Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Ian Leslie starts of his article with something everyone experiences: “Being influenced by others is inevitable and essential. But it’s also true that when we over-conform to influences, we surrender individuality. ” A balance is needed. Easier said than done: “Be impervious to social influence and you get closed off from the best that your fellow humans have to offer. Be defenceless against it and you become easily manipulable, boring, and unhappy. ”   But do we have the term “influence” all backwards? Consider this long (but totally worth reading) passage by Michael Baxandall: “If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than that Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality…. If we think of Y rather than X as the agent, the vocabulary is much richer and more attractively diversified: draw on, resort to, avail oneself of, appropriate from,...

We saw this Hindi movie on the Maratha king, Shivaji named Raja Shivaji at the theatre. To be honest, my knowledge of Shivaji is entirely based on Amar Chitra Katha ’s (ACK’s), I don’t remember anything from my (school) history books.   The move is very so-so, but several things made the experience interesting.   Since the central character is a beloved figure in Maharashtra, the movie starts with the customary disclaimer on being part fictionalization, edited for entertainment, not meant to hurt religious or regional sentiments etc. The usual stuff. What was different was that the disclaimer was a whole page long! So what, you say, who reads them. Aha, this one was read out for all to hear! At breakneck speed. With words nobody uses in day-to-day life. It was taking forever to complete. We were beginning to dread that they’d follow this with a translated English reading, but thankfully that didn’t happen. ~~   I struggled with the first 45 minutes of the m...

Once upon a time, humans “gathered colors from naturally occuring materials in the world around them”, writes Whitney Balick. Ochre dug from the earth, charcoal, minerals found locally, local plants, saffron, those were the sources.   All that changed in 1856 when William Perkin, a British chemist, stumbled upon a way to turn coal tar sludge into a colored dye: “Perkin’s discovery jump-started a revolution in synthetic dye-making that would change the way most of the world made color. It wasn’t long before other chemists began to figure out how to synthesize seemingly every color of the rainbow from coal tar and other petrochemical products.” This industrialization of color set off huge environmental damage.   Multicolored waste would find its way from industry into waterways and poison the local ecosystem. Humans nearby had reactions to the chemicals, from rashes to outright poisoning. The colored products could also wreak havoc, like the lead used in paints perm...

American airports suck (to be fair, they’re not international hubs). European airports are overcrowded, chaotic and unintuitive. Bangalore’s T2 terminal is beautiful and scenic, though it doesn’t have many shops or eating places (yet). Hong Kong airport is spacious, sparkling, and has lots of shops.   And then there’s Singapore’s Changi airport. It is the only airport one would like to be “stuck” due to a delayed flight or a long layover! That’s partly because parts of the airport are a mall cum fun area open for all, not just people catching a flight. Locals come for family visits, the way you might go to a mall or a movie!   It even has a (paid) swimming pool and gym. The food options are numerous, though the more popular ones can be very crowded (it’s like a mall for the locals, remember?). Like a few European airports, it offers a city tour between flights for an overview of Singapore, though you’d need to apply for a visa if you are just passing through.   ...

The Mustafa Center in Singapore is the go-to mall for affordably priced items. Everything from phones to clothes to watches to daily use items. We spent a few hours there shopping for various things. Most malls in the city have a counter where you can apply for the reimbursement of VAT (only for foreigners like us). The details (including your passport) get keyed in, but the reimbursement happens later. How/when?   When you are leaving the country, at the airport, there’s a section for the reimbursement. Go over to the scanners and scan your passport. Bingo! It pulls up all the reimbursements from all those shop counters, adds them up and asks you whether you want it paid in cash or credited to your credit card. That simple. Quick, frictionless, no struggling to find receipts (The contrast to the difficulty in equivalent reimbursements in Europe is zameen aasmaan ka farak) . ~~   Then we went to the Singapore zoo. It is way out of the city (not surprising) which mean...

Facts rarely make anyone change their mind. We know that all too well. This is true not just about political matters but also about every belief that people hold.   Why is that? Seth Godin takes a stab at the question. We have consciously or unconsciously built stories around our beliefs, political or otherwise. And that, he says, explains why facts rarely convince anyone: “Because a good story feels true. A good story resonates.” So he says: “If I bring facts to rebut your story, they will fail .”   Is there no hope then? Godin says one can succeed: “(If) the facts I bring are the foundation for a new story .” Therefore, he says: “Part of the job of making change is working to make sure a bad story doesn’t get in the way of good facts. ”

In an earlier blog , I mentioned the discovery of bacteriophages (viruses that kill bacteria) and asked why they weren’t used as treatment/prevention for bacterial diseases? Pranay Lal’s Invisible Empire answers that question.   First, says Lal, hierarchy matters. Some top biologists at the time offered alternate explanations – what if, they said, the killer wasn’t a virus but enzymes released by other bacteria? While d’Herelle was outranked, he used bacteriophages to treat a handful of patients suffering from bacterial dysentery. Years later, he cured a few more patients suffering from the bubonic plague. He tried his method in India to treat cholera outbreaks with great success. Sadly, his successes were few and even with the India case, where the effects were on large number of people, the trials had to stop due to the start of the Satyagraha movement (non-cooperation).   The few trials conducted after that didn’t help the case for various reasons: “The small-...

Marina Bay Sands. An iconic landmark of Singapore.   A 5-star resort with a casino. It includes a luxury shopping mall. An ArtScience museum. A huge theatre. A floating Apple store. Celebrity chef and signature restaurants. The hotel part consists of 3 curved towers of 55 floors each. Joining their tops is the Sands Skypark, a 340 meter skyway shaped like a ship. The purpose of this resort? To aid with Singapore’s economic and tourism objectives. The video below gives an all-round view.   As our 14 yo daughter never tires of reminding us, we rarely never splurge on anything. So we decided to spend two days at this iconic hotel (We initially considered a one-day stay, but that would have meant we’d barely have unpacked before it would be time to checkout).   Our room was on the 13 th floor, with a great view of the Gardens by the Bay and its light show. That is a huge urban park with cooled conservatories (lounges for growing delicate plants), a (pay) area with a spe...

This summer, we’d planned to visit Dubai. But repeated attacks on Iran early this year made us reconsider. What if another round of attacks happened during our visit? What if our flight got cancelled at the last minute? What if we got stranded after reaching there?   (This was before all out war began).   So we switched to Singapore as the destination, even though we’d been there before. Even then, we were nervous – what if jet fuel ran out due to the closure of the Straits of Hormuz? Anyways, we went ahead. A benefit in all this? My wife found if we re-did the hotel bookings with the uncertainty of the war and the ceasefire, prices were a lot less! ~~   Singapore immigration was impressive. You place your passport on a scanner, look at the camera and the system compares details and face with the visa application already submitted. That’s it – the turnstile opens and you’re done. No human interaction, no questions from an immigration official about purpose of v...

One of the chapters in Pranay Lal’s Invisible Empire starts with these lines: “Say the word ‘virus’ and the first thought that comes to the mind is of the diseases they cause.” But they can also be the cure for some diseases, he writes.   The Britisher, Ernest Hankin, was sent to India. His job was to “protect British troops from infectious diseases”. Like cholera. By 1894, he was curious about the Maagh Mela in Allahabad, on the banks of the Ganga. Over 3 million devotees arrived every day during that festival. He inspected the waters during this period: “There was very little bacterial contamination of their waters despite the multitudes of people and their cattle bathing in them, discarding their waste and burning corpses along their banks.” By 1895, he had written a paper that the Ganga was cleaner than most British or European rivers , “despite the way they were treated”. He wondered why that was the case, how the Ganga managed to avoid the decay seen in European ...

We think of viruses as being tiny, much tinier than bacteria. But as they say about mutual funds, past performance is not indicative of future results! In 2003, scientists discovered a “giant” virus. A typical virus has around 100 genes, this one had 1262. More giant viruses were found from that point onwards. Pranay Lal points out something startling in Invisible Empire : “Some viruses are so large that they can be parasitized by smaller viruses.” Sounded like Russian dolls.   The discovery of giant viruses reopened the debate on how viruses came to exist. Broadly speaking, there are two schools of theories. The first one says that viruses got started just before or around the same time as life on earth (remember how viruses are said to be on the border of living and non-living? And that viruses need to insert themselves into living cells to kick into action? That is why, in theory at least, they could have gotten started before life got started). The second one says that...

In Invisible Empire , Pranay Lal points out that it was the invention of the microscope that finally proved that “infinitesimally tiny organisms” did exist: “The microscope became a weapon for scientific validation.” The inventor of some of the best microscopes of the time, Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, wrote a lot about the different types of microbes he could see. These came to be called bacteria.   As the microscopes kept getting better, the aim turned from curiosity to trying to identify which bacteria caused particular diseases. Man learnt to even isolate and grow bacteria in culture. In 1857, an unknown agricultural disease hit tobacco. Adolf Mayer found that whatever caused the disease could pass through filter paper. But not through double filter paper. He concluded that the microbe in question was a bacteria, but far tinier than anything that could be seen with the best equipment of the times.   In 1885, Martinus Beijernick was investigating a different tobacco...

Kids use AI for their schoolwork. Plenty of them use it, not as an assistant, but as the entity that does all the work. That is a problem obviously.   This blog is not on a solution for that problem (None exists. Not yet anyway). Instead, this blog is based on a post by college student Maximilian Milovidov on a course called Writing AI . What’s unique about it? “(It) might be the only one on campus where artificial intelligence was not prohibited but, rather,  required .” The spirit of this course is an interesting experiment: “What if we taught students to use AI critically, rather than insisting they ignore it or assume they're using it to cheat?” AI, after all, he says, is here to stay. You can’t wish it away any more than our ancestors could wish away the printing press.   Here’s how the course works. Students have to bring their own ideas and outlines to the class. “We fed drafts into a chatbot while documenting its suggestions and then explaining...

If you want info on questions like how to update your Aadhar card or increase views on your YouTube page, you do a search in all the usual sites like YouTube or Google. All free. So why would anyone pay for videos on such topics. Yet that is exactly what the Indian app named Seekho does. And millions pay for it. Dharmesh BA looks into Seekho . “Why would someone pay for what they could find free? What is it about the product, the design, the psychology of the user journey that turns free content into a subscription business?”   On YouTube, anyone can upload anything. On Seekho , only curated “showrunners” can post stuff. The company picks potential content creators, gives them topics, posts their videos and sees how viewers respond. If it draws clicks, the creator is enlisted (and paid). Else he is dropped. This solves the quality-drowned-in-quantity problem of much of the free Internet.   How much does it cost? ₹1 for the first week, ₹149 per month thereafter (on ...

The war on Iran has created oil shortage and oil price hikes. What I missed, in the middle of the war, was that the International Energy Agency (IEA) — the world’s top energy watchdog — asked India to share its oil with the world!   Wait a minute. Given that India imports 85% of its oil, how can we possibly have oil to share? What was the basis for the IEA ask anyway? Therein lies a tale, explains Nithin Sasikumar.   The story starts way back in 1973, when the Arab countries launched a surprise war on Israel. The US airlifted weapons and supplies to help Israel. The furious Arab states imposed a ban on all oil exports to the US and any Western country that supported Israel. Oil prices in the West quadrupled. Petrol pumps began to run out of oil. The West realized the importance of building an “oil cushion”, oil reserves that could last at least 90 days. They formed the IEA, an agency formed and led by (who else?) the West. “So if a supply disruption were to hit the...

“Social reality” is a concept that exists only in the human brain, writes Lisa Barrett in Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain . Social reality is anything we consider real though nothing in physics or chemistry would make it real – examples include national borders; or the idea that a specific portion of the earth’s orbit around the sun is January.   Scientists believe that the ability to construct social reality is because of a suite of capabilities of the (human) brain called the Five C’s. Creativity : Someone needs to decide to draw a line and call it the border of a “country”, then define what a country is. That needs creativity. Communication : The idea of a country can be explained to others. Via, say, language. Copying : This refers to the ability to teach and learn the practices of others. Only if newcomers and children can be taught or if one can learn the customs of a new place can social reality continue to exist for very long periods. Cooperation : We ...

“We behave better when we believe we’re being watched”, writes Brian Klass in Corruptible . Today, that line brings to mind CCTV cameras that are all over the place, and government systems that could get info on our online habits. But long, long ago, when policing systems were practically non-existent, how could one make people follow basic rules? This wasn’t just a law and order problem for kings. As we know all too well, if we can’t trust people and there are no systems in place to penalize and punish wrongdoers, then economic activities (and associated prosperity) never get going…   Until policing and judicial systems could be built, the way to build some basis for trust amongst people in most places was the concept of religion: “The world’s major religions are overflowing with reminders that God is watching.” Religion helped build some degree of trust, as long as everyone believed that one would pay, “either in this life or the next”.   Klass humourously calls...

My 14 yo daughter has noticed what I do in my office calls. Unlike my wife, I am usually on group calls, not one-on-one calls. This means that the parts relevant to me in the call can vary wildly. Between hardly needed to needed periodically to being the presenter. Accordingly, how much attention I pay during those calls varies wildly. As you might have guessed, my daughter picked only the data points that made me look inattentive or worse.   Let me elaborate on the “or worse” part. Sometimes, a question will be sprung at me in the middle of a call and I would not even have heard the question! Upon which, I follow the time-tested practice of blaming it on bad network connection, and ask them to repeat the question. Such instances became Exhibit A for the prosecution daughter.   At other times, I have been on my phone during calls, scrolling through various social media. Not only did these become Exhibit B, but they also got me branded (with exaggerated finger wagging ...

  In Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain , Lisa Barrett describes the structure of the brain. The brain is a network of neurons, around 128 billion of them in case of humans. The neurons continuously fire and communicate with other neurons they are connected to. And here’s something not everyone realizes: “Your brain network is always on.” Put differently, that means neurons are not triggered into action only when something happens inside or outside the body. Rather, they are talking with each other continuously. But the strength of the signal will change based on triggering events and also, yes, frequency of usage of those pathways.   A metaphor that Barrett uses to describe the brain is the airport network. Just as every combination of airports don’t have direct flights between them, similarly all neurons don’t communicate with all other neurons. Instead, both have “hubs” – a small number of points that connect to a huge number of other points. The rest (majori...

We understand the importance of perseverance. But, as Seth Godin wrote : “You can pull out every stop, fight every step of the way, mortgage your house and your reputation–and still fail. Or, perhaps, you can quit in a huff at the first feeling of frustration.   The best path is clearly somewhere between the two. And yet, too often, we leave this choice unexamined.”   It is that choice that Annie Duke has written a book about called (what else?) Quit: The Power of Knowing when to Walk Away . I haven’t read the book but her interview with David Epstein was interesting.   The biggest problem to quitting is the sunk cost fallacy: So much time and effort has already been spent, so wouldn’t quitting mean all that effort was in waste? Projects don’t get scrapped even when the cost and delays have spiraled out of control. Stocks that we bought and can’t bring ourselves to sell at a loss. There are endless examples. She has an interesting perspective on that: “Wha...

For what purpose has the brain evolved? As humans, we are biased when we encounter that question, writes Lisa Barrett in Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain . We wrongly assume that the purpose of the brain is to think: “After all, thinking is the human superpower, right?”   Wrong, says Barrett. Long, long ago, unicellular life found itself in competition with others over limited resources, the importance of any capability to sense what lay where was an evolutionary advantage – Did XYZ lie to the left or right? Gradually though, raw sense organ signals weren’t enough. Choices had to be made – was it likely one could catch the prey? Make a wrong choice repeatedly and one would die of starvation. Thus: “Energy efficiency was a key to survival.”   So Barrett concludes: “Your brain’s most important job is to control your body… by predicting energy needs before they arise so you can efficiently make worthwhile movements and survive.”   But this created...