Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In his book, Origin Story , David Christian points out the different techniques using which different fields of science find the age of something. And “age” is another way of saying “time”.   Let’s start with astronomy. How do they know the Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago? It started off when astronomers discovered that certain stars have the same brightness, i.e., their actual brightness is the same everywhere. When they see such a star, astronomers measure its perceived brightness as seen from earth (or a telescope in space). Using the two values (actual v/s perceived brightness), they can calculate the distance of the object in question. Next, take the current distances and speeds of galaxies, and work backwards to see when they must have all been together, and you get the age of the universe.   Geologists and paleontologists, on the other hand, used radioactivity to come up with the age of everything from ancient mummies to the earth to the solar system ...

Not even wrong. Here’s what that phrase means : “The phrase implies that not only is someone not making a valid point in a discussion, but they don't even understand the nature of the discussion itself, or the things that need to be understood in order to participate.” The phrase perfectly describes Aatish Taseer’s apocalyptically titled article in TIME magazine, “Can the World’s Largest Democracy Endure Another Five Years of a Modi Government?” . Here’s why: 1)         It applies Western norms of what is politically acceptable, Western norms of what cannot be said by politicians and so on. But of course, this is India and the rules of political discourse are very different here. a)      Taseer talks of Modi’s “deafening silences after more recent atrocities” (aka Godhra). But in India, Rajiv Gandhi’s widow and son have shown the same deafening silence wrt the 1984 killing of Sikhs. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but this i...

Kids in a car will drive you up a wall by asking the question, “Are we there yet?”. Every 2 minutes. And that’s if you are lucky; more often, they’ll ask the same question again within a minute. Is that because they’re so damned impatient and so easily bored? Or is it just not possible for kids to visualize distances or the passage of time? The point hit me when my daughter was watching this cartoon about 2 naughty school kids, Badrinath aur Buddhadev . The class was told that there’d be a 5 km marathon, upon which one kid promptly responded: “Just 5 km? What’s there in that? I can run that much in just 5 minutes.” Most adults immediately know that’s impossible. But if you step back to see how adults know that, it’s not because we can visualize the distance of 5 km or the amount of time 5 minutes implies. Rather, our brain uses the proxy called “speed” to assess the claim: 5 km in 5 min means a km per minute, which is 60 kmph. Cars go at that speed, not humans, therefore th...

William Poundstone started off his book Fortune’s Formula in the age before live transmission of sports and before long distance phone calls. That meant there was a few minutes delay between the time a race at the racetrack got over and the times the bookies got to know the outcome. In theory, says Poundstone: “A customer who learned the winner before the bookmakers did could place bets on a horse that had already won.” Of course, it worked the other way too: a bookmaker who knew the result before others would be quite happy to accept bets on a horse that he knew had lost! A man named John Payne spotted this opportunity and started a wire service to speed up the communication of race results to anyone who’d pay for it: “Payne stationed an employee at the local racetrack. The instant a horse crossed the finish line, the employee used a hand mirror to flash the winner, in code, to another employee in a nearby tall building. This employee telegraphed the results.” In the pres...

It’s not often you find a book review turning out to be a great article in itself even as it says the book itself is average! But that’s exactly what Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow managed to do in her review of Judy Wajcman ’s book, Pressed for Time . The theme of the book is about the “crazy busy” lives most of us feel we lead, what Tuhus-Dubrow describes as: “What changed? Was it just that then I was a kid, and now I have a kid? Time no longer seems unlimited: then I had possibilities; now I have responsibilities.” Of course, if we are perfectly honest about it, she reminds us that we should check whether we really had more time back then or whether we are “just misremembering it all through a haze of nostalgia”. Or if: “When we complain about how busy we are, it may be sincere, but it is also a kind of humblebrag.” (Humblebrag. I love that word. I’d never heard it until then but its meaning is so obvious, isn’t it?) Some of the contributing factors to this feeling include ...

Several sites like Longreads and Medium suggest articles for you to read and also the approximate time to read each of those articles…4 minutes or whatever. Looks like now that metric has moved from the digital to the physical world, from articles to entire books: like Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s book, Without Their Permission , it had the time-to-read number printed on the back : “5-hour read”! While Michelle Dean can see the use of such numbers in case of Internet articles: “I understand that we live in the kind of culture where we are scheduled down to the minute, where reading is a thing you fit into your spare time, which is typically the one hour you spend on the subway each day. So I understand needing to organize your time.” She doesn’t see the point of it in case of books. After all, she says: “It certainly isn’t to give you a true idea of what kind of investment is required to read the book.” Besides, she argues, doesn’t it just lead to a reading race wi...

Many Indians were upset with an article in Time magazine criticizing Indians. Apparently, so many Indians voiced their unhappiness with the article that both Time and the author, Joel Stein, posted apologies (You can see them at the end of the article). For a change, it wasn’t about the IT folks who “steal” American jobs. Rather, it was a criticism of Indians who live in the US. Or more specifically, the ones who live in one city: Edison, New Jersey. Most Indians familiar with the US know of Edison for that very reason. But hey, let a white guy say the same thing and we are up in arms! As long as we are spoken (and thought) highly of as the smart doctors and software engineers from India, we are very lapping up the complements. We love it when the Americans “ assumed all Indians were geniuses ”. Then, says Stein, some of those “geniuses” in Edison started bringing in their “ merchant cousins ”. Who in turn brought in their “ even-less-bright cousins ”. And then he says, “ we started...