Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In his autobiography, Born a Crime , the comedian Trevor Noah talks about the names of black South Africans. Since the whites could not pronounce African names, the natives would have to (also) take on a name for whites to use, the so-called English name. This English name was chosen at random – “plucked from the Bible or taken from a Hollywood celebrity or a famous politician in the news”. Thus, names like Napoleon, Mussolini and even Hitler.   Such names offend whites, but Noah is unapologetic. The whites came, invaded, occupied, treated the natives like crap, did not educate them, and then act offended by the fact that the blacks don’t know history (of whites) and pick names like Mussolini and even Hitler. Whereas, as Noah says: “Many black people in South Africa don’t really know who Hitler was.” Noah’s own grandfather thought Hitler was a tank since all the news said it was crashing through Europe! Many South Africans considered Hitler good because he had white Europe...

Tim Harford wrote a thought-provoking article on the inflation numbers calculated by governments: “The consumer price index, or CPI, aims to measure the average price paid by UK consumers.”   The devil lies in the details. What basket of items you use for the calculation matters. Is it truly representative? But wait, here are further nuances: some items matter more to poor people than others (e.g. food prices).   And then there’s the problem that humans change their behavior. If the price of certain items goes up, they shift to cheaper alternatives. In which case, the increased price of the item doesn’t affect them anymore: “They might pick up some cheap carbohydrates. Rice one week, spaghetti the next — whatever was on special offer.” Even if you could magically factor in for such changing preferences, it’s not enough. After all: “It makes sense to calculate inflation by looking at the same goods, month after month.” But if you keep changing the list of ite...

While reading Freedom at Midnight decades back, I was too young and so taken in by the flow of the events and characters that one question never occurred. If all the princely states of British India had to make a choice (India or Pakistan?), how come Kashmir got to not make a choice at the time of independence? Surely, Sardar Patel and the British could have forced Kashmir to make a choice, the way they did with all the other princely states, right?   Shashi Tharoor answers that in An Era of Darkness . While highly critical of British rule, one area he acknowledges the positiveness of British rule was to introduce and allow for continuation of the printed news. While not fully free, they were still allowed to criticize the “policies and actions of the government in a responsible manner”. For the most part, that is (There were obviously times when the British would step in and censor or even ban entire outlets. And structurally, the British demanded a sizable “security deposi...

There is the company/site/app called FlightAware that provides real-time and historical flight tracking data (flight paths, statuses, cancellations, delays and predictive analytics). It is popular among both aviation enthusiasts and travellers.   Ben Burwell wrote this piece on the eternal problem engineers have to deal with: “While we as engineers might hope for aviation data to be clean and well-standardized, the real world is messy.” All kinds of assumptions about standardized data types and schemas (formats) turn out to be false, making the development of FlightAware very challenging. He lists examples of invalid assumptions from multiple categories, some unsurprising, some downright weird. Click on the hyperlinks below for examples.   Flights . Flights depart from a gate. Flights leave their gate only once. Flights take off and land at airports . Flights are never longer than a few days . Flight numbers consist of an airline’s code plus some numbers, like UA...

Ekta Kapoor once said: “I think success is what you make of it - of course there is always the factor of luck, but one should always be equipped to seize the moment when opportunity knocks.” That is obviously true. But can one do things to be better positioned to take advantage of the elusive opportunity/luck when it comes one’s way?   Shane Parrish certainly thinks so : “The answer is as simple as it is frustrating.” You’ll see what he means as he elaborates.   First, it is an accumulation of a large number of small steps that gets you to that stage where you could seize the opportunity. But none of those small steps carry immediate rewards (or penalties): “The ordinary choices that guarantee a strong future go unnoticed. There is no pat on the back for doing the right thing just as there is no slap on the wrist for doing the wrong thing. Eating a chocolate bar right now won’t make you unhealthy. Just as not eating it won’t make you healthy.” Not getting a...

I was hesitant to write on the Iran-Israel war because everything would change dramatically if the US entered the arena. And who knew whether and when the US might join the war? Now with Trump announcing a 2 week period after which he will decide, it might be “safe” to write one… (Of course, as Iran rightly fears, the US may be lying about that to lull Iran into a bit of relative security, but I’ll ignore that possibility and write this anyway).   Personally, I don’t think Trump greenlighted Israel’s attack for a couple of reasons. First , if this was part of the US plan, why the 2 week wait period? They’d have had a plan ready. Second , the US would have lined up its ducks, By that, I mean their intelligence agency would have said (lied?) that Iran was close to having a nuke, whereas their spy chief, Tulsi Gabbard said the opposite . Yes, Trump said she was wrong but that just supports my point – you wouldn’t have these kinds of contradictory statements if the Israeli attack w...

Joe Daigle wrote an interesting article on the issues found when someone tries to replicate a research publication: “A shocking fraction of published research in many fields, including medicine and psychology, is flatly wrong—the results of the studies can’t be obtained in the same way again, and the conclusions don’t hold up to further investigation.”   He then turns to a field which should be immune to this problem – maths: “In experimental sciences, the experiment is the “real work” and the paper is just a description of it. But  in math, the paper, itself, is the “real work” .” Unlike other fields, where it takes money to try and replicate an experiment, one can just go over the other guy’s proof in maths (and spot errors), right? Nope: “It’s reasonably well-known among mathematicians that published math papers are full of errors . Many of them are eventually fixed, and most of the errors are in a deep sense “unimportant” mistakes . But the frequency with whic...

Rare earth minerals . No, they don’t refer to gold or silver. They are the lanthanides (lanthanum, neodymium, cerium, europium etc), scandium, and yttrium. Never heard of them? Well, they are critical for a whole host of industries, which is why they have been in the news for a while.   Importantly, China is the world’s largest producer of these vital minerals. A key point here is that the rare earth minerals aren’t really rare. Rather, they are found in low concentrations, which makes their extraction economically unviable. So did China just get lucky in having higher concentration ores in its territory? Like how the Middle East lucked out by having oil under its feet?   Nope, that’s not the case here. Rather, China got to this point via its deliberate economic policies. First, China heavily subsidized the rare earth mining/extraction industry. These subsidies made it cheaper to extract in China.   Second , China doesn’t allow its exchange rate to be decide...

What is science? Thanks to the insane accuracy of physics, many people believe that that science means the ability to predict . But is that the right definition, wonders Mitchell Waldrop in Complexity . Or is the ability to explain things the correct measure of a science?   He cites several good examples in that context. “Was Darwin “unscientific” because he couldn’t predict what species will evolve in the next million years? Are geologists unscientific because they can’t predict precisely when the next earthquake will come, or where the next mountain will rise? Are astronomers unscientific because they can’t predict precisely where the next star will be born?”   Then Waldrop cites everybody’s favorite problem field – economics. When the market and the economy is unpredictable, why do economists insist on making it like physics? Why come up precise mathematical equations, built on the assumption that all humans are perfectly rational (and thus predictable), when (a...

One of Isaac Asimov’s tales is titled The Final Question . Well into the future, the very hi-tech inhabitants of the future are worried. By the second law of thermodynamics! Or rather, the implied consequence of that law.   Without getting into the details of what the law is, let’s focus on the consequence that is scary. The law implies that everything in the universe will eventually cool down and decay. In that setup, no free energy will exist to drive any further processes. It is called the “heat death of the universe”.   Or as TS Eliot poetically put it: “This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.”   So these hi-tech inhabitants ask their cosmic supercomputer: How can the second law of thermodynamics be overturned?   The supercomputer starts working on the question. Eventually, long after all life has ended, the stars have died out, and as nothing new emerges in the universe, and the universe is on the cusp of the gloomy end...

I’ve never been a Scrabble fan. And yet I found this extract from Oliver Roeder’s book fascinating. He hits the nail on the head as to why kids dislike the game: “The problem when you start playing Scrabble— ​ especially if you start as a kid — ​ is simply that you don ’ t know many words… You spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make a word, any word, with the tiles on your rack, and then trying to figure out where to play them, and discovering that the whole enormously frustrating effort was worth, like, six points.”   One has to rise “one step above beginner” to begin to enjoy the game: “Anagramming is an addictive intellectual rush. Unscrambling AAABLOPR, DFGGHIOT, or EILLMNOU for the first time feels like exercising a minor superpower.”   But if you want to be really good, like competitive good, then the process begins to sound like chess: “One must study. One first learns the “twos,” or two- ​ letter words… Many of them are already familiar: AN...

The immune system is something to marvel at. It is in a state of continuous alert and is fighting (minor) wars all the time, and wins most of its battles (which is why we are healthy most of the time). But it has its flaws, writes Nathan Lent in Human Errors .   The most well-known flaws are the diseases where the body attacks itself. No bacteria, virus, or tumours are the culprits. They are called autoimmune diseases. “Autoimmune diseases are the result of mistaken identity… It’s a tragic case of friendly fire.”   Surprisingly, allergies too are an immune system “error”: “An allergy is the result of the immune system overreacting to a foreign substance – one that is totally harmless.” Redness, swelling, fever, pain – all signs of an allergic reaction – these are also signs of the immune system on overdrive. As Lent wryly remarks about those allergic to bee stings: “Even if bee stings were truly dangerous (which they’re not), suicide seems like an overreaction....

We tend to think of people as being one of the two: optimists or pessimists. At best, we are willing to concede the same person can be optimistic about some things while being pessimistic about other things .   But founders of mega-successful startups need to be both: audaciously optimistic about their company’s prospects while simultaneously pessimistic that they could get wiped out by some new upstart who rises the way they did. Let’s see a few examples of the pessimism of such founders.   Andy Grove, as CEO (and one of the co-founders) of Intel, wrote a famous book titled Only the Paranoid Survive . He calls events that can kill businesses as ‘strategic inflection points’. These happen at high speed; and don’t creep up on you incrementally. It could be technological advances (like what the iPhone did to Nokia), or a deep pockets player moving in (think of Reliance or Amazon entering any new market), or a regulatory change, to name just a few reasons. There is a ...

We know that evolution eliminates harmful genes; and yet we find some of those disease-causing genes continue in the gene pool. The easy answer in some cases is that the disease in question occurs after the individual has already had babies, which means the genes were transmitted before they did the harm. In others, the answer is that it’s a combination of genes that causes the problem, so there’s no easy way to eliminate all the genes in question.   But that still leaves a few single gene-based diseases that act (and kill) young. Like the (in)famous Sickle Cell Disease (SCD), writes Nathan Lent in Human Errors . It results in “mutant versions of haemoglobin”, the molecule that carries oxygen in our blood. A fatal drawback, obviously, if your blood can’t get enough oxygen around. Surely such a gene should have been eliminated long back. “Yet this mutant coding that causes SCD is hundreds of thousands of years old, and it has appeared and spread – spread! – in many differen...

In World War 2, Japan could have gone either way, with the Allies or with the Axis powers, says Nick Mulder in this interview . The story, he says, starts several years before World War 2 started – it starts when Japan invaded China in the 1930’s. The West didn’t want Japan to become the new colonizer (what if Japan decided to next fight European imperialists for other parts of Asia?).   The way the League of Nations imposed sanctions on Italy for invading Ethiopia, the US considers imposing sanctions on Japan. But there are Neutrality Acts in the US designed to avoid dragging the country into foreign wars. “(Those acts) make it impossible for the US president to discriminate by cutting off trade with one country that’s party to a conflict and not with the other; the Neutrality Acts actually obliged the US government to break off arms trade with both parties to a conflict.”   Meanwhile, World War 2 breaks out, so Britain puts strict controls on its colonies – their ...

We are told of the importance of a balanced diet – carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins etc. But have you noticed almost no other species seems to need this?! Not pets, not wild animals – they die if they starve, but they don’t get diseases because they didn’t get a balanced diet. So why is it only humans need a balanced diet, asks (and answers) Nathan Lent in Human Errors .   When it comes to micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, amino acids): “Our bodies fail to make many of the things that other animals do.” Our terminology adds to the confusion: we call some nutrients “essential”, which sounds like “critical”. Wrong. Every nutrient is critical. When we say “essential”, we mean the body can’t produce it, so it has to be ingested. Never heard of Vitamin K or Q? That’s because the human body produces them; so we don’t care about them.   From an evolutionary point, something weird happened to us humans: we have lost the ability to make certain nutrients. In case of Vit...

In 1935, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. In response, the League of Nations (equivalent to the UN) imposed sanctions on Italy. Germany and Japan watched this closely: If sanctions were imposed on them, how would they fare? That is the theme of an interview with the author and European historian, Nick Mulder.   Let’s start with Germany. As they started to increasingly focus on militarization and industrialization in the 1930’s, they needed energy. Coal and oil. This need for coal was the reason they invaded the Ruhr eventually (apart from the point that it was theirs to begin with and wrongly taken by France after World War I). On oil, they got lucky with the timing. Thanks to the Great Depression, trade and thus prices fell, making it cheaper for Germany to import oil. The Germans realized that sanctions were unlikely to be imposed on them at a time of global depression – Germany not being allowed to buy oil would mean some exporter like the US would also suffer!   But i...

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.” ...