselves. For example: The frequency of these shapes is even higher if rotated shapes are counted as the same shape: If you felt that rotating the shapes and still thinking of them as the same letter is cheating, think again: our brain adjusts for orientations – how else would it recognize the same object again, when it is viewed from a different angle?   Next, consider these drawings, where the same shape is drawn with varying degrees of completeness:   Notice how the middle column is almost interpretable whereas the first column isn’t? Why is tha...

Recently, the Karnataka government decided to take steps against fake news – create a fact-checking unit, identify “fake news syndicates”, and to introduce legislation against propagation of fake news, and to punish those involved in it.   But is any measure possible against fake news? Wrt that question, I found Gurwinder’s post thought-provoking. First, he reminds us, neither misinformation (wrong info) and disinformation ( deliberately spreading wrong info) are new problems – they’ve been there since the time humans learned to communicate. Every new advance in communication systems creates new threats on this front – the printing press, the telegraph, TV, radio, the Internet, and everyone’s favourite whipping boy of present day, social media.   Some argue social media is a whole different type of threat. It is democratic and distributed, they argue – anyone can create and spew fake news. But that very reason, says Gurwinder, raises a new problem wrt any attempt t...

You’d think that in the age of the Internet, one can find answers to factual questions easily. Not always, writes Tim Harford. How you frame the question to, say, Google can influence what you learn. Ask Google “Why is the sky blue?” and it will point to Rayleigh scattering as the answer. Ask instead, “Why is the sky white?” and you are pointed to a different reason.   This sounds mildly amusing. But it is an example of something much bigger. How? Well, when most people say, “I’ve done my research”, the danger is that the info they got was based on how they framed the question! No deliberate bias, no malice, no vested interest, no agenda, no propaganda, and yet…   One way to avoid being misled when you ask the question is to also ask its opposite – “ Is Russia winning in Ukraine? ” and “Is Ukraine winning?”. Each question will throw up sites that (mostly) confirm that question. Flip through enough sites from both sets and you could get a truer picture. “A truth-see...

One of my college mates is now settled in the US. One time, he wrote about his 9 yo daughter who had written a poem telling how her parents had let her down. I loved my friend’s comment as he described that on Facebook, “Instead of writing poems, why can’t she be like a normal Indian girl in America who’s solving calculus problems at this age?”   Stereotypes. Usually, they’re bad, but when it comes to Asians in America, the stereotype (and source for jokes) is that their kids are very smart.     That stereotype is not without basis. After all, (1) Asian education system teaches a lot of things much earlier than the American system, and (2) Asian parents are very, er, hands-on in their children’s education.   While reading Marcus du Sautoy’s Music of the Primes , I saw another side of point #1 above about the Asian education system. Neal Koblitz is an American mathematician. When he was 6 yo old, his family spent a year in Baroda. He recollects: “The mat...

We’ve all seen statues of the Laughing Buddha. Except it isn’t a statue of the Buddha. At least not the “original” Buddha, Siddhartha from Lumbini.   There were many other Bodhisatvas and avatars after Siddhartha. The Laughing Buddha is one such avatar, Budai, from 10th century AD. He would wander from village to village carrying a large sack over his shoulder. From that sack, he would give rice and sweets to all. On his deathbed, he revealed himself as an avatar of the Buddha.   This avatar became particularly popular in Zen Buddhism. His large belly and sack came to represent abundance. At some point, he became the patron deity of bartenders and restaurants. Hence his prized location next to the cash register in Buddhist owned restaurants!   This figure of the Laughing Buddha then went global with the porcelain trade in the 16 th century. This depiction is not considered a sacrilege by Buddhists. Anything that brings people closer to the Buddha (in any way)...

Coming up with new medicines is a time-consuming and costly affair. It was inevitable somebody would throw AI at the problem, writes Rahul Matthan. A pharma company named Collaborations Pharmaceuticals tried using an AI named MegaSyn: “The company was convinced that if machine-learning algorithms trained on chemistry and molecular engineering were used, it would be able identify new, never-before-seen compounds that had a high probability of curing diseases.”   The AI threw up a huge number of possible chemicals for various diseases. Sensibly, the company then decided to add a filter: reject any chemicals that could have serious side-effects.   You must have guessed what happened next: “The trouble is that once a feature like this has been designed, it is very easy to flip the switch—to use the algorithm to design toxic chemicals instead of just filtering them out.” In fact, some researchers at the company secretly tried just that – and yes, it did come up with ...

Since eternity, video games have had NPC’s – Non-Playing Characters. It refers to the characters in the game whose behavior is entirely computer determined. Like that dragon in the game. Or the enemy soldier. You get the idea.   Increasingly, the term is being used to refer to real world humans in the real world, writes Gurwinder: “Naturally, everyone believes that their political opponents are NPCs.” ~~   All of us are NPC’s . Why? Because, as is often the case, evolution. “Cognition costs time and calories, which in our evolutionary history were scant resources. As such, the brain evolved to be a “cognitive miser” that operates according to the principle of least effort, taking shortcuts in thinking and perceiving that build a workable but hugely simplified (and cost effective) model of the world.” Gurwinder then gets into the various categories of real world NPC’s. ~~   NPC #1: The Conformist . They accept mainstream views on most topics. T...