Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Some people in entertainment just don’t get it. Take the Walt Disney marketing team for the movie, Star Wars Episode 7: The Force Awakens . Rather than releasing the trailer on TV or online, they decided to create artificial scarcity by deciding to air it only in 30 theaters worldwide (read that as the US and Canada). What was Disney thinking? That nobody who saw the trailer would record it on their phone and post it on the Net? Did they not understand the consequence of that as one Reddit explained: “It’s like Disney WANTS the first thing people to see about ‘The Force Awakens’ to be a grainy, shaky footage someone at the back of the screen took with their iPhone.” Responding to the online fury of the Star Wars faithful, Disney backtracked and said the trailer would also be made available on the iTunes Trailer site. Wait. So they decided to leave Android users out? Are these people brain dead? Star Wars has a global audience; and globally there are far, far more Android de...

“Any explanation is better than none.” -          Nietzsche We love to cite reasons for everything that happens. If the reason is correct, all the better; but that’s not a must. Obviously, nobody says that to themselves, but if you check out many of the “reasons” floating around, you’d see what I mean. It turns out that we don’t just stop at attributing causes to real life events. People even try and find root causes for battles from movies , like the Battle of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back ! So what were the reasons Darth Vader and Co couldn’t crush and kill the rebels in that battle? “Don’t place unaccountable religious fanatics in wartime command, and never underestimate a hegemonic power’s ability to miscalculate against an insurgency.” Well ok, those reasons would apply even today in the real world; so maybe this analysis wasn’t a total waste of time after all! A comment on Slashdot to the above analysis said: “…peo...

Photos of space always blew me away. They looked awesome! And they got even better when telescopes like Hubble were placed in space thereby avoiding the dust and the atmospheric distortions that earth-bound telescopes suffer from. Take a look at these pics below to see what I mean: But after a while, such pics lose a bit of their charm because there are so many of them on the Net and also because you start to remember that the colours on the pics are computer generated ones. Which is when I started appreciating the informative pics. Like take supernovas. When they explode, they are said to emit the light comparable to the entire galaxy they are a part of. That’s a bit hard to believe, isn’t it? Surely they are exaggerating. And then I saw this pic: See that light at the center of the pic? That’s the light of about ten billion stars at the center of the galaxy. Now see that light at the bottom left corner? That’s a supernova! As bright as ten billion stars,...

Some weeks back, there was the news about how the US had considered blowing up the moon as a show of strength during the Cold War. This was around the time the Russians put the first man in space and the Americans felt they were woefully behind the Soviets. There followed the (inevitable) denials that it was never a serious idea, that the world (let alone the Americans) never had the firepower to blow up the moon, that even a massive nuclear explosion on the moon would have just been a blink-and-you-miss-it event in Moscow (and that’s assuming the sky was clear and someone was even looking)… On a more recent note, there was a petition filed in the US that the government build a Death Star, you know, the Star Wars kind. Well, the US government had to respond because the petition had collected the minimum signatures needed! Titled “This Isn’t the Petition Response You’re Looking For”, the US rejected the petition (obviously) and went on to list the reasons: -    ...