Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Richard Feynman is an extremely quotable guy; and not just about scientific stuff. In fact, it’s almost impossible to read any popular science book of the past few decades without finding at least one quote by him. And each book will have a different quote that’s apt to their topic! It’s easy to see why: the man can articulate things superbly. I like Mario Livio’s books and blogs, and I was reminded of Feynman’s statements on the topic discussed in two of Livio’s blogs. Livio’s first blog was on uncertainty and its relation to religion, science and philosophy. From a world where most religions assumed that “everything worth knowing has already been written, either in the scriptures, or in the legacies of very wise men of the past”, we entered the scientific era where we accept that “there are many questions to which we don't know the answers, and that all answers are only provisional”. In this uncertainty-is-normal world we live in, Livio quotes Bertrand Russell about t...

I read two very interesting takes on “great” books. The first one was by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey who talks about a book that “sits on every college reading list”: Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . The book’s stance is that the religious ideas of Protestants in general (and Calvinists in particular) is what led to the rise of the capitalistic spirit (and system). McCloskey writes : “But that a book is "great" does not mean it is correct, or is to be taken as good history or good economics or good theology. Marx's  Das Kapital  is indubitably a great book, one of the very greatest of the 19th century, as I say to annoyed friends of libertarian or conservative bent. But then I say to my left-wing friends, annoying them too, that Marx was wrong on almost every point of economics, history, and politics.” “Great” does not mean “correct”: that’s a very interesting point! The other article was by Umberto Eco who had this to say in his rev...

Recently, my wife told our soon-to-be-7 daughter that she’d celebrate her own birthday by staying in a hotel. No work, no interruptions, yes to room service, and (pointedly) without my daughter around . My daughter called her bluff immediately, “I don’t need to get nervous. You’d never do that”. Another time my wife was talking to her friend who was building a 5 bedroom house (in the US). Instantly the kid interrupted, “Can you arrange for my birthday to be held at a villa with my friends?” Wow! So she can associate a 5 bedroom with a villa? Guess why my daughter forced us to get her a new cycle recently? Turns out the old one was too childish (all pink), and it had a backseat which allowed her friends to hop on whenever they wanted (uninvited). #*$%!, the sneaky freeloaders who also made her lose balance at times. The new bike is a very functional looking white with no backseat . All of which proves that she’s not a baby anymore. In fact, she is now offended if she’s ca...

During the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase about the “banality of evil” based on how “normal” Eichmann seemed. Robert Sapolsky in his best-selling book, Behave , mentions the “three of the most influential, disturbing, and controversial studies in the history of psychology” that showed: 1)       People want to conform, so much so that if enough people say or do something, they will start doing/believing the same; 2)      People are willing to punish others for failing to do something, if someone in a position of authority tells them to; 3)      When given power over others identified as being bad people (e.g. prisoners), people will go to any lengths to enforce discipline on them. Sure, as Sapolsky says, these experiments have been criticized and their findings questioned, but it’s hard to dismiss them entirely given the genocides from former Yugoslavia to Rwanda to the much ...

Former chess champ, Garry Kasparov, wrote this very interesting book titled Deep Thinking . Once a upon a time, chess was the holy grail for machine intelligence. Claude Shannon, founder of information theory, explained why. Chess is a sharply defined game, its objective is clear, and the last reason is best explained in Kasparov’s words: “Since chess requires thinking, either a chess playing machine thinks or thinking doesn’t mean what we believe it to mean.” There was also the hope that training a computer’s guns at chess may lead to other learnings, things far deeper than chess. Unfortunately though: “Chess just wasn’t deep enough to force the chess-machine community to find a solution beyond speed… Patterns, knowledge, and other humanlike methods were discarded as the super-fast brute force machines took home all the trophies.” Which is why Google’s AI, AlphaGo, that beat the human world champion at the Chinese game Go, a game “too big of a matrix to crack by brute f...

We’ve subscribed to the Nat Geo Kids magazine for our daughter, a magazine mostly about wildlife, customized for kids. These are the two most common kinds of info from the magazine that appeal and/or amuse her: 1)       Gross is king : Like the time she learnt that the urine of the leopard gecko, a lizard like reptile, comes out as tiny crystals. She piled on, “I guess that when they need to find crystals for jewelry, they collected the urine of this animal”. This was followed by uproarious laughter… 2)      Chance to quiz and show off : One time she saw this pic of an animal next to which it said, “It has donkey ears, a kangaroo tail, and a piggy nose”. It was an aardvark. I translated the last part of the animal’s description (“distant relation of…”) into terms she gets: “With which animal does it share the maximum number of instructions (DNA)?”. The surprising answer? The elephant!! Off she went in a flash, to ask her mom the same ...

In his awesome book, Labyrinths of Reason , William Poundstone describes the generally accepted criteria to truly “know” something: 1)       Belief : You must believe what you think you know (e.g. “We wouldn’t say a flat-earther knows the earth is round”); 2)      Justified : There must be a valid reason why you think you know something. This is to rule out lucky guesses; 3)      True : This feels circular, but it means that you can’t know something unless it really is true in the first place. Consider the topic of antibiotics-resistant bacteria. An antibiotic resistant strain called MRSA has been the posterchild for just that trend. It certainly feels like something we “know”, right? Over/mis-use of antibiotics caused the bacteria to mutate and become resistant, thereby making the antibiotic useless for further use. It sounds right and logical. And yet, as Ed Yong writes , the story of MRSA is far more ...

We had held on to my old car, the Santro Xing, for an abnormally long period of 14 years, until we bought a new one recently, the i10. It was a similar price/feature car (adjusting for inflation and the evolution in car tech), but given how old the last car was, even the average sized touchscreen was something new! Being a low/medium end car, there are still plenty of physical controls in the car. Why I bored you with so much detail about a not-a-high-end-car is that it made this article by Amber Case on the “hidden cost of touchscreens” very relatable. Huh? What kind of Luddite thinking is this, you ask. Isn’t everything in the world moving to touchscreens and thereby providing a better experience? Yes, but Case’s point was about the downside of touchscreens in certain fields, not in general, and the problem with poorly designed interfaces in touchscreens. In cars, for examples, she writes: “Physical interfaces are crucial for automotive usability. Operations rely on...

Once my daughter got to the stage where she could go down to play by herself without needing an escort, I used to insist that she must go down to play every day. You’d think she would have been happy to hear this, but no. True to the I-only-do-the-opposite-of-what-you-say philosophy of all kids, she demanded to know why. Honesty is the best policy, right? So I told her: “I want some peace”. She has always been both amused and mildly offended by that line, even as I continued to use it whenever I wanted to get her out of the house… to play or to one of her many classes over the years (yoga, swimming, skating, whatever). And then recently, she told us that she was going to the other room to watch TV by herself. And added that neither of us should come to that room since she wanted to “watch TV in peace”, without us disturbing her. Ouch! Another time, she told me to leave the room saying she had “booked the room”. I guess I should be glad that she’s still years away from k...

Now that Pranab Mukherjee has completed his address at the RSS headquarters, let’s see what it says about the different actors in the story, as well as those on the sidelines who spoke (or stayed silent) as events played out: 1)       Pranab Mukherjee did something that most intellectuals only talk about: He was willing to publicly engage with an opposing ideology. Or as RSS ideologue Rakesh Sinha put it : “Whether it is ideological or political untouchability, anyone who considers political untouchability is harming democracy. This was the first message of Pranab da attending the RSS headquarters.” 2)      Pranab comes off even better because he had the courage to tell the RSS (in their own den, no less) that India stood for plurality, secularism, tolerance and inclusiveness. 3)      The RSS comes off well because they too were willing to engage with someone who opposes their ideology. In fact, as this Deccan H...

Once upon a time if a party (or individual) lost an election fairly, they would accept the verdict. Once upon a time, if a legislation that one disliked was nonetheless passed through parliament according to constitutional procedures, one accepted it. One just bit one’s tongue and waited for the next elections to get back in power and do things differently, if that was what the (new) majority of the people wanted. Not today. With the rise of illiberal parties world over from the US to Turkey to Poland to Hungary to Brexit (to India?), Adrian Vermeule writes that: “Academics, journalists and other intelligentsia… spend their careers in a state that can only be described as professional hysteria.” But why has the acceptance of the verdict gone for a six? Why, wonders Vermeule, it is that “experimenting with nonliberal versions of democracy” provokes such rabid breast beating? Vermeule’s answer is provocative. He says that historically liberalism “made an alliance of conve...

When I got my passport renewed recently, it was the first time they took my fingerprints as part of the process. I am guessing passports now have RFID chips that hold our prints (or similar tech to achieve the same outcome). It turns out finger prints have been used as far back as Babylon for contracts, and in the 1300’s in China for catching criminals, writes Chantel Tattoli. Surprisingly, the Europeans didn’t know that fingerprints were unique to each individual. As recently as the 1850’s, the British dismissed the Indian practice of inking their finger next to contracts as… superstition! Soon after though, the British started using finger prints to identify criminals. That set off a drive in England to collect finger prints. When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, guess who was one of the suspects? Pablo Picasso! “Picasso cried. He begged forgiveness. He was in possession of two statuettes filched from the museum, but he hadn’t taken  her . ” The l...

Now that schools have opened after the summer holidays, traffic in Bangalore got a lot worse. Hard it may be to believe, but yes, there’s always room in Bangalore for traffic to get worse. It’s the usual set of reasons: parents changing their departure time to align with the bus time, others dropping their kids at school on the way to work, the roads near every school getting jammed by school buses… For the very junior classes, many schools start off by having very short days initially to let them acclimatize gradually. As a result, one of my friends complained that he’d dropped his daughter at 9:15, caught the bus to work, and found that by the time he reached office at 11:30, his kid was back home. Her (school) day was over before our guy had even reached office! In the evening, I told my daughter that kids, including her , were adding to the traffic jams and commute time. Never one to back off from a round of verbal jousting, she immediately asked what I was complaining a...

Every year when school reopened after the summer holidays, like all parents, we’d be thrilled. Thank God it’s over! But this time was wonderfully different. Maybe it was because my daughter’s grown up (a bit) and can handle boredom better. Or maybe it was because she can now go to classes in the apartment unescorted, which in turn allowed my wife to enroll her in multiple classes: skating, yoga/art, and swimming (Advanced Batch, as she proudly said, not Baby Batch). Followed by play time in the evening, of course. One time, when I took a day off to keep her company, I realized how packed her day was: I barely saw her as she went from class to class. In fact, the poor thing looked exhausted by lunch time itself. I knew I’d regret it, but I told her that she could skip the odd class on the odd day… It also helped that she was finally old enough to go to other kids’ homes on her own and have a good time there. On days she’d call me at work to ask, “Can I eat lunch at my friend’...

Ex-Amazon employee, Eugene Wei, wrote this blog where he explained how and why the Amazon Prime scheme came about, and it makes for an interesting read. It started with a question years back: what is the roadblock Amazon would hit if it didn’t change anything about how it worked? The answer: shipping fees . This may sound trivially obvious, but Amazon realized how big a deal (breaker) shipping fees was: “People don't just hate paying for shipping, they hate it to literally an irrational degree... (even though) even after paying shipping, customers were saving money over driving to their local bookstore to buy a book… That wasn't even factoring in the cost of getting to the store, the depreciation costs on the car, and the value of their time.” It took Amazon several years to find a solution. Yes, years! Their first stab was to launch a scheme called Super Saver Shipping: “If you placed an order of $25 or more of qualified items, which included mostly products in...