Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Extended deterrence . It refers to America’s promises to use its firepower, including nukes , to protect (some of) its allies. It emerged after World War II, with Europe destroyed and needing to rebuild, not spend on arming itself against the USSR. It extended to Japan since the Americans didn’t want Japan to arm itself and risk another war down the road. It covered South Korea since Korea had become a symbolic line in the sand against communist expansion in Asia.   In this interview/chat , one of the participants said: “We never implemented extended deterrence out of altruism or charity… This allowed us to keep the economies and political systems of our allies free, democratic, and capitalist, which created open markets for the US.”   Another benefit (from the US perspective, that is) of such extended deterrence was that fewer countries pursued nuclear weapons. Of the 34 or so US allies, only France pursued nukes. Why? Because they feared (rightly, as events have pr...

Here’s how Nathan Lent describes a nerve in Human Errors : “Nerves are bundles of tiny individually wrapped cables called axons that convey impulses from the brain to the body (and vice versa).”   Take the nerve with the initials RLN (Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve), which connects the brain to the larynx (voice box). Given how close the brain is to the voice box in your neck, you’d think the RLN would be a few centimetres long. But no. Instead, it winds its way from the brain to the upper chest, loops under the aorta (heart area) and reaches the voice box! “The RLN is more than three times longer than it has to be. It winds through muscles and tissue that it need not.”   There is no functional benefit, so why does the RLN “travel this long, lonely road”? For the answer, we need to start with the ancient fish, which is where this nerve originated. From where it continued in all vertebrates. In those ancient fish, the RLN connected the brain to the ancestor of the voice ...

Many people, include Indians, often compare how our country is doing with China. But China is five times richer, so not all comparisons are fair. However, as Pranay Kotasthane writes , there are also many areas where a comparison between the two is fair, and sadly, India does much worse than China.   One , agricultural output: “Although India has a third more land under cultivation than  China , it harvests only a third as much produce by value.” Two , medical colleges: “India has the highest number of medical colleges globally, yet China produces 3.5 times the doctors India produces yearly .” (I had gone into the reasons behind this in an earlier blog ). Three , vaccines: “India is the world’s largest vaccine maker. Yet China exported five times the number of COVID-19 vaccines India could export. ” Four , school teacher salaries: “Indian teachers in government schools are much better paid than in China, yet China beats India in student learning outcomes.” ...

So much has been written about the tariff wars Trump has unleashed. A lot of it is just Trump-bashing. Others obsess over the impact on the “great” US alliance with Europe and Canada. Which is why I found Ben Thompson’s take so refreshing – it was mostly about the country that really matters in all this, China. And equally, why America cannot move manufacturing to itself.   First , the US/West thinks of manufacturing the way it used to be, i.e., before China changed manufacturing altogether. He explains what he means by that. The one-word answer? Scale. Aka quantities. The more one manufactures, the more the efficiencies of scale, which reduces costs, that then increases affordability and thus demand. The more money there is to be made, the more the factories invest to optimize things. China has been in this virtuous cycle mode for decades. To imagine that the US (or West) can come to that level of manufacturing efficiency and skills any time soon is just impossible. “This...

After the eye, Nathan Lent looks into the “design defects” of human nasal sinuses in Human Errors . They are those huge cavities (there’s a lot of empty space in our skull) with mucus membranes. When we breathe air, it passes through these “filters” to prevent dust and germs from entering the body. In addition, they also warm and humidify the air we breathe. Of course, eventually the mucus gets saturated, at which point it is dumped into the stomach: “(Stomach is) the safest place for the mucus, since the bacteria and viruses it contains can be dissolved and digested by the acid there.”   Sinus problems start when this system gets “gummed up”. At that point, the bacteria aren’t getting cleared, accumulate enough to form colonies, and in the worst cases, sometimes manage to enter the (rest of the) body.   So why do humans suffer more sinus problems than almost any other species? There are many reasons, and one of the important ones is that: “The mucus drainage syste...

Nathan Lent’s book on the “design defects” in the human body, Human Errors , is endlessly fascinating. But why write a book on errors when there are so many “working” things? For one: “By exploring human shortcomings, we can peer into our past. Each and every flaw… tells a story about our species’ evolution.”   He starts with the most famous flaw that lies in our eyes: “The photoreceptor cells of vertebrate retinas appear to be installed backward – the wiring faces the light, while the photoreceptors face inward, away from it.” BTW, it’s not just us – it’s the same for all vertebrates, from fish onwards. But not all species have their eyes wired this way: “Interestingly, the retina of… octopi and squid – is not inverted.” This proves that: “Nature ‘invented’ the camera-like eye at least twice, once in vertebrates and once in cephalopods.”   The problems this arrangement creates for vertebrates are many: Light must travel around the bulk of photoreceptor...

Ever heard of Erasmus Darwin? Unlikely. He was the grandfather of the famous Charles Darwin. In his time though, Erasmus was a “towering figure in his own right”, writes Carl Zimmer in Life’s Edge . He believed in a unified vision of life, but realized nobody would read a long technical book. So he came up with the idea of a new genre: scientific poetry! “Darwin turned the finer points of botany into hugely popular verse.” Impressive, given that he lived in the age of Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley.   One of his poems, The Temple of Nature , introduced his belief in the idea of evolution (“New power acquire and larger limbs assume”). Yes, he had no proof – his grandson would do that decades later. As expected, many were appalled by the idea that species changed over time, as opposed to God creating them in that state from the beginning.   But others were intrigued. Including writers like Percy Shelley. In 1816, Shelley and his lover, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin went ...