Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Once we have GPS co-ordinates for every place, you know where every place is, right? Wrong, writes Greg Milner in his book, Pinpoint : “Those GPS coordinates do not mean much to us without a map on which to peg them.” Huh? The maps of the world, regional or global, are called Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Combining GPS with GIS is not one bit easy, rather it is a “creative merger of computer science, cartography, and database management! But why should that be the case?   Map making has historically involved a method calling triangulation. Like the name suggests, it involves measuring triangles and laying them next to each other. An alternate method is to find the latitude and longitude of a place using astronomy. Ideally, the triangulation and astronomical methods should match. Except they don’t. Why? Because the earth isn’t a perfectly shaped ellipsoid. Rather, as it is a “complicated potato shape”. Therefore, to make the two methods align: “The early land surve...

When someone says “blitzkrieg”, we immediately think of the Germans in World War II. But do you know who came up with the concept of blitzkrieg and when? The surprising answer: the British in 1916!   Tim Harford explains it all in his wonderful podcast . In 1916, Major JFC Fuller of the British Army saw a demo of the tank and realized this was the solution to the problem of World War I: how to get through the mud, trenches and barbed wire under a hail of machine gun fire? He wrote a paper spelling out how tanks could go deep behind enemy lines at a fast pace. Aided by air fire, they could create confusion and chaos in the enemy camp. It was called “Plan 1919”. As we know all too well, Plan 1919 was never put in action. Rather, it was put in action… but 20 years later... and by the Germans to run across Europe in weeks.   This is a pattern that seems to repeat itself, says Harford. Xerox, the huge photocopying machine maker in the 70’s, invented the personal computer, G...

The term “virus” comes from Latin for “poison, sap of plants, slimy liquid”. A non-living thing, in other words, writes David Quammen in Spillover . Evidence to the contrary came not from medicine but from agronomy!   The tobacco mosaic disease had hit tobacco production. It was transferrable via the sap. Filter the sap using filters through which bacteria can’t pass. No effect. The filtered sap could still spread the disease. This thing was tinier than bacteria.   A Dutch researcher, Martinus Beijerinck diluted the sap, and then infected another plant even with that diluted dose. Weirdly: “Whatever it was, (it) regained its full strength even after dilution.” That meant it was “reproducing itself”. No poison can do that. No by-product of a bacteria can do that. This was something else.   Trial and error yielded new information: “In a container of filtered sap alone, it wouldn’t grow.” Which meant it wasn’t feeding on the sap: “It needed something e...

GPS. Something the US military created. And something that makes navigation via Google Maps possible. That’s how I thought of it. That’s so much the norm that Greg Milner writes in his book, Pinpoint : “In the age of GPS, we don’t require the environment to locate ourselves.” Who needs landmarks when you have GPS to tell you where you are?!   The idea of GPS was conceptualized when the Soviets launched the first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. To prove they had really done it, the Russians put an on-board transmitter. Check the strength, movement and pattern of the signal, they said. It could only come from something in orbit. Two American scientists, William Guier and George Weiffenbach, flipped that point around and realized that the satellite could detect the position on land by the same principle. In theory.   To achieve it in practice, GPS needed multiple satellites. And to make GPS accurate at the level we take for granted, “the clocks cannot falter”: “A timin...

Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, two traveller writers of the ancient age, with diametrically styles and views on regions they visited. The former, a Genoese Christian; the latter a Muslim. But the reason for the difference in their attitudes didn’t lie in their religion per se : rather, it lay in who was in power back then, writes William Bernstein in his book on trade, A Splendid Exchange .   With the rise of Islam, the trade routes from India and China to the West fell entirely under Muslim control. The Europeans were literally locked out. Ibn Battuta, being a Muslim and thus a part of the power of the age, thus behaved like a “surly Western package tourist”: he complained about the food, the quality of hotels and the fact that the locals cheated him during his visit to China. So unhappy was Battuta in China that he didn’t even appreciate the Chinese invention of paper money. Like the “archetypal American”, he was instead exasperated by the “funny money” of China: why don’t they ...

What led to the insurrection in Washington DC? There are many in the US who believe that Trump’s supporters know their guy lost and yet refuse to accept the result. But I suspect that’s too simplistic. Rather, I think Andrew Sullivan gets it right . The legitimacy of the electoral process, he writes, has been hammered away, bit by bit, over a period of… decades!   It started off with close elections that were then pursued via the right channels. When Bush won in 2000, the narrowness of the victory meant that it had to be decided by the Supreme Court. In 2004, there was a “nasty spat over counting Ohio’s Electoral College votes”. That “spat” was limited to their parliament, not the streets.   Then came the result of 2016 when Trump’s win stunned everyone: “In 2016… many, many Democrats kept insisting that the election had somehow been rigged by the Russian government, in collusion with the Trump campaign, and the US media went on to beclown itself with innuendo, rumo...

Fredrik de Boer wrote this anguished piece in the aftermath of the insurrection in the US to overturn an election that Trump lost. While he condemns the levels to which Trump and his supporters will go, his article was more about “my despair over the response from the left”. He wasn’t talking of the American left’s reaction to the rioting in particular, but what the left seems to have become.   The left, he says, seems to be only interested in identifying injustices: “I sometimes wonder if people understand that there is more to politics than saying “this is wrong.” But they show no interest in proposing solutions: “Proposing meaningful solutions is much more fraught. Solutions are hard. Solutions are messy. Solutions are inherently unsatisfying.”   The left demonizes all forms of power so much that they then have no option but to “constantly make appeals to the heavens because they believe, very deeply, that if you identify injustice often enough some cosmic ...