Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Conditional reflexes. It is what an animal learns by repeated exposure. If a bell rings, then food is served, the dog will (over time) start salivating when the bell rings. Even before the food is served. What is strange is that such conditional learning does not need a brain. It even happens in creatures without brains. Brain or no brain, such learning is called acquired learning .   Say, you now start ringing the bell but don’t serve the food afterwards. For just a few days. As expected, over time, the animal will stop salivating when the bell rings. The association has been removed, a process called extinction . After those few days, you re-establish the bell-food sequence. The animal will start salivating again, a process called spontaneous recovery . Turns out the association was supressed , not deleted .   Next, you break the bell-food for a long time. Then after that long period, you restart the bell-food sequence. The animal will start salivating again. The s...

There was this one time when my dad and I wondered who had come up with a particular equation in maths. The sources Google pointed to didn’t have a conclusive answer. It seemed to be the accepted practice to attribute the equation to one particular individual because he had been working on many related topics and seemed the most likely candidate, not because there was any record of him having actually found it! My dad remarked that the tendency to glorify the discoverer is just a human quirk, and that truly glorious things can’t have ownership associated with them. But the issue here isn’t about ownership, it’s about credit. One of the most famous battles over discovery is the one between Newton and Leibniz over who discovered calculus. It was a bitterly contested topic, with no quarters given. The issue gets even more muddied because Newton didn’t publish what he came up with for 20 years! Does it count if you didn’t show it to anybody for decades? Or as you find with Colum...

Before the recent J&K elections, a local politician declared that only a Muslim was permitted to be Chief Minister of the state. Then, after the government was formed, the CM of the state thanked Pakistan for allowing the elections to be held. Not the Indian Army, but Pakistan. Contrast all that with the reaction of the Center to the evacuation of over 2,300 Indians from war-torn Yemen. Narendra Modi tweeted: “Seamless co-operation between organisations- MEA, Navy, Air Force, Air India, Shipping, Railways & State Govts greatly helped in rescue work.” Note Modi says “state govts”, not just BJP ruled states. And if you’re wondering what the Railways have to do with this, then let Sushma Swaraj explain: “ Indian Railways are providing all hospitality and confirmed tickets free of charge for onward journey to their homes.” No wonder then that Modi tweeted: “ Salute the services of our civilian & defence officials & organisations in helping evacuate our citiz...