Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Douglas Adams’ famous book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , has a famous “answer to life, the universe and everything”, produced by a supercomputer (who else?). The answer (drumbeats): “42” What the hell?! Here is tech blogger Venkatesh Rao’s take on that answer: “(Adams nails) the fact that it’s an extremely ill-posed question by giving this ludicrous answer (which) forces you to do a lot of philosophical soul-searching and understand what it is you’re actually trying to think about.”   In recent weeks, I stumbled upon 3 great articles on these related points: the “meaning” of life, and not knowing what one is passionate about.   The first one was a letter Hunter S Thompson wrote to his friend. He quoted Shakespeare’s famous “To be, or not to be: that is the question” line: “Indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal.” Even if you find your passion, your goal, Thompson calls it the “tragedy of life”: “We se...

Remember Kepler’s laws from my earlier series and how they predicted that planets would have elliptical orbits? Then came Newton and his theory of gravitation, predicting that the orbits shouldn’t be perfectly elliptical because, hey, the planets would exert a pull on each other thereby “distorting” the orbit a bit. In his book, The Character of Physical Law , Richard Feynman pointed out a very interesting aspect of the laws of physics: “When a law is right it can be used to find another one… This process has developed into an avalanche of discoveries.” Feynman used Newton’s laws of gravitation to explain things with 2 examples: 1)       Uranus’ orbit didn’t match the predicted “distortion” from the perfect ellipse for Uranus. Did that mean Newton’s law was wrong? Or, was the law right, in which case it implied the existence of a yet-to-be-discovered planet that was causing the “funny behavior”? It turned out Newton’s law was right; and thus we foun...

You’d think the term “tech companies” would refer to any company in, well, the technology sector: so pretty much any engineering company. In other words, the list should include everything from Apple to Intel to L&T to BHEL, right? Wrong! Take the company I work for: General Electric, or GE. As Ian Bogost says : “GE makes almost everything — from light bulbs to medical imaging devices to wind turbines to locomotives to jet engines.” And yet GE is not considered a tech company! You can see that when Bloomberg’s Shira Ovide and Rani Molla recently wrote: ““Non-tech titans like Exxon and GE have slipped a bit” in top valuations.” In fact, when the markets closed last Monday: “At the close of trading this Monday, the top five global companies by market capitalization were all U.S. tech companies: Apple, Alphabet (formerly Google), Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. Bloomberg, which reported on the apparent milestone, insisted that this “tech sweep” is unprecedented, even...

“Confusion about culture was just part of the culture this year.” -         -   Joshua Rothman Guess which word Merriam-Webster declared as 2014 Word of the Year? The surprising answer: “culture”! Why that word? Joshua Rothman explains : “The word “culture,” they explain, was simply the word that saw the biggest spike in look-ups on their Web site.” Raymond Williams, Rothman points out, talks of 3 divergent meanings of the term: 1)       “There’s culture as a process of individual enrichment”; 2)      “Culture as a group’s “particular way of life”” (e.g. French culture); and 3)      “Culture as an activity, pursued by means of the museums, concerts, books, and movies that might be encouraged by a Ministry of Culture”. Worse, says Williams, these meanings often compete with each other. Ok, so the word has multiple, divergent meanings. But why the sharp spike in lookups on the...

In Greek mythology, Procrustes was the giant who stretched or cut his victims to make them fit his bed. Today, the eponymous term refers to a person who imposes conformity without concern for individuality. This, of course, is what Adam Smith’s capitalism meant in the Industrial Age. In his TED talk on keeping people motivated at the workplace , Dan Ariely describes how Smith’s capitalism placed emphasis on efficiencies, which meant breaking down things into steps, and then creating specialists for each step. Eventually, everyone becomes a cog in the wheel and doesn’t know the big picture, or how they contribute to the final output. At which point they stop caring. Fast forward to the Information Age. Now worker alienation can be costly. As Ariely describes it: “And you can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their...