Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Why should one write, asks (and answers) Shane Parrish. No, writing is “not just a vehicle to share ideas with others”. Rather: “Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Importantly, writing is also the process by which you figure it out.”   Paul Graham wrote the same thing: “A good writer doesn't just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing.”   In addition, writes Parrish: “Writing requires the compression of an idea. When done poorly, compression removes insights. When done well, compression keeps the insights and removes the rest. Compression requires both thinking and understanding.” I guess that’s what summary writing at school was trying to teach!   Another purpose of writing is to understand things for yourself – this is often called the Feynman learning technique , after the p...

Penicillin . The most famous antibiotic of all time. In The Song of the Cell , Siddhartha Mukherjee asks and answers two questions about penicillin that had never even occurred to me. How does penicillin differentiate microbial cells from human cells? How did it work so well against such a wide range of microbes? (Before our overuse of antibiotics undid its effectiveness)   A slight digression first. In my 11 yo daughter’s Biology book, there is a chapter on cells. It mentions bacteria as examples of unicellular plants. Plants, that’s right, bacteria are plants!   Though Mukherjee doesn’t mention it, that weird fact (bacteria are plants) is the starting point of the answer to both questions. A plant cell has a cell wall. Bacteria being plants have cell walls. To create those cell walls, they have a particular enzyme. Humans cells, being animal cells, don’t have cell walls – hence, human cells don’t need or have that enzyme.   Penicillin “kills” those enzymes that create...

In The Song of the Cell , Siddhartha Mukherjee writes : “In the history of biology, there are valleys of silence that follow the peaks of monumental discoveries.” Like when Benjamin Marten reasoned that TB was caused by microscopic organisms in 1720. It would take another century before Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur linked diseases to microbial cells. Or when Mendel discovered genes in 1865. It was followed by 40+ years of no mention of genes.   But the reality is different: “If you zoom into these valleys of history, they are far from silent or inactive. They represent extraordinarily fecund periods when scientists try to wrap their minds around the magnitude, generality, and explanatory power of a discovery.” More questions follow in this period. Does the new idea explain any other “previously inexplicable observations”? Are there any further levels of organization beyond what was proposed?   Quite often, writes Mukherjee, one needs new instruments and model...

In Watterson’s telling, the fight with the Syndicate was David v Goliath. Goliath with its lawyers and money and binding legalese. David with a “pencil in hand and heart full of uncompromisable values”. Shades of grey v Black and White, as he famously captured in this strip:   Not entirely true, writes Matthew Morgan. Merchandising could only work if the strip continued, if the creator didn’t publicly air grievances. Options Watterson did have. In fact, the Syndicate did worry he might abruptly quit.   Besides, as the Syndicate bosses showed Watterson, others were creating illegal and unauthorized Calvin and Hobbes merchandise anyway. At least by licensing it, Watterson could control the narrative, the format. Watterson still said No; and the Syndicate backed off. Even rewrote the terms of his contract. ~~   One of the almost unheard-of terms of the revised contract was the sabbatical (extended leave from work, for between 3 and 12 months). Why was it unhear...

Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene explains at length how we read. The first chapter starts with the eye. I was surprised that: “The fovea, which occupies 15 degrees of the visual field is the only part of the retina that is genuinely useful for reading.” Just 15 degrees of the visual field is useful for reading? No wonder then: “Our eyes do not move continuously across the page… They move in small steps.” In steps of 15 degrees coverage, that is.   McConkie and Rayner’s experiment proves this window is real. The setup involves a special device that tracks eye movement of the wearer. It then changes the visual display on the screen accordingly. In real time . It shows only a few characters to the left and right of the center gaze, the rest it fills with x’s.             We the pexxx xx xxx xxxxxxx xxxx xx xx xxxxxx xx When the eye moves, the screen gets updated to align where the gaze has moved: ...

I read this Hourly History book on the Ottoman empire . The book felt like reading through Mughal history in India, constrained to an hour of reading (such a book would probably have been limited to Babur, Akbar, Aurungzeb, and fading away with Bahadur Shah Zafar with the rise of the British; with some tidbits like the Taj Mahal thrown in). Except that, unlike the Mughal era, a lot of the Sultans were short-lived, and so there was a lot of churn in policies and governance mechanisms. While not a very informative book (it has too much to cover), it’s enough to get the broad brushstrokes. ~~   One amusing tidbit went like this. When the empire was still small and growing, the Sultan Murad II felt he had secured the place with expansion and treaties. So he abdicated the throne in favour of his son, Mehmed II. Except the son was just 12 years old! The Sultan retired to “enjoy a lifestyle worthy of an ex-Sultan”. But, as would happen repeatedly, the areas to the west, being Chr...