Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Every time we hear of a spy who operated successfully for far too long, or a fraud who swindled people for ages, we wonder, “How could everyone have missed all the signs?”. But, as Malcolm Gladwell writes in Talking to Strangers : “In real life… lies (told by people we know and interact with very often) are rare.” This makes sense, because if we thought folks around us were liars or crooks, we wouldn’t be with them, would we? Ironically then, this blinds us to the odd cheat/ liar in our group. No wonder, says Gladwell, that for people we know, we “default to truth”, i.e., we accept (or come up with) explanations for stuff that is suspicious. It takes a lot of counter-evidence before we change our opinion.   Gladwell then describes something from Russia: “In Russian folkfore, there is an archetype called yurodivy , or the ‘Holy Fool’. The Holy Fool is a social misfit – eccentric, off-putting, sometimes even crazy – who nonetheless has access to the truth. ‘Nonetheless’ is act

I have played a fair amount of Atari video games as a kid, but I never became a game junkie/addict. And yet I found this Michael Thomsen article on cheating in video games very interesting and thought provoking. But first, let’s be clear what does not constitute online game cheating. In many online games, you could play them the old fashioned way (advancing by your skills). Or you could pay the game maker to get extra lives or to increase your farm produce or to skip levels! (In case you’re wondering, most such games are free and such purchases are the way the game makers make money. It’s just a different business model). But at least those games were designed with such options in mind and everyone knows that some of the others would be employing such techniques. So what about games where cheat codes were never intended to be part of the game? Your instinctive reaction about using such cheat codes might be, to quote Johan Huizinga: “as soon as the rules are transgressed

As we were returning from work, one of my colleagues was giving vent to his irritation with the kind of assignments his daughter is given at school: the kind that can only be done by parents. Looks like India has improved on a whole lot of thing since the time I was a kid, but (sigh) not on this front. But what was amusing about my friend’s ranting were the following “learnings” he listed for his daughter every time her parents did the assignment: -          Take credit for what others did, -          Lie if asked who made the stuff, -          Assignments will always be way beyond your abilities or skills or involve instruments your parents don’t want you to use (like scissors and knives). Sad to say but every one of us can say, “Been there, learnt that” about his list of learnings from our own childhood, can’t we? But I remember this one time when my dad (for one of my school projects) combined electrical switches to indicate different gates (AND = if both switches