Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Far too frequently than I care to admit, I hit myself on the head wondering, “How come I never even thought of the question (let alone finding the answer)?”. Turns out Francis Bacon knew the importance of asking the right question: “A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.” Take the number ‘e’. Those with the maths background to know of it would probably have been introduced to ‘e’ via this equation: In case you wondered what the term with the exclamation means: it is math-speak for “multiply all the numbers from 1 till that number” (Thus, 2! = 1 x 2; 4! = 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 and so on). Given we instinctively think of the number ‘e’ via the above definition, no wonder it seems like a number defined as an arbitrary sequence of calculations. And yet, this arbitrarily defined number pops up across science equations across topics as diverse as the charging of a capacitor or the rate of radioactive decay. The question I read on the Net was: Is the occurrence of ‘e’ in such divers...

Claude Lévi-Strauss once said: “The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.” Of course, that’s true for many areas outside science as well. In his wonderful book, The Gene , Siddhartha Mukherjee gives an awesome example of the danger of mis-defining something: “If we define “intelligence” as the performance on only one kind of problem in only one kind of test, then we will, indeed, find a “gene for intelligence”. In A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , the inhabitants of Magrathea didn’t know Lévi-Stauss’ point. They asked their super computer the answer to the “Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything”. After millions of years of computing, the super computer states the answer (drum rolls, please): “Forty-two.” The characters in the story were as dismayed, perplexed and disappointed as you probably were by the answer. And so the computer explained: “Once you understand what the question actua...

Kids have this habit of asking “Why?” about everything. Like all parents, I’ve experienced different emotions when that happens: -          It’s flattering because you know the answer; -          Enjoying the experience of phrasing the explanation in a way that the kid gets it; -          It sets off a hope that you’ve done your bit to encourage the kid to stay curious and seek (and hopefully understand) explanations; -          It shames me that I don’t know something so basic; -          And of course, at times it can be highly irritating. One time, my 5 year old daughter asked me yet another Why question and I replied, “It’s too complicated to explain to you”. Upon which, she said, “But you’ve simplified other things in the past; so why can’t you to do it for this too?” I w...

Remember those “What is your mother’s maiden name?” kind of questions standard to all websites when you forget your password? Well, here’s the latest addition to that list: To Hudson’s question as to whether such a question is inappropriate, John Herrman said that perhaps it just means that the US has completed its recovery from 9/11. He even termed it (what else?) “web healing”! So is 9/11 the new “Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated?” question? Or is this, as Herrman wonders, the last of the “Where were you when…” questions. After all, he says: “Should something horrible or memorable happen tomorrow, your answer to the equivalent question in 14 years will probably be, "I don't know, on the internet?"” Or maybe we could ask Google or Apple to pull out our GPS logs to give us the answer!