Viswanathan K's Thoughts

We love our touch based devices, from the iPad to the smartphone to the Kindle. But are there better interfaces than touch that could be created? Bret Victor certainly thinks so . He points out that almost every real world object offers some feedback to our hands (“texture, pliability, temperature; their distribution of weight; their edges, curves, and ridges; and how they respond in your hand as you use them.”). Now contrast that with what you feel when you interact via touchscreens (“Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing?”). That is why Victor terms current touch tech as “ Pictures Under Glass ”: “It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.” So what is the future then? As per Victor: “Despite how it appears to the culture at large, technology doesn't just happen. Revolutionary technology comes out of long research, and research is performed and funded by inspired people...

During the good old days of the cold war, the West could call a spade a spade, an enemy an enemy. Not so with the fight against terrorism where they have to call the very people who murder them their friends. So the Saudis are “friends” as are the Pakistanis. Most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, and the Pakistanis hosted Osama bin Laden in a military town. With friends like these, who needs enemies? Well ok, you could term those as the compulsions of oil and geography (also known as the ‘supply routes to Afghanistan’). But it’s not just the American politicians who practice this charade: even Hollywood does the same. Cold war era movies often revolved around rogue Russian generals, but today, they don’t make any movie on rogue ISI or Pakistani army generals. And while Iran and North Korea are the “axis of evil”, there's deafening silence on Egypt (the other supplier of the 9/11 perpetrators). And while there is an increasing effort to build US alliances against China ...