Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Why did humans develop hierarchies? Why couldn’t everyone stay equal to everyone else in the group? Brian Klass looks into the commonly accepted theories on the topic in his book, Corruptible .   The first theory is the one most of us are familiar with. Once humans discovered agriculture, they began to have surpluses. By definition, some people had more surplus than others – inequality had gotten started. Further, agricultural surpluses in turn required storage systems, accounting systems (to maintain records of who had how much excess), and protection systems (to protect the surplus) all of which led to specialists in different roles – hierarchies had begun. Klass calls this the “peas theory” (pun intended) – it all began with agriculture.   The other theory is more nuanced. Assume two groups of hunter-gatherers. One lived in the Amazon basin where food was plentiful in all directions. If someone forced you off your land, no big deal – you just moved somewhere else an...

War Thunder is a free online video game that goes all out in its simulation of “realistic vehicle and weapon physics ”, writes Rich Stanton here and here . Since the weapons and tanks they have in the game exist in the real world, there are many online arguments “about the accuracy or otherwise of particular hardware”.   In one such incident, the argument was over the French Leclerc Main Battle Tank. Specifically, the question was about exact speed of rotation of the tank’s turret. One participant thought the best way to prove he was right was by (hold your breath) posting portions of the manual of the real tank! So much for such documents being classified material…   It turns out this wasn’t the first or last time classified military material was posted to settle online debates. The site owners are now used to being on the lookout for any material on their forums that may be classified and try to take it down.   This being the Internet, the argument then cha...

In 1986, Yoshizumi Ishino found something weird in the DNA of the E.coli bacteria, writes Walter Isaacson in The Code Breaker : “He found five segments of DNA that were identical to each other. These repeated sequences … were sprinkled between normal looking sequences of DNA, what he called “ spacers ”.” He didn’t dig deeper, but did publish his observation.   By 1992, such repeated sequences and spacer segments were being found in more and more bacteria. Weirdly, these repeated sequences were palindromes . (Palindromes are words and even sentences that read the same from front to back, and back to front. Examples include Malayalam and “Able was I ere I saw Elba”. DNA palindromes means the DNA letters – A, T, G and C - read the same in both directions).   This raised the question - The genetic code of bacteria is very small (obviously). Why would they “waste” it in duplicating stuff? Unlikely, right? Did that then mean that it must serve some purpose after all? ...

Everyone has heard of Moore’s law . (It was and is a prediction, not a law like the laws of physics). It says the number of transistors that can be packed in a chip will double every 18 months or so. For decades, it has held true. The other side of that equation is less well known and is called Rock’s law . It says the cost of setting up a chip manufacturing unit doubles every 4 years. Why? As transistors get tinier, the tech to manufacture gets more expensive. Foundries have to keep pouring money into improving manufacturing capabilities. The manufacturing units for the highest end chips are very expensive, writes Pranay Kotasthane in When the Chips are Down .   Obviously the majority of chips do not need to be at the cutting edge. And the further away one moves from the cutting edge, the more one finds Asian countries at the pinnacle.   While the cutting-edge lithography machines are made in the Netherlands (ASML), Japanese companies (Canon and Nikon) dominate the ...

Nathan Rothschild, he of the famous uber rich Rothschild family, got into the banking business only in 1811. And yet, when the British were fighting Napoleon in 1814, they turned to him for help. Why? Because the British needed a way for their war fighting money to reach the Continent. And by this time, the brothers had branches in most European cities. Plus, Rothschild had “acquired valuable experience as a smuggler of gold to the Continent”, writes Niall Ferguson in The Ascent of Money .   The British authorized him to collect up to ₤ 6,00,000 within 2 months, and ensure its availability at specified ports in Europe. It was an “immense operation” which the Rothschild brothers managed to pull off. And the rewards were in proportion to the risks – they got hefty commissions.   Napoleon lost, got exiled… and returned to power. As war seemed imminent again, the Rothschilds decided to proactively buy up as much gold as possible, in preparation for a long war, and a repeat...

Starting from 1979, China’s changed in policy to focus on economic growth rather than ideology, a stance famously captured in Deng Xiaoping’s quote: “It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.” Sure, the CCP (Communist Party of China) still maintains controls with an iron fist. Sure, they still tightly control what topics cannot be spoken about. Sure, they built the Great Firewall of China to control information flow via the Internet. But all that’s about staying in power, not about ideology.   Ironically, it’s the US that focuses on ideology! No, I am not talking about their wars against communism during the Cold War era because those were understandable. Rather, I am talking about the Iraq war which was as much as about those non-existent Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction as it was about the Bush-Cheney idea that toppling Saddam (and later Gaddafi) would set off the spread of democracy in the Middle East.   Being from a country t...

A couple of years back, I wrote a blog on why it is difficult to end a war . Why wars start is a much easier question (obviously). We know of wars benefiting the economy of the country going to war. Provided they win, of course! But what if you were not even a combatant nation and yet reaped the benefits of a war between other nations? Michael Schaller points out such an example in his book, Altered States . Between 1945 and 1950, the US had been unable to get the Japanese economy going. And then the Korean war broke out. Suddenly: “Toyota received a military order for 1,000 trucks. Within a year it had sold 5,000 vehicles to U.S. forces and boosted monthly production to over 2,000 units. Workers' annual wages doubled.” Years later, President Kamiya described those orders as “Toyota's salvation” because the company used its profits from the sales and technology transfers to modernize its operations and began passenger car production. Other Japanese companies ben...

Albert Einstein once said about wars: “To my mind to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.” Few would go that far. In war, it is kill or be killed. If that’s not an existential choice, what is? Besides, some wars are truly dharma yudh ’s. The loss of life apart, wars usually have a huge economic cost, for both the victor and the loser. And as former US President James Madison wrote in “Political Observations”, war is the enemy “most to be dreaded” when it comes to civil liberties: “In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied…(all that inevitably leads to) opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both.” And so Madison concludes: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Then there’s the issue that wars create the “merchants of death”, what...

I read this adapted extract from Fred Vogelstein’s book, Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution , and boy, I am already drooling to read the book. In 2005, Google was already working on its smartphone project. But two years later, when Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, Google felt like the “iPhone was a kick in the stomach”. Here’s how one of the architects of Android (Google’s smartphone OS), Chris DeSalvo, described his reaction to the iPhone: “As a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’…What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties.” Google’s plans for the smartphone market were based on three points: 1)       Eventually, technology and bandwidth would allow people to surf on the move, via their phones. 2)      Telecom carriers would have to come around to the phone-as-more-than-something-to-make-calls-with view (feels like such an ancient view today, doesn’t it?). ...

I have often marveled at America for being the only country which goes to war and expects zero casualties! Of course, that’s mostly because the US fights its wars way outside its borders which inevitably raises the question domestically: why should our guys die for some reason associated with another corner of the world? Starting with the advent of missiles and now with drones, it’s entirely possible for the US to fight most wars without putting any “boots on the ground”. Jonathan Bernstein argues that this new type of warfare, with no soldiers on the ground, deserves a new term. Why? To make it clear to the American public that succeed or fail, they won’t see any body bags being flown in: “The press, along with the political establishment, utterly failed to find, or at least to consistently use, a vocabulary for what was on the table. Certainly air or missile strikes are an act of war, and should be reported as such; just as certainly, those sorts of limited attacks alway...

“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...

The US in Vietnam. USSR in Afghanistan. The US again in Iraq and Afghanistan. Russia in Chechnya. What do they have in common? In each case, an overwhelmingly superior force fails to win against a guerrilla force. Why is it so? Set aside the role of “outside” support to the guerrillas. Of course, it exists and it plays a role. But does anyone really believe that outside support, which has to be hidden, can actually equalize the two sides? And yet… Turns out Andrew Mack, a historian did such an analysis way back in 1975 titled “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars”. Many of its conclusions hold good today as well: -          The deer runs for its life, the lion for dinner : The bigger country’s survival isn’t on the line; the guerrilla’s is. Bigger the stake, the harder they fight. -          Timebound v/s eternal conflict : The bigger country almost always has a timetable as to when the conflict sh...

In a recent blog , I argued about how sometimes wars are necessary. That’s what they call the Big Picture. But what about the soldier who fights that war? I am not talking about the guy who died during the war; I am talking about the guy who killed during the war and returns home. I read this article by an ex-US marine, Timothy Kudo, titled “ I killed people in Afghanistan. Was I right or wrong? ” and it raised some interesting questions. How do soldiers get themselves to kill people during war? Isn’t it the exact opposite of what all our ethics and sense of morality tells us? That one seemed easy to answer, at least for a Hindu: Didn’t the Gita call it the dharma of a soldier? But even that Krishna-Arjuna conversation brought up the point about the war being justified (or what they called a dharma yudh ). But doesn’t every country call its wars justified? In any case, armies today are professional units where a soldier could get court-martialed if he says he will pick...