Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The mathematical number ‘e’ has a celebrity status in maths, writes Steven Strogatz in The Joy of x : “A few numbers are such celebrities that they go by single-letter stage names, something not even Madonna… can match.”   That line got me thinking. Why did it take me a very long to understand why ‘e’ is such a famous number? I mean, I am an engineer and all those years of maths and physics prior to that meant I had run into ‘e’ in all kinds of places. Within maths itself, the “natural” logarithm is to the base ‘e’, not 10, but that I dismissed as an arbitrary human choice. But I could also see ‘e’ in real world phenomenon, from the charging of a capacitor and inductor to the rate of radioactive decay.   I’d always dismissed ‘e’ popping up in all kind of real world phenomenon as a coincidence. I mean, my idea of ‘e’ was based on how schools introduce ‘e’. Via an equation that seems contrived: How can the occurrence of such a ridiculously defined number popping up e...

The best medical products were developed in the West. Inevitably, clinical trials were done on Western folks. Were there differences between white people and the rest (black, brown, yellow) that were relevant to the product – nobody knew for sure. The trust in Western processes, the aura around their products, and the lack of alternatives meant the rest of the world would use those medical products.   But now, writes Rahul Matthan, concerns are being raised. He cites pulse oximeters, those easy-to-use devices that measure oxygen saturation. Their usage spiked as even the common man started using them as a quick and cheap check to be run during COVID-19 times. “The fact is that these devices have largely been tested on lighter-skinned people, their algorithms tuned to the light absorption and reflection characteristics of paler skin. As a result, they perform poorly on darker complexions.” The same problem, he says, is being found with melanoma (cancer) detection algorithms...

During our vacation in Ladakh, I was blown away by the Himalayas. It is not just their height that was so impressive, it was also the fact that they are seemingly endless. And to think I was just seeing a tiny part of the range when the Himalayas stretch for thousands of kilometers.   I was awestruck by the physical mountains, their height, their ruggedness, their snow-capped beauty, and the visibility of the power of the erosive forces – first, along the slopes where the snow had melted and flown down year after year for millennia and carved paths through those hard rocks; and second, at the foot of the mountain, where the water accumulated and form a river that then cuts across rocks as it flows onward. One truly understands that phrase to convey difficulty, “a mountain to climb”, only against a backdrop like this.   For some reason, though I am neither religious nor spiritual, all this reminded me of a passage from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maint...

As it became evident that mass extinction events had happened in the past, Christianity scrambled to explain them. Yes, they were cataclysmic events, but they were “directional and purposeful” went the argument, writes David Quammen in his wonderful book The Tangled Tree .   In the 1800’s, a geologist, Charles Lyell, published a book that said the processes and events that shaped the earth were erosion, deposition, and volcanic eruptions. And he added that those forces also led to extinctions. Edward Hitchcock was aghast at this view of a planet that could “exclude a Deity from its… government”. Lyell was a believer in God, not an infidel, but the risk Hitchcock saw was that the theory might drive others into godless ideas…   He was right. Well, at least in the case of one particular reader. His name was Charles Darwin and he combined three points to form his famous theory:         Offspring resemble their parents - inheritance     ...

Games like chess can and have been played online. Not just friends playing with each other, even tournaments have been conducted that way. That creates a problem, writes Joe Posnanski: “Because computers are so much better than people at chess now, there’s a big, big problem with cheating. People playing online will often use a chess engine to defeat people and build up their ratings.” This has set off a cat and mouse game: “Chess.com has instituted ultra-sophisticated methods of tracking down cheaters and then closing their accounts.”   Some time back, the rising star, Hans Niemann, defeated world champion Magnus Carlsen. An upset, no doubt. But Niemann didn’t get a single point in the rest of the tournament. So this guy can beat the world champion but not even a scrape a draw in his other matches? Then it happened again… soon after, Niemann beat Carlsen again. Carlsen was convinced Niemann was cheating – he didn’t say it officially – but he tweeted something that indi...

In The Power of Moments , the authors describes a campaign in one city in the US to remove segregation, specifically the whites-only lunch counters. Here’s the surprising aspect of that (successful) movement: “What’s less well-known about this story is that the demonstrators didn’t just show courage. They practiced it. They rehearsed it.” Huh? A civil rights leader from the era, James Lawson explains: “The difficulty with non-violent people and efforts is that they don’t recognize the necessity of fierce discipline and training.” Lawson taught the crowd “how to behave”, how to avoid breaking other laws, how to step-in for others, even how to dress for the occasion! But he didn’t stop there: he had them engage in role-plays. He got in white friends to come in, to crowd the protestors, to try and provoke them, even push them a bit. “The simulated attacks were brutal but essential… (Lawson wanted to teach them how to) suppress the natural urges to fight back or run away.” ...

Thanks to the Coronavirus, the lockdown has been enforced in Bangalore. So one has to work from home. Those with working spouses suddenly discover that the Wi-Fi bandwidth isn’t enough for two people working from home. Then there’s the issue of sharing bandwidth with the on-vacation kid(s) who want to watch Netflix and YouTube. The EU’s answer to this problem? Since you can’t control the kids + retired, you cut off the source instead: “The EU has called on streaming services such as Netflix and YouTube to limit their services in order to prevent the continent’s broadband networks from crashing as tens of millions of people start working from home.” Thank God the Indian government hasn’t take such crazy measures. Non-working spouses resent the work-from-home spouse who takes over a room and insists on pin drop silence (“Hey, I’m working”) and demands endless cups of tea, snacks and meals…. to be served in “his” room. In our apartment complex, we have slinging matches th...

Simple rules, applied long enough and in conjunction with other simple rules, can result in enormously complicated outcomes and systems. Often, the outcome is not even remotely close to our intention. This is something we know well from experience; and yet we also continue to act and believe that there exist some areas where this isn’t true. This tendency to believe (or apply) a rule in some areas but not others has a technical name: domain dependence. The laws of physics are one such example. Most of the laws are fairly straight forward; and yet the universe they produce is insanely complicated… in comparison to what you may expect by looking at each law in isolation . It’s when they come together that things become really complicated. Or take sci-fi writer, Isaac Asimov’s famous “three laws of robotics”, formulated in 1942: 1)       A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2)   ...

A year or so back, we bought a science kit for our then 5 year old daughter. As with all such kits, the highlight was supposed to be the volcano (vinegar with baking soda). And as we’ve discovered so many times since, that experiment is never anywhere near as spectacular as the pics will show or what you think it will be… But that activity still got her interested in “science experiments”, many more of which have since been done based on YouTube and various kits. One of her first experiments was to catch a couple of ants in a bottle and observe them with the magnifying glass provided in the kit. Any attempts at telling her to leave the poor ants alone was met with a ferocious “Do you or do you not want me to do science experiments?” response. Oh, what horrors we inflict in the name of science. (Note: she’ll call her friends who “play” with ants the ant bullies…) The wheel with different colors (or patterns) that merge when the wheel is spun fast blew her mind. How can that be...

“Any explanation is better than none.” -          Nietzsche We love to cite reasons for everything that happens. If the reason is correct, all the better; but that’s not a must. Obviously, nobody says that to themselves, but if you check out many of the “reasons” floating around, you’d see what I mean. It turns out that we don’t just stop at attributing causes to real life events. People even try and find root causes for battles from movies , like the Battle of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back ! So what were the reasons Darth Vader and Co couldn’t crush and kill the rebels in that battle? “Don’t place unaccountable religious fanatics in wartime command, and never underestimate a hegemonic power’s ability to miscalculate against an insurgency.” Well ok, those reasons would apply even today in the real world; so maybe this analysis wasn’t a total waste of time after all! A comment on Slashdot to the above analysis said: “…peo...