Viswanathan K's Thoughts

As we saw, AIDS hit the West in the 1980’s. In his awesome book, Spillover , David Quammen gets into how it came out of Africa. That story starts off with a heated debate between two theories on the origin of HIV in humans: (1) the cut-hunter theory that said assumed a hunter killed an African primate, and got infected due to a wound/cut in his body; v/s (2) the polio-vaccine theory that blamed contaminated vaccines which had been tested on Africans in 1957-60.   To test the polio-vaccine theory, Dirk Teuwen went to the Congo to test one of the earliest HIV-1 samples from 1960. It was improbable anything would have survived that long, but as luck would have it, those samples had been preserved in just the right way. That strain was given the name DRC60. It was compared against another strain named ZR59. The two strains were very different: “Every virus has its own rate (of mutation)… The amount of difference between two viral strains can therefore reveal how much time has...

A few days back, just before boarding her flight to Africa, Justine Sacco, the communications director for InterActiveCorp (IAC) tweeted: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” What happened next will make even warp speed seem like a crawl. “A mob with 140-character pitchforks” sprang up, as Nick Bilton described it . Her tweet “set off an avalanche of fury — on Twitter, on Facebook and in the news media across the globe”, as Jeff Bercovici put it . 12 hours later, IAC fired Sacco (12 hours was also the duration of her flight). That’s the pace of the Internet for you. So many others tweet idiotic and offensive things. So why did Sacco evoke such a strong reaction? Mostly because she was not a nobody: “Justine’s professional affiliation with billionaire Barry Diller and his well-known companies made her seem important, not just some random crank; a number of other ill-advised tweets provided fresh fodder and the outline of a caricature; her j...

Jerry Brotton argues in his book, A History of the World in 12 Maps , that mapmaking has always been a contentious topic, from Ptolemy to Google Maps. Or at least that’s what one book review says. Maps always “shaped—and were shaped by—various political, religious and social movements” , says the review. There were 3 maps I found interesting from his list. The first was the eponymous Mercator map, the one we have all grown up from school, named after the Belgian cartographer Gerard Mercator. It was drawn way back in 1569 and has surprisingly never been improved on, despite its obvious drawback. As a less than 7 year old, I remember a jigsaw puzzle of the world’s map that made it look like Greenland was bigger than India! Wikipedia goes one further and points out that : “Greenland takes as much space on the map as Africa, when in reality Africa's area is 14 times greater.” The cause of such severe distortion is obvious: The Mercator map attempts to “chart the contours of ...