Viswanathan K's Thoughts

My 10 yo daughter went back to school last week. After a year-and-a-half of COVID-19 imposed study-from-home regime. Some parents are still scared to send their kids; and the school bus isn’t operating either. As a result, in my daughter’s class, only 7-8 kids came this first week in a class of approx. 40.   Not surprisingly, kids have forgotten a lot of “school etiquette”. One girl, for example, sauntered into class without remembering to ask for permission from the teacher. Unabashed, she then glanced at the teacher and said (believe it or not), “Sup?”. Here’s how Urban Dictionary defines the term: “Sup is something cool people say. It can be used as a greeting. People say "sup" when they don't feel like saying “what’s up” because it's too long .” Upon which a boy reminded her, “Bro, you forgot the hand gesture that goes with ‘Sup’”. This happened in English class. Sup, bro. I can imagine the teacher frothing at the mouth…   Another time, between c...

An Indian student from Pune named Siddhesh jotted down his initial observations about the US where he has gone for higher studies: “To be fair, I haven’t experienced any culture “shock” per se. Exposure to tons of American pop culture and the internet helped make sense of a lot of things. But there have been plenty of surprises - some hilarious, some puzzling, some impressive.”   His first comment is about the “bigness” of everything: “Every single thing here is at least twenty percent bigger than it is in India: street widths, road signs, cars, people, footpaths, beverage sizes, houses, wall posters, general equipment, food servings, lawns.” On the language front, he writes: “Spanish seems to be almost sort of like a second official language here.”   After a lifetime of Indian beverages, not surprisingly, he says: “I have to say this - for a country this obsessed with coffee, the cappuccinos really aren’t that good.” The absence of neighborhood shops take...

Anne Duke wrote this book called Thinking in Bets , that made me look at the phrase “Wanna bet?” in a very different way: “Suddenly, you’re not so sure… Ideally it triggers us to vet our belief.” How do I know this? What is the reliability of my source? Is my information upto date? What could I be missing?...   Here’s how we’re wired to form our beliefs: (1) Hear something, (2) Believe it by default (unless it’s outrageous or contradicts what we already believe), (3) Only occasionally, check whether it is true or not: “`Wanna bet?’ triggers us to engage in that third step that we only sometimes get to.”   Duke is a (very good) poker player, an area where betting is, er, the whole point of the game. The feedback in poker is not like physics or chess. You could make all the right moves and still lose. There’s luck involved, there are factors you weren’t aware of, a beginner could beat a master… just like life.   This makes it very hard to know what to lea...

I was reading this article by Andy Mukherjee about the upcoming PayTM IPO, from which I learnt several interesting things. The focus of this blog though is about one aspect only – how critical the underlying UPI technology layer is, and the importance of government policies wrt the same.   Just 5 years back, there was no UPI. Which meant a company like PayTM had a lot to do – create the technology for digital money transfer, convince shopkeepers to accept it, and convince customers to use it. Worst of all? Banks weren’t going to be on its platform on Day 1, and they would only join (if at all) one at a time. Hence, a customer would have to “load” money onto the PayTM app, which would then transfer it to the shopkeeper. This created the nuisance that having loaded some money, one had to find a way to use it. On the other side of the transaction, shopkeepers would get their money from PayTM periodically, not immediately. Not an appealing proposition for them. No wonder digital p...

Shivshankar Menon’s book, Choices , talks of India’s decision to not go to war after the 26/11 Mumbai attack. That chapter of his book isn’t very satisfying; but I guess that’s inevitable due to the very nature of the problem called Pakistan.   The option of going to war was considered, writes Menon. And dismissed. First, he said, war would have converted 26/11 into “just another India-Pakistan dispute” in global eyes. External powers (US, China) would have forced an early stop to the war and India would have achieved nothing. Second, even a limited “surgical strike” at LeT facilities would have been pointless – their key cadre would have been evacuated long before, and worse, their facilities were deliberately built in densely populated civilian areas, and one knows how the Western press would have painted any such casualties. But more importantly, even such a strike would achieve nothing in the bigger scheme of things – Pakistan would continue to sponsor, train and send in m...

In his book on the road to quantum computing , John Gribbin made this remark about the multiverse: “In (David) Deutsch’s words, ‘all fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.’ So all of Jane Austen’s stories recount real events in parallel realities to our own; but The Lord of the Rings does not.” By that token, many things Calvin did in Bill Watterson’s books must happen some parallel universe. Or worse…   Calvin, like all boys his age, found girls repulsive. This 8 yo friend of my 10 yo daughter announced that she and a similar aged boy were now a couple. The older girls made fun of her singing the same K-I-S-S-I-N-G song Hobbes is singing above. The 8 yo brazenly said she didn’t care, and romped around holding hands with her “boyfriend”.   Kids are notorious for drawing totally wrong + self-serving conclusions: We have 2 car park slots, and had rented one of them to a neighbor. During play, their kid announced that since his car was in the sl...

From Tim Harford’s book on data and statistics, How to Make the World Add Up , let’s look at a couple of other things to watch out for when we see conclusions drawn.   Let’s start with an example: “Consider the historical under-representation of women in clinical trials. One grim landmark was thalidomide, which was widely used by pregnant women to ease morning sickness only for it to emerge that the drug could cause severe disability and death to unborn children.” Even if we try and collect data with the right representation of men/women, rich/poor, urban/rural etc, we still run into the problem that many don’t respond. Or certain types of people can’t be found easily. All these are a form of “dark data”. (This problem cannot be solved entirely). The general danger here is that all analysis is, by definition, done with “found data” only. And that is a lesson Harford asks us to remember: “We can and should remember to ask who or what might be missing from the data we’re b...