Viswanathan K's Thoughts

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...