Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Extended deterrence . It refers to America’s promises to use its firepower, including nukes , to protect (some of) its allies. It emerged after World War II, with Europe destroyed and needing to rebuild, not spend on arming itself against the USSR. It extended to Japan since the Americans didn’t want Japan to arm itself and risk another war down the road. It covered South Korea since Korea had become a symbolic line in the sand against communist expansion in Asia.   In this interview/chat , one of the participants said: “We never implemented extended deterrence out of altruism or charity… This allowed us to keep the economies and political systems of our allies free, democratic, and capitalist, which created open markets for the US.”   Another benefit (from the US perspective, that is) of such extended deterrence was that fewer countries pursued nuclear weapons. Of the 34 or so US allies, only France pursued nukes. Why? Because they feared (rightly, as events have pr...

Here’s how Nathan Lent describes a nerve in Human Errors : “Nerves are bundles of tiny individually wrapped cables called axons that convey impulses from the brain to the body (and vice versa).”   Take the nerve with the initials RLN (Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve), which connects the brain to the larynx (voice box). Given how close the brain is to the voice box in your neck, you’d think the RLN would be a few centimetres long. But no. Instead, it winds its way from the brain to the upper chest, loops under the aorta (heart area) and reaches the voice box! “The RLN is more than three times longer than it has to be. It winds through muscles and tissue that it need not.”   There is no functional benefit, so why does the RLN “travel this long, lonely road”? For the answer, we need to start with the ancient fish, which is where this nerve originated. From where it continued in all vertebrates. In those ancient fish, the RLN connected the brain to the ancestor of the voice ...

Many people, include Indians, often compare how our country is doing with China. But China is five times richer, so not all comparisons are fair. However, as Pranay Kotasthane writes , there are also many areas where a comparison between the two is fair, and sadly, India does much worse than China.   One , agricultural output: “Although India has a third more land under cultivation than  China , it harvests only a third as much produce by value.” Two , medical colleges: “India has the highest number of medical colleges globally, yet China produces 3.5 times the doctors India produces yearly .” (I had gone into the reasons behind this in an earlier blog ). Three , vaccines: “India is the world’s largest vaccine maker. Yet China exported five times the number of COVID-19 vaccines India could export. ” Four , school teacher salaries: “Indian teachers in government schools are much better paid than in China, yet China beats India in student learning outcomes.” ...

So much has been written about the tariff wars Trump has unleashed. A lot of it is just Trump-bashing. Others obsess over the impact on the “great” US alliance with Europe and Canada. Which is why I found Ben Thompson’s take so refreshing – it was mostly about the country that really matters in all this, China. And equally, why America cannot move manufacturing to itself.   First , the US/West thinks of manufacturing the way it used to be, i.e., before China changed manufacturing altogether. He explains what he means by that. The one-word answer? Scale. Aka quantities. The more one manufactures, the more the efficiencies of scale, which reduces costs, that then increases affordability and thus demand. The more money there is to be made, the more the factories invest to optimize things. China has been in this virtuous cycle mode for decades. To imagine that the US (or West) can come to that level of manufacturing efficiency and skills any time soon is just impossible. “This...

After the eye, Nathan Lent looks into the “design defects” of human nasal sinuses in Human Errors . They are those huge cavities (there’s a lot of empty space in our skull) with mucus membranes. When we breathe air, it passes through these “filters” to prevent dust and germs from entering the body. In addition, they also warm and humidify the air we breathe. Of course, eventually the mucus gets saturated, at which point it is dumped into the stomach: “(Stomach is) the safest place for the mucus, since the bacteria and viruses it contains can be dissolved and digested by the acid there.”   Sinus problems start when this system gets “gummed up”. At that point, the bacteria aren’t getting cleared, accumulate enough to form colonies, and in the worst cases, sometimes manage to enter the (rest of the) body.   So why do humans suffer more sinus problems than almost any other species? There are many reasons, and one of the important ones is that: “The mucus drainage syste...

Nathan Lent’s book on the “design defects” in the human body, Human Errors , is endlessly fascinating. But why write a book on errors when there are so many “working” things? For one: “By exploring human shortcomings, we can peer into our past. Each and every flaw… tells a story about our species’ evolution.”   He starts with the most famous flaw that lies in our eyes: “The photoreceptor cells of vertebrate retinas appear to be installed backward – the wiring faces the light, while the photoreceptors face inward, away from it.” BTW, it’s not just us – it’s the same for all vertebrates, from fish onwards. But not all species have their eyes wired this way: “Interestingly, the retina of… octopi and squid – is not inverted.” This proves that: “Nature ‘invented’ the camera-like eye at least twice, once in vertebrates and once in cephalopods.”   The problems this arrangement creates for vertebrates are many: Light must travel around the bulk of photoreceptor...

Ever heard of Erasmus Darwin? Unlikely. He was the grandfather of the famous Charles Darwin. In his time though, Erasmus was a “towering figure in his own right”, writes Carl Zimmer in Life’s Edge . He believed in a unified vision of life, but realized nobody would read a long technical book. So he came up with the idea of a new genre: scientific poetry! “Darwin turned the finer points of botany into hugely popular verse.” Impressive, given that he lived in the age of Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley.   One of his poems, The Temple of Nature , introduced his belief in the idea of evolution (“New power acquire and larger limbs assume”). Yes, he had no proof – his grandson would do that decades later. As expected, many were appalled by the idea that species changed over time, as opposed to God creating them in that state from the beginning.   But others were intrigued. Including writers like Percy Shelley. In 1816, Shelley and his lover, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin went ...

Miriam Posner’s article on supply chains starts off with a common question. Do exploitative work conditions exist because global corporations care only for profits, while third world countries are both cheap and don’t care about labour conditions? The answer, as you might have guessed, isn’t simple. But the information she finds while exploring that question is very interesting.   But first, she points out another aspect of supply chains around us: “The world is unpredictable—you’ve got earthquakes, labor strikes, mudslides, every conceivable tragedy—and yet as a consumer I can pretty much count on getting what I want whenever I want it. How can it be possible to predict a package’s arrival down to the hour, yet know almost nothing about the conditions of its manufacture?” The ignorance, she says, isn’t limited to us customers. Even companies themselves don’t know! That may seem outrageous, but it is a feature, not a bug: “This partial sight, erected on a massive scale, ...

While America had found a new weapon (secondary sanctions and mafia diplomacy) to impose their will and policies on countries unilaterally, a new variable was growing larger and larger in the global economic equation. Yes, I am talking of China. China was the emerging economic superpower; and it lay outside America’s sphere of influence, says Jordan Schneider’s interview with Eddie Fishman.   Back then, the US and China weren’t hostile to each other. Yet, America had to be careful with its new weapon. If its unilateral sanctions hurt China, then China’s annoyance aside, there was another risk - since all manufacturing lines led to China, any (unintended) economic impact on China due to American sanctions on a 3 rd country could set off a rippling effect that might then get magnified into an economic tsunami that slammed into the world’s economy. So all such unilateral sanctions needed to make an exception for China.   Today, that list of exceptions has expanded to In...

On Operation Sindoor and what it set off, there has been endless news, fake news, wishful news and “what one hoped was true” all jostling for attention and belief. Even now, the dust has not settled and both sides claim victory.   It is in this context that I found Pranay Kotasthane’s post refreshing. He says India’s action was significant on 3 fronts: (1) It struck terror hubs not just in PoK but also deep inside Pakistan “proper”; (2) There was no element of surprise; the build up wasn’t hidden though Pakistan didn’t know what exactly would happen. Or where . Or when exactly; (3) It was proportionate and limited to hit only elements Pakistan pretends it has nothing to do with.   Either the Pakistanis are brazen and/or they can’t fully control certain terrorists came out when: “The photos of a US-designated terrorist leading the funeral function of terrorists’ coffins draped in Pakistani flags, with Pakistani military officials in the background, further reduc...

Our trip to Pisa was to see the Leaning Tower. It took almost 200 years to build due to various wars (contrast that with the Colosseum which got built in a decade). At 55+ meters tall, and with 251 steps, it started to tilt during its construction itself. By the 1990’s, the tilt was almost 10 degrees. Subsequent restoration work has reduced the tilt a bit. When we climbed the tower, we could see several bells on it – hence its other, less famous name as the bell tower. Right next to the tower is a cathedral with a massive dome, named the Duomo di Pisa. We couldn’t go into that, but the cathedral next to it (see pic above) was open. Impressive artwork inside cathedrals was almost expected by now in Italy, and this one didn’t disappoint. ~~   And then it was a quick train tide back to Florence, pick up the bags and onto Venice. My wife had seen a lot of another water-y city, Amsterdam, so she wasn’t sure how different Venice would be. Until she saw it – very different. ...

Why did Korea get split? Tomas Pueyo’s account of the events leading to the division of Korea reads like a thriller (except it is real and tragic). In thriller/ movie style, he posts a pic from the Yalta conference in Feb, 1945 with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin in it and says it all started there…   At this point, it is a foregone conclusion that Germany will be defeated. The question is not “if” but “when”. But in the Pacific, against Japan, the war is showing no signs of ending. The US asks the USSR to join the war against Japan, but Stalin stalls: he will join, he says, 3 months after Germany falls . “This would end up determining the future of Korea, but none of them knew it at the time.”   Germany surrenders on May 8 th , 1945. That means the USSR will declare war on Japan on August 8 th . This should be good news for the Americans. Except that on July 16 th , the US acquires the atomic bomb. They don’t need Stalin anymore, no need to split the spoils of Asi...

From Rome, we took the train to Florence. In Italian, it’s called Firenze. It is the one city whose English name doesn’t sound anything like its native name. (Roma – Rome, Milano – Milan, Genova – Genoa, Napoli – Naples, and then Firenze – Florence. Google gave no answers on the naming contrast, only the same exasperated question by so many others: “Why did the English decide to Anglicize Italian names? Surely they are not too difficult to pronounce?”   So let’s leave the name aside. Florence is a small town, with none of the hustle of a big city. Quite, relaxed, peaceful, enjoyable. The city is home to the famous Pont Vecchio bridge (literally Old Bridge) which has many shops on it, esp. a lot of jewellery and gold shops.   The city is also home to some of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, from Michelangelo to da Vinci to Botticelli to Donatello and so many more. The list of great artworks was, therefore, never-ending… (The Medicis, the richest family of t...

As my 10 yo daughter’s grammar book said, a metaphor is a figure of speech that describes something via a comparison that isn’t literally true e.g. “The world is your oyster” and “All the world is a stage”.   If you combine multiple metaphors in a train of thought, it can be illuminating. Or funny. Or both. Like: “When you open that Pandora’s box, you will find it full of Trojan horses.” Or this line from the serial Futurama : “If we can hit that bull’s-eye then the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards.” Or the time an Irish parliamentarian said: “Mr. Speaker, I smell a rat. I see him floating in the air. But mark me, sir, I will nip him in the bud.” We don’t nit-pick about the weirdness of such combined metaphors – they’re just too funny.   Funnily though, in the British comedies, Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister , Bernard Woolley did nit-pick, and yet one doesn’t feel put off by what he points out. In fact, it adds to the humour. '...

A fter the Vatican visit, the next day was all about going around in Rome. Starting with a guided tour of the Colosseum. Our guide asked us to guess how long it took to construct the Colosseum. The answer was surprising: just 10 years. It takes longer today to build a metro station in Rome today, she joked. Rome may not have been built in a day, but it sure wasn’t built at a crawling pace either. Jokes aside, our guide acknowledged that was possible because they used slave labour back then.   The underground system below the arena that housed the wild animals and gladiators with its many holding areas and passageways is open and visible. This guide too was an archaeologist (like the one at the Vatican), which explained why she was so keen to convey the reality of the Colosseum, not the nonsense that Hollywood peddles, she said contemptuously.   Yes, it was all bread and circus, something to keep the masses entertained. No, gladiators did not fight to the death. Sure, ...

If the US had such a powerful non-military weapon (secondary sanctions and mafia diplomacy), why didn’t they use it when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 – the “first” Ukraine “war”?   Multiple reasons, explains says Jordan Schneider’s interview with Eddie Fishman. (1) It happened suddenly and without warning. The Americans were caught unawares, and thus had no strategy in place on how to react. They found themselves continuously reacting to events on the ground. (2) Russia was (is) a huge economy and the world’s largest exporter of fossil fuels, so the cascading effects of crippling the Russian economy were too risky. (3) The world was still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, and Obama wasn’t sure if it was safe to rock the world’s economic boat. (4) Europe was entirely dependent on Russian oil and natural gas. “(The West) don’t know what kind of sanctions are tolerable to their own economies.” (5) Neither the US nor the EU was willing to risk all-out economic ...