Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Recently I read a couple of articles from two different parts of the world – India and the UK – that recommended randomizing selections in various fields. Our instinctive reaction to such a suggestion is negative, as Tim Harford wrote : “We do not usually draw lots to allocate duties, jobs or privileges.”   I want to state at the outset that both articles are not saying that selections (for whatever field) should be entirely random. Rather, they mean set a minimum criteria or qualification that needs to be met. Then, from amongst the shortlisted entries, select at random – not by ranking them as 1 st , 2 nd and so on.   University grants, says Harford, could be given at random (provided the applications meet the minimum criteria). After all, he argues, sometimes a thorough evaluation of each application (to decide on merit) can end up costing a significant chunk of the grant amount itself! In any case, he says, the assumption that experts know best (and can rank i...

We think we know our solar system. Obviously not every single object and rock, but at least the categories of objects in it. Sun, planets, moons, comets, asteroids, asteroid belt, meteorites, we’ve covered everything, right?   Not entirely, as Latif Nasser found out. His discovery started off from a kiddish solar system poster on his 2 yo son’s wall. As per that poster: “Venus had a moon called Zoozve. ” What, he thought? Among the rocky planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars), wasn’t Earth the only one with a moon?   The NASA site said Venus had no moons. He googled up Zoozve. No results, at least not in English. That could have been the end of it – an error in a kid’s poster. But Nasser didn’t stop. He called up the illustrator of the poster – the man said he didn’t cook it up, that he found Zoozve on some online list of moons.   And then Nasser’s friend at NASA called him back. It wasn’t Zoozve, it was 2002-VE, an actual object near Venus. That fit – the...

In the bad old days of the Internet, finding what you were looking for was, well, like searching for a needle in a haystack. Clay Shirky called it “filter failure”. And now, the pendulum has swung to the other extreme of “filter success” as Nicholas Carr calls it. (Think of the effect of Google search, or the recos of Amazon and Netflix). But that’s just created a new problem, writes Oliver Burkemann - the “Too many needles” problem: “(You have) a large pile (or digital equivalent) of books or articles you've been meaning to get around to reading, plus maybe a long queue of podcast episodes to which you'd love to listen, if only you had the time.”   Burkemann says this is a broader problem most people face. It occurs outside the digital/ Internet domain, in pretty much every aspect of life: “If you're blessed with work you love, or a creative passion you're good at, you may often feel torn between multiple projects you're excited to launch. Others are the f...

That UPI has been very useful and successful is unquestionable. But valid questions exist about its viability, specifically on the “Who pays for it?” topic. After all, it costs money for PhonePe or GPay or the banks or the government-owned backend system behind it to develop, maintain and keep things running.   When it was launched, most people had assumed a fee would be charged for its usage. Either as a percentage of the transaction, or as a flat amount. But in 2019, writes Rahul Matthan, the government passed a law prohibiting banks and service providers from charging any fee for it.   There were good reasons behind that decision. For high value transactions, history had shown that shops are willing to foot the fee because nobody carried that much cash and the benefit of closing a sale was worth the fee. But for low value transactions, the fee became a significant fraction of the profit, which is why credit cards never caught on in most places in India. “It is t...

Raghu S. Jaitley makes an interesting observation about the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. On the one hand, almost everyone says “it appears like the most pointless LS election in living memory”. The BJP’s victory appears to be a foregone conclusion (Modi talks of winning 400 seats), and the opposition seems to be in disarray with endless arguments over seat-sharing arrangements. “It is either the failure of the political imagination of the opposition leaders or the relative success of this government that we might not have any overarching theme that serves as the connective tissue to the multiple state or local issues.” Which is why Jaitley says: “While I can foresee lots of drama and rhetoric in campaigns at the state level, this will be a ‘no wave’ election, which means it will be impossible to dislodge the incumbent.”   And yet, there are other signs and actions of the BJP that “belie this optimism”. “The eagerness to stitch alliances across states and political spe...

Pranay Kotasthane’s post on the history of how the water situation in Bangalore has evolved was highly informative. “First, half of the city’s water supply comes from Kaveri, which is 90 km away and 350 m lower.” That “350 m lower ” part is very significant. First, it means the water has to be lifted. The electricity bill for lifting comes to ₹3 crores per day. Second: “Before independence, Bengaluru, due to its elevation, relied largely on the rainwater stored in nearby lakes. But as the city population grew, the engineering marvel of pumping water up from the Kaveri was dreamed and realised.” In turn, that led to a decrease in the dependence on lakes. As the lakes fell into disuse, encroachments began to increase. Since the lakes had begun to matter less (at that point), the pushback against encroachment was proportionally low.   Historically, the other half of the city’s water needs were met by groundwater. But, as the city began to grow with tech parks followed by ...

Is writing video games software harder than other forms of software development? In his biography of a handful of video games, Blood, Sweat and Pixels , Jason Schreier answers it with an emphatic Yes.   First, he points out, video games are interactive. Which means they don’t move in a linear fashion, unlike say an animated movie or a movie like Avatar . Secondly, the game consoles (e.g. Xbox, or PlayStation) have newer, faster, better hardware capabilities every year. If you don’t come up with a game that can use those newer capabilities, your game will look tame and old . But that hardware is still under development, which means things are continuously changing: “Making a game is like constructing a building during an earthquake.”   Third, games need other software tools like photo creators, and physics engines (you don’t want to program the laws of physics each time, do you?). These tools keep changing. Or the tools could do so much more with the improved hardwa...

There was a recent paper that said that economic inequality in India has increased so much that it’s worse today than even during the British Raj – it’s the era of Billionaire Raj, it proclaims. Apparently the first version of this paper was published in 2017; and what we got now was the updated version.   Pranay Kotasthane isn’t convinced by the paper. He reminds us of a question that was asked about the first version – how does one find out the wealth of individuals? The original paper had used “survey data to estimate the incomes of the non-rich” and was “relying on income tax data to estimate the incomes of the rich”. Many had argued that the methodology was wrong on both fronts – (1) plenty of rich people don’t pay taxes (as we know all too well) and (2) who answers surveys honestly, let alone on a topic like how much wealth they have. Weirdly, the second edition of the paper doesn’t address these questions on its methodology, he points out.   Second, he says tha...

Tim Harford wrote a thought provoking piece on the many similarities, lessons and warnings from a form of fake’ness that’s been around for far longer than social media – art forgeries.   He bases this on things said and done by a master art forger named Eric Hebborn. In his autobiography, he declared that a Brueghel painting in the New York Mets Museum was a fake that he’d created. The museum wasn’t happy: “We don’t believe it’s a forgery, and we believe that the story told by Mr. Hebborn in this book is not true.” Was the museum lying because it didn’t want to admit it had been conned? Was the forger lying to grab headlines? How does one know what the truth is?   This problem applies to fake everything today. Is that video of a politician or actor saying or doing something real? Or is it a fake as those folks claim?   There are fakes and then there are deepfakes. “Deepfake AI is a type of artificial intelligence used to create convincing image, au...