Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Blackmail is illegal in most countries. As it should be, I felt. After all, unlike some acts that are crimes without making any sense (like suicide or blasphemy), surely blackmail is, well, a black and white issue, right? Apparently not. There is even a term for it: the paradox of blackmail. Let us understand it. An example would explain the paradox. If workers threaten a strike unless their pay is increased, it is not considered illegal. But if you threaten to expose someone’s affair unless he pays you, that’s called blackmail. And hence illegal. But from a purely logical point of view, shouldn’t a “Give me money or else” threat always be considered blackmail? That’s the paradox. I know, I know, some would argue that the difference between the two is the motive. The workers are demanding more wages often because of their existing wages being low. Whereas the blackmailer of the above example is just out to make some easy money. Not so fast. The counter-argument to tha...

Adam Smith once wondered that even though water is far more critical to life than diamonds, it is diamonds that are worth so much more! Jeff Jarvis asks the modern day equivalent of that question: “If information is so much more valuable to society than entertainment, why is it so hard to build a business—namely, journalism—around selling access to information?” In contrast to movies and serials that continue to thrive. His answer is very, well, informative. The key point? “Information itself cannot and must not be owned…That is, you cannot copyright the  fact  that the Higgs boson was discovered at CERN in 2012, you can copyright only your  treatment  of that information: your cogent backgrounder or natty graphic that explains WTF a boson is. ” If you are wondering why society should not allow the information to owned by anyone, here’s why: “Society cannot find itself in a position in which information is property to be owned, for then the authoriti...

The Fermi paradox asks why we haven’t found any other civilizations in our massive universe? Surely, statistically, in such a large area, advanced civilizations that can broadcast signs of their existence and/or emit other signs of their existence must have come up multiple times. Why then haven’t we found any? Karl Schroeder, a science fiction author, has an interesting take on that. He starts by rephrasing Arthur C. Clarke's famous declaration that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don't exist, or we can't see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems . I vote for the latter.” That is an interesting argument: it basically says we don’t find these other advanced civilizations because they are in perfect harmony with their environment. And so we can’t spot anything even when we are looking right a...