Viswanathan K's Thoughts

We know of the Internet of Things (IoT) – it refers to interconnected devices that “talk” to each other. Like the wearable fitness sensors that report back to your smartphone. A decade or so back, there was also talk of the industrial variant of it, the so called Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), writes Nicholas Welch: “The belief was that the falling cost of cloud computing, sensor costs, and machine learning — coupled with new connectivity technologies such as 5G or IPv6 — would lead to a revolution.” Revolution in what? In manufacturing efficiency, in predicting when an equipment would have problems (say your washing machine or a wind turbine) and then proactively sending the service guy to fix it, in reducing system downtime and thus productivity increases. Add data analytics on top of that, and we should have had massive productivity increases. So why didn’t that happen?   Simply put, there are too many different players whose systems needed to be integrated. (1) ...

In one of the tales in Nitin Pai’s Nitopadesha , an elephant sees a tiger getting ready to attack a deer and its fawn. If she thumped the ground, the deer and her fawn could escape. But that would mean the tiger would instead attack a stag on the other side. The question of the story: what should the elephant do? Either choice would mean the death of someone.   The tale takes us through the way one would assess. Is saving two lives better than saving one? But saving two lives means sentencing the stag to death – who gave the elephant the authority to decide that? Round and round the arguments go. The moment one has an argument for one, there is a counterargument for the other. We might have the luxury of time, but the elephant has to make a choice within moments. Worst of all, not making a choice still leads to the deer’s death.   No, it’s not a Vikram - Vetaal story with a right answer. Instead, the moral is to remind us that governance is hard and involves such decisions. ...

The Union Finance Commission is the entity that recommends how to split the tax pool between states and the center. Less well known are the State Finance Commissions (SFC) that were constituted in 1992 to decide on the next level – how to split the tax pool between the state and local governments.   Few states have bothered to reconstitute SFC’s every 5 years, as called for in the 73 rd and 74 th amendments to the constitution. Further, the recommendations of the SFC are delayed, on average, by 16 months. Worse, SFC members are usually serving politicians and bureaucrats, which means bias is almost certain. If SFC’s recommend increasing the money given to local governments, then the recommendations are always rejected by (who else) the state government.   The problem, as Pranay Kotasthane says starts with those constitutional amendments: “These amendments left the devolution of funds and functions to local governments at the discretion of the state government. And...

An interesting story in Nitin Pai’s Nitopadesha is the “The Case of the Wilting Orchards”. A wise but unconventional cat is invited to a kingdom where the orchards had started dieing slowly and the vegetable gardens were failing. What was the cause, they wanted this cat to find out.   After going all over town, the cat mentions that that a large number of rats were moving up and down a hill in the town. Do you know why, he asked his host. To prospect for gems which are abundant in this region, his host responded, but can you get back to the mystery at hand. After thinking a bit, the cat says he had found the answer! The rats, he said, are digging everywhere searching for gems. Their digging is damaging the roots of the trees and plants. The gemstone hunters are either unaware or don’t care about the side-effect of their activity.   What is the solution, asked his hosts. Should we kill the rats? No, said the cat, they are just earning their livelihood and that is not w...

What could possibly be an application of a defense mechanism like CRISPR found in bacteria? To answer that, we first need to understand how the CRISPR system works. In the earlier blog , we understood that at a high level. But now we need to understand the details.   Scientists identified the pieces that played different roles: tracrRNA : It acts as a handle to latch onto the attacking virus. CRISPR RNA, aka crRNA : It uses the latched on tracrRNA and in turn acts as the guide to identify the attacking virus. Think of it like the torch that highlights the point to attack. CRISPR associated enzyme, aka Cas enzyme : This is the scissor like enzyme that uses the guide crRNA to cut up the attacking virus. See how it works? The tracrRNA attaches itself to the virus. The crRNA uses the tracrRNA to identify the virus to the Cas enzyme, who then cuts up the virus, scissor like.   Now we can get to the application that humans have devised based on this ancient bacterial...

The timing of Tim Harford’s brief history of Venice couldn’t have been better – it was right before our upcoming Italian vacation (including Venice).   How did some “muddy, flood-prone islands in the middle of a lagoon”, a region that “lacked wood, minerals, metals, even arable land” develop into a major European power?   First , of course, via trade. With Egypt, Levant (middle east) and beyond Constantinople to the Black Sea ports. The Pope’s embargo on trading with the Muslims was just ignored – Venice intended to do whatever was advantageous.   Second , muscle power. Trade usually needed the threat of violence. Venetian naval power secured trading privileges in the various sea lanes connected to Venice; and also acted as a deterrent to pirates.   Third , organizational and execution skills. In 1201, the Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, was approached to ferry an enormous crusader army to Cairo. Dandolo got Venice to work around the clock to build 5...

Pranay Kotasthane feels the chips war is unwinnable by either side. China cannot hope to build the entire chip industry in-house – there are too many things to be built from grounds-up, starting from the tools for chip design, the chip manufacturing equipment, the expertise in all aspects, the barrier of existing copyright and trade secrets… There are way too many hurdles, he writes in When the Chips are Down .   The US, by trying to move every key piece of the chip industry into Western locations, will make the cost of all chips higher. And lose all the expertise built over decades in niche areas in other parts of the world. Additionally, can the US government keep pouring money and subsidies to move everything to the West? For how long? Further, banning the sale of certain items to China will result in the loss of a huge market, right around the time when Europe ages and its market share declines. Lastly, history tells us that even private semiconductor companies can’t predic...

In 1986, Yoshizumi Ishino found something weird in the DNA of the E.coli bacteria, writes Walter Isaacson in The Code Breaker : “He found five segments of DNA that were identical to each other. These repeated sequences … were sprinkled between normal looking sequences of DNA, what he called “ spacers ”.” He didn’t dig deeper, but did publish his observation.   By 1992, such repeated sequences and spacer segments were being found in more and more bacteria. Weirdly, these repeated sequences were palindromes . (Palindromes are words and even sentences that read the same from front to back, and back to front. Examples include Malayalam and “Able was I ere I saw Elba”. DNA palindromes means the DNA letters – A, T, G and C - read the same in both directions).   This raised the question - The genetic code of bacteria is very small (obviously). Why would they “waste” it in duplicating stuff? Unlikely, right? Did that then mean that it must serve some purpose after all? ...

Nitopadesha by Nitin Pai is a play on the famous Hitopadesha tales. The book has short tales with animals as the main characters, and are meant as “moral tales for good citizens”. What makes for a good society? What is needed for good governance? The answers are not always obvious or intuitive. ~~   Take this tale about a pond where there was an agreement that a duck would catch and eat only one fish per day. One day, a duck accidentally caught two fish. He got a lot more satisfaction and nobody seemed to have noticed. So he started eating two fish everyday. When the other ducks noticed this, they started copying him – some because that duck seemed happier; others because there seemed to be no penalty. Soon the fish count fell steeply, and the ducks struggled to find enough food. It got worse. With no food (fish) left, the ducks were forced to leave the pond whereupon they fell victims to the jackals in the forest.   The moral for citizens? Balance greed and respon...

In his book, The Code Breaker , on gene editing technologies, Walter Isaacson makes an interesting observation. In the 1950’s, information theory was developed – how information can be encoded. (The most well-known example of this today are the 1’s and 0’s, the bits and bytes of computer science). But around that same time, Watson and Crick discovered the famous double helix structure of DNA. Unlike computer bits, DNA is coded in a 4-letter alphabet of A, T, G and C. But the similarity is clear – it’s all about information. And: “The flow of history is accelerated when two rivers merge.” As the code of DNA began to be understood (to some extent, at least), it became clear that DNA was like an instruction manual – it had all the information. But it didn’t do anything. “DNA doesn’t do much work. It mainly stays at home in the nucleus of our cells, not venturing forth.” Biologists began to understand the role of RNA : “RNA… actually goes out and does real work. Instead of jus...

Is the idea of NATO and joint Western defence fraying? T.Greer wrote a balanced, well-thought post on the topic. Change in views, in the list of what matters etc can be very disruptive. “Sons dishonor their fathers. Daughters rise against their mothers. Ancestral ideals are cast aside, and possibility staggers forth from its long captivity, ready to wreak vengeance on mankind.”   Fourteen years ago, well before Trump , ex-US Secretary of Defence, Robert M Gates was worried that joint Western defence was at risk. Since World War II, he said, the US (politicians, voters) felt that keeping Europe “whole, prosperous and free” was beneficial to America. But that mood was starting to change, he warned: “If current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future U.S. political leaders—those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me—may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost...

For the foreseeable future, the economic prospects for the chip industry look great, writes Pranay Kotasthane in When the Chips are Down . AI, virtual and augmented reality, cloud gaming, EV (electric vehicles), autonomous cars and crypto mining are the new/growing applications in the horizon. These are in addition to the regular phones, tablets and PC/laptop market.   When there is a lot of money to be made, there will be new ideas and attempts.   Most chips use the x86 instruction set today, which is owned by Intel and Arm. This means huge licensing fees to those companies. Those costs are one reason for the attempt to shift to RISC-V instruction set, an open-source alternative. China pushes for RISC-V for another reason too – Intel is American, Arm is British. Anything non-Western is a safer bet for them.   Similar attempts at coming up with alternatives to chip design software are underway. For the same reasons. To save on license fees, and to shift the ...

In Nuts and Bolts , Roma Agrawal talks of magnets as yet another invention that has had massive applications and impact. Wait a minute, aren’t magnets a discovery, not an invention? Technically, yes, but most magnets that are used for any applications are artificially created from metals or ceramics, or they are electromagnets, i.e., magnets produced by using electricity. (The reason for producing them is that natural magnets are too rare and too weak).   To use magnets required humans to first understand magnetism. As if that wasn’t hard enough, magnetism is intertwined with electricity, another phenomenon which took us a long time to get a grasp of. And boy, magnets are everywhere – thermostats, door catches, speakers, motors, brakes, generators, body scanners…   Understanding electromagnetism led to the understanding of electromagnetic waves. This combo of electromagnets and electromagnetic waves is what changed communication forever. From telegraphs to Wi-fi. While...

In a polarized India, several people in India wonder how much British colonialism hurt India and helped Britain. (To clarify, such people are not denying that colonialism was beneficial to the colonizer – why else would they be doing it? Their question is about the extent of damage to the colony, whether it is exaggerated or not). Quantifying that damage is hard, if not impossible. After all, there were no formal ways of tracking the purchasing power of money across countries, or metrics like GDP or per-capita income. How can you arrive at a numerical value of damage?   But other counterfactual ways of looking at the question help understand the extent of the damage, even if not numerically. Take two such examples. ~~   Take China’s solar panels industry. The Chinese government doesn’t necessarily pick or back specific companies within a sector, but it does pick sectors which it considers important – for employment, for national security etc. For such sectors, t...

The news seems negative, bad and depressing. All the time. When people are continually hit with negative/critical news about the government and the economy, they feel angry. At politicians. At business heads. The never-ending negative news on social matters leads to feelings of anger and sadness.   Pranay Kotasthane’s view on the matter is interesting. Since most of us consume our information online, he tells us the problem is aggravated: “Given how the Information Age operates, you will most likely find another instance of a similar kind in quick succession. Soon enough, you have concluded that the social problem is worsening, humans are becoming more evil, ruthless, and so on. ”   Kotasthane doesn’t go into a rant against social media. Instead, he reminds one of a counterintuitive point: “Increase in reporting of a social evil is not the same as increase in the prevalence of that social evil. Most likely, it’s the reverse for two reasons. ”   Firs...

In Nuts and Bolts , Roma Agrawal takes a look at the good old spring: “Springs are things that store energy when their shape is changed by a force. When the force is removed, they ping back to their original shape and release that energy – and this energy is made to do something useful.” The more they can be made to curve, the more energy they can store. Think of how a bow works – pull (store energy), release (energy transferred to arrow).   Springs can store energy in multiple configurations – “when squashed” (e.g. ballpoint pen), “when stretched” (e.g. trampoline), or “when twisted”. One of the easiest laws in physics was Hooke’s Law, the one that describes the relation among force, energy and stretching/compression of a spring. It was an easy equation, no calculus, perfectly linear. And thus, one never give any thought to – there are so many harder equations… Except, as Agrawal tells us: “This law was far-reaching. Beyond springs, Hooke’s Law allowed engineers to predi...

In recent years, the US has switched to what it calls the “small yard, high fence” policy. What this means is that in most areas, it will be as business as usual. But in a handful of areas, which the US deems as relevant to its national security, it will impose a lot of restrictions on what can or cannot be made available to others. This policy was clearly framed with China in mind.   High-end semiconductor chips fall in this “small yard, high fence” category. As the name suggests, the constraints and bans apply only to the highest end chips. Since most of the other countries involved in key parts of the chip industry fall under the American sphere of influence (Europe and Japan mostly; South Korea a bit more reluctantly), the “small yard, high fence” policies are enforced by those countries as well.   Not surprisingly, at the highest end of chips, this is having a crippling effect on China and Chinese companies, says Pranay Kotasthane in When the Chips are Down . Hua...

  Next up in the small inventions that make a huge difference, Roma Agrawal talks of the wheel in Nuts and Bolts . This may take you aback – what is there to write a chapter about the wheel? Don’t we even have the saying “Don’t reinvent the wheel”, which suggests that the wheel was perfected ages back?   Historical records suggest that the wheel was not invented for transportation. No, the wheel was invented for pottery! Why pottery? To create vessels to store food and water. What? As humans began to settle into agriculture and thus larger colonies, people found themselves further and further away from the fields or rivers, hence the need to store and carry food and water increased.   It was only after humans had domesticated animals and thus had something to pull a vehicle with that the “vessel-maker” wheel was transformed into a “destination-maker” wheel, writes Agrawal. But the early wheel had many drawbacks – cut from logs, they were heavy; they were uneven i...

DEI. It stands for the “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies companies follow wrt their employees. This approach was pushed for very hard by Biden. With him gone and Trump in, DEI is now in Trump’s crosshairs.   A simplistic, knee-jerk reaction would be to assume is it’s because Trump is an MCP or a misogynist or pro-white (you get the idea). But Trump’s reason is what many of us in India can relate to! He says he wants to discard DEI policies in favour of “a society   .   .   .   based on merit ”. Did that sound familiar to how many Indians feel about reservation policies?   Corporate America has been quick to fall in line with Trump. Just as quickly as they fell in line with Biden earlier. A reminder, writes Raghu Jaitley that: “Politics may be downstream of culture, but everything else is downstream of politics.”   No, Jaitley isn’t bashing politics or politicians. His point is a lot deeper. It is true that women, blacks and various other groups do...

In her book on the small inventions that make a huge difference, Nuts and Bolts , Roma Agrawal starts with the humble nail: “The nail enables us to connect things together. That might not sound like much, but the act of joining two things was once radical.” Complex systems could only be built when we could fasten things together. She includes the derivatives of the nail (rivet, screw, bolt) as part of her description, since all of them “enabled robust connections… at a vast range of scales”.   To make nails, one first needed to find metals, understand their properties, and figure ways to shape them. Metals can be hammered straight into other materials; and can be shaped into a sharp point. This isn’t a trivial point – most other materials snap or deform if you hammer them. But to shape metals into nails, humans had to find way to generate very high heat and then invent other tools to hold and beat them.   For a long time, nail making was hard (and skilled) work, wh...