Book Review: The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene

Finished reading Brian Greene's "The Hidden Reality - Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos" last weekend. This is in some ways the third book in the trilogy he has authored. The Elegant Universe spoke about Physics and Universe in general, discussed theory of relativity in a very accessible prose, talked about Calabi-Yaushapes/spaces and string theory in an engaging way. The next one called The Fabric of Cosmos spoke about how space forms the fabric from which the entire cosmos is formed. This third book is focused on the following versions of multiverses plausibly floating around. 

Quilted Multiverse: 

Inflationary Multiverse: 

Brane Multiverse: 

Cyclic Multiverse: 

Landscape Multiverse: 

Quantum Multiverse: 

Holographic Multiverse: 

Simulated Multiverse: 

Ultimate Multiverse: 

I am listing them here since each multiverse is worth a Google search to get lost into. :-)

Book starts with a discussion of how Einstein blinked when theory of relativity ended up showing a universe that is forever expanding or contracting. Feeling quite unsettled, he added the cosmological constant to his math to make it static. Subsequent investigation and actual observations through experiments indeed showed the universe to be continuously expanding and in fact accelerating its expansion. This then leads to the follow up questions on the limits of the universe and the possibility of a quilted multiverse. In subsequent chapters we explore more than half a dozen versions of the multiverses that have been proposed. While the ideas are highly speculative for now, author suggests that this is similar to the days Einstein came up with the theory of relativity that couldn't be tested via experiments immediately due to the limits of technology at that time. But as we know, subsequently ToR was indeed experimentally verified and has practical application today in things like GPS since satellites that provide the signal for our handheld units need to take into account the space-time curvature without which it won't work..! Thus Greene proposes that even the existence of multiverse could one day be experimentally investigated and confirmed even though we may not be able to visit the other universes in existence. Currently there seems to be ideas floating around based on how atomic particles/strings may behave differently if there are additional dimensions that support additional universes. Some of these sections are not as clearly written as the initial and end chapters. Still, he presents very interesting discussions on what can happen if universes bump into each other, can LHC (Preview)create a small black hole that will grow and swallow the whole universe (not likely :-), etc. 

One of the concepts discussed related to string theory is very neat. In the 1980s physicists figured that there are five different types of string theories named (certainly not by marketing experts :-) Type I, Type IIA, Type IIB, Heterotic-O and Heterotic-E. To work out the details of each theory, perturbative approach was usually used, where you do take into account just the major factors in the first round to determine the (rough) result and then go back for a second pass to fine tune it further taking into consideration the second order factors that are lot less influential, followed by another pass taking into account third order factors and so forth to incrementally arrive at as precise a result as possible as the computations get more and more complicated. This is similar to the way we may do mental math to land in the right ballpark first and then narrow down the answer to a more precise value. While doing the math, string coupling constant that defines the probability of one string bumping off of another is used as a factor. Until the early 90s each one of this string theory is considered a silo and physicists worked out the details assigning small values for string coupling constants. But in 1995 there was a big revelation showing that if you keep increasing the value of string coupling constant (SCC) in one of these 5 theories, it slowly morphs into one of the other 4 models with the SCC value dialed much smaller..! Thus, for example, when Type I string theory model's SCC value is raised, it morphs into Hererotic-O string theory with SCC value that is really small..! While this idea itself is very elegant, he explains using this image that looks like a photograph of Einstein when your eyes are close to the image and morphs into Marilyn Monroe when you move back considerably..! Pretty cute analogy. :-) 

One other satisfying proposal put forth is that the multiverse concept will answer the gnawing philosophical question "Why is there a universe instead of nothing?". I can paraphrase it briefly as follows. Since multiverse supports a large number of universes in existence, human beings end up existing in this tangible universe since this happens to be one variation that is capable of supporting our life form. This answer won't work easily if there is only one universe where we exist, which may force us to create a God to explain the creation of the universe. :-) If you find this topicintriguing, do read this paper by Peter Lynds.  

Last couple of chapters touch upon the ideas of the whole world we perceive being a simulation run by someone where human beings are all entities within that simulation (similar to The Matrix movie plot line) and one day can we build computers powerful enough to do such simulations ourselves that will collide back with the simulation we are already on and so forth. Quite an interesting ride/read.

Something should be said about Greene's book titles themselves. Titles like "What They Don't Teach You at Harvard" are amusing gimmicks to catch attention and sell books. If that book had been named "Some Useful Principles for General Management" which is what it was, I doubt if it would have sold that much. On the other end of the spectrum, I find titles of all three of Greene's books almost poetic and at the same time representing the content exactly (truth in advertising). Admirable.

-sundar.

Are you well read?

Last week I received an email from my M.S. thesis advisor who was also in my dissertation committee. Since my grad school days are long past, and since we have kept in touch, over the decades he has become more of a friend. He is in my spam email list and reciprocates in kind sending me mail on his own once in a while. This is what it said:

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I read two linked essays that immediately made me think of you and your own essays about reading and listening and thinking about reading and listening.  The first one titled "Is There Too Much Music?”, is about loving music but being overwhelmed by how much new music there is. The second titled “The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything”, is about the question of what does it mean to be well read when there are more good books than anyone could read in a lifetime.  It points to culling or surrendering as ways to cope. 

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I am always grateful to friends who send me such emails unsolicited. Stop now and do read those two pieces before continuing. They are not long. The posts themselves are nothing spectacular but touch upon a good theme that may apply to many of us interested in growing up well-read, well-exposed, culturally/politically/socially aware human beings. They reminded me of a late night ~20 years back around this time of the year in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Another LSU grad student friend of mine and I went to see a play for the first time in BR Little Theater. Since we were students, we got discounted tickets, watched the play which was very nicely put together and proved to be very entertaining with a good bit of humor, drama, mystery all thrown in. As we walked out into the cold night driving back to our apt., we were specifically discussing how despite being in BR for ~5 years, we never watched a play in BRLT and wondered how much else is going on right around us that we will thoroughly enjoy but never get to, be it music concerts, books, lectures, documentaries or any other material/event. We indeed felt a bit bad and promised ourselves to seek out more things that we should learn about/enjoy. Subsequently I did watch a few more plays, went to public libraries to get documentaries such as PBS's Eyes on the prize, Ken Burns' Civil War, US Constitution: The Delicate Balance (Preview) , watched series  like I, Cladius (Preview) , attended few good lectures, etc. 

I always regretted the fact that I never learned Indian classical music formally (which as you may know gets quite technical and tough and is usually a decade long pursuit to get it right), not reading fast enough that is exacerbated by daily family/work pressure, not listening to all the podcasts that I actually know are good ones, and so on. I think even about 10 years back this notion used to spill over into areas like visiting Disney World where I'd want to try every ride, see every show, etc. driving my wife crazy. She used to joke that she needs a vacation after going out on a vacation with me. :-) But I think as kids grow up, I have reluctantly reconciled myself to be more on the surrender side of the spectrum. So, when we go on vacation, I try to be satisfied as long as kids are having fun though we may not see everything, though I may not get to take good pictures/videos (as my son is keen on taking over the camera that makes him really happy and gives us poor pictures/videos :-). 

In my Android smartphone I have subscribed to "The Radiolab" and PRI's "TheWorld" podcasts though I am not listening to them everyday, been trying to finish up Brian Greene's "The Hidden Reality" for the past couple of months, started writing an article in Tamil, trying to watch Season 3 of this Danish TV serial called Borgen at thelinktv.org site.. Nothing is complete. But at least there are a pile of fun things to do as and when possible. Hopefully I will die a content man. :-) 
-sundar. 

The Art of Writing Movies

I enjoy watching movies. Beyond that, I find getting an academic understanding of the movie making process even more interesting. So, when I am watching movies, there is usually a thread in the back of my mind that analyzes the story/scenes finding patterns. For example, I am very familiar with the three-act structure of story telling. So, I try to parse the story line to see where the first act ends, second/third acts begin. Naturally once you learn the grammar, movies that make use of that construction tend to become a little less fascinating. As a friend of mine once said seeing a flower as a flower is joy. But disecting it petal by petal to do research may not be fun anymore. That is true from one point of view, while understanding the meta level construction, how things are put together could provide a different sort of enjoyment. 

Recently my wife and I watched Star Trek: Into the Darkness, a new release still in theaters. Though it was decent, being a safe summer block buster production, it is a case study for three-act structure. Analyzing it further, in the first act it was explained that the villain's human body cells don't die and regenerate very quickly. Then at the beginning of the third act when the protagonist is killed off, I could immediately see the villain's cells will be used near the climax to resurrect the hero again. In fact as we were watching the movie in the theater, once the hero is killed off, we were laughing recalling a Tamil movie called Sivaji that came out in 2007. It pretty much had the same sequence where a young boy killed off by electrocution is revived in the first act setting the audience up so that the same technique could be applied to revive the hero in climax. :-) All these tricks and formulas make story telling repetitive. These thoughts were flowing in when I came across this article (do read it) that explains how Hollywood has gone several steps further since there is a 15 beat formula for writing block buster movie stories now that is almost always followed. You can see this grammar/constructs being used in most Spielberg, J J Abrams type blockbusters. While the formula works overall, it sure makes audience feel "déjà vu allover again" as they watch each new movie. :-)

Movies that defy these rules and still turn out to be good ones are much more interesting. Non-linear story telling gives us a break (as in the old movie Memento with very interesting trivia about chronology at the IMDB site). Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros type portmanteau movies or other variations such as the French/Polish trilogy Blue-White-Red are intriguing for interacting/intersecting across movies & story lines. In that genre, recently saw Cloud Atlas that tells 6 different stories in parallel with same actors appearing in different roles in different stories. Though we can still blame individual stories for following the good old three-act structure, weaving all the stories without causing confusion, is admirable. This is despite the fact that they are even loosely tied to each other with overlaps (unlike  Iñárritu's movies where the connection is often too flimsy as in Babel making the narration totally disjointed). Kudos to writers/directors Wachowski brothers (of The Matrix fame) and Tom Tykwer.

 

Now there are software packages to analyze movie scripts to predict how well it will do in the box office and/or what changes will make it better/cheaper, etc.! So much for art..! :-)

Book Review: In Spite of the Gods by Edward Luce

Read this book titled "In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India" by Edward Luce and enjoyed it thoroughly. He is a British journalist, who has served as the New Delhi bureau chief of Financial Times from 2001 to 2006. He is living in Washington D.C. now. His years in India, his position combined with his background (he is married to an Indian who is a World Bank economist) seems to have given him a good grip on a wide range of topics discussed in the book. Though I am not following Indian politics/headlines/hot topics closely on a daily basis, I found his assertions and assessments quite in line with my image of what is India today. In some parts of the world the subtitle seems to be modified slightly as "The Strange Rise of Modern India"..!

He starts off with a visit to Auroville, a spiritual town full of Westerners seeking India's spiritual elixir, which is home to the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. Starting from there he tours around various parts of India to get a good view of India's schizophrenic mix of ultra modern and medieval economies lingering side by side. Second chapter discusses the extent to which the state permeates people's daily lives, how well entrenched the civilian cadre of officers are, and despite knowing well how corrupt government officials are, and poor villagers still seeing landing a government job (from which no one gets fired) as their path to economic salvation. Moving on, the next section discussing north and south India paints a clear picture of how different the quality of governance is. He provides pointers like the literacy rate in Tamilnadu (about 90%) Vs. Bihar (less than 50%), well paved roads and seemless WiFi service in Hyderabad full of MNC software giants Vs. Patna (capital of Bihar) where making a phone call from your room to the hotel front desk is tough and all the roads are broken, while (even economically poor rural) women in Tamilnadu's coastal region discuss and complain about how they have been paid only 90% of the tsunami relief monies, women in rural north Indian villages won't even come out of their huts to talk to a foreigner. He himself explicitly states that he is not trying to portray Tamilnadu as heaven but compared to several northern states, southern states have much better quality of governance, only 10 to 20% of funds being siphoned off compared to 70 to 80% in the north. 

Subsequent chapters talk in depth about castes, Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and the sycophants that surrounds the leaders, the Kashmir issue with Pakistan (he had interviewed General Musharraf), the triangular dance going on between India, China and US each with its own intentions and end goals, nuclear deterrent, Bollywood movies and so forth. Everywhere he manages to retain readers' attention. 

  

He visits Dar-ul-Uloom -the House of Knowledge- a large Islamic school in a town called Deoband. The Maulana (an honorific title given to the Muslim leader) asks him if he wants any refershment to which Luce responds with a request for a Nescafe coffee, which is probably the only kind of coffee you will get in those parts. The Maulana says that he had earlier issued a fatwa preventing all faithfuls from consuming any of the American or British products to protest against their attacks on the muslim brethren. Luce trying to argue that he is not a faithful (since he is not aMuslim) and Nestle is actually a company in Switzerland, etc. doesn't help. Still the Maulana after thinking through it a bit comes up with a solution saying the fatwa he issued applies only to products bought after 9/11 and so by locating an instant coffee sachet bought before 9/11, they manage to serve him a cup of coffee..! With such a convenient & thoughtful loophole found in the fatwa for his sake, Luce says it was one of the most satisfying cup of coffee he ever had. :-)

There are no charts or graphs in the book (though there are a bunch of photographs collected in few pages in the middle) and the tone is not too academic but still the work is serious enough to dive into serious topics earnestly. It is his perception of people, places, events, organizations he had come across in India, which is a functioning anarchy. The list of big names in India that he had interviewed sound quite impressive as it ranges from political leaders (Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, Vajpayee, Lalu Prasad Yadav), industrialists (Hinduja), tech titans (Nilekani, Premji) to Bollywood stars (Amitabh Bachchan), sport stars, IAS officers, spiritual leaders (Sri Sri Ravishankar) and so on. His wit is entertaining. Describing one of the modern gurus (Ravishankar) very popular in India, he says the guru is sitting in a large prayer hall with hundreds of devotees in front, with flowing long hair and beard, with a nice air conditioner on, looking like Jesus Christ is shooting a shampoo commercial. :-) There are mild jokes thrown in once in a while pointing out things like in India "You don't cast your vote but vote your caste", India never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity, etc. While he is on the whole respectful of people & culture, he relentlessly points out all the flaws in the system as in the cases of free or subsidized products and services provided by the government purportedly to help the poor ending up filling up the coffers of the rich and resulting in the exact opposite effect of depriving the poor even more. A good case in point is free electricity state governments provide to help the poor farmers. In reality only the well connected rich farmers who don't need the freebie enjoy the delivery, run the pump sets 24x7 to irrigate their large lands endlessly as there is no incentive to turn the pumps off that results in water table getting lower and lower preventing poor farmers who can't afford electric pumps from accessing any water through their manual means.

In the last section he lists the following four problems that require urgent attention, if India had to reach its envisioned super power status in the future. 

- The challenge of lifting 300 million people out of abject poverty

- Overcoming the dangers of rapid environmental degradation

- Heading off the specter of an HIV-AIDS epidemic

- Protecting and strengthening India's system of liberal democracy

His prescriptions are a bit vague and skimpy. I am also sure that we can add couple more bullets to the list or debate whether these four are the valid ones that should be on top. Similarly, Indian readers may not see a lot of new information in the book, while foreigners may not know the cast of characters well enough to enjoy the book as much as I did. But on the whole he does a nice job of presenting the background history and current status of this land of contrast well to conclude that India is not on autopilot to greatness but it would take an incompetent pilot to crash the plane.

Planning to read a similar work on China for which  China Goes Global:The Partial Power by David Shambaugh looked like a good candidate. Haven't bought it yet. Do you know of anything better?

-sundar.

Book Review(s)

I bought Viktor E. Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" about 3 years back and it was sitting on the shelf patiently ever since. It is a fairly small book of about 160 pages. Frankl was a psychiatrist in Austria, captured by the Nazis and placed in concentration camps for 5 years before he got out and eventually published several books including this one. First half of the book talks about life in the concentration camps during the second world war. While he describes the horrors of people being put to death, the showers, lack of any kind of nourishment, sleeping next to dead bodies and so forth, he is not trying to describe things just for shock value, limiting himself saying enough has been written now that describes these camps, and so there is no need. 

I remember reading a while back as to how our minds adapt themselves to any given situation filling themselves with the task of analyzing what is in front. Thus, a cut in our pinky may look much more important to us taking up our whole thought process though we might have read about/seen on TV an ongoing famine in another part of the world killing thousands of people. But if we are in the midst of a famine, a cut in a pinky won't even register. By the same token, even in as abject a situation as in a concentration camp where you see people dying and put to death daily, our elastic mind adjusts itself to focus on finding some sort of meaning to one's existence so that one can live on. As the author quotes Nietzsche, "He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How." Getting some peas with the soup (instead of just broth water), cracking jokes about the SS guards, thinking about the nice life one is going to lead after getting out of the camp one day, making up stories about how one's friends & family must be getting along outside and one will meet them soon, etc. all provide causes/reasons for hope that makes one survive the camp day by day. Of course when this hope is lost, author says he saw human beings in the camp simply giving up, not getting up one day to go to mindless work one is forced to do, knowing fully well that not getting up will lead to one's death in the hands of the guards.  He argues that those prisoners who gave up on life were the first to die. The main cause for their death is the lack of a reason to live for rather than lack of food or medicine. These realizations/observations got him to develop his ideas for logotherapy, discussion of which forms the second half of the book.

Contrary to Freudian and other conventional psychiatry ideas that human mind is driven by its pursuit of happiness, Frankl's Logotherapy claims that human beings are driven by a search for a meaning in their lives. This seems to explain as to why even when your existence is reduced to such misery as in a concentration camp, people are able to live on and survive. Where pursuit of happiness doesn't stand a lot of chance to keep you going in such extreme situations, search for a meaning can. 

After he got out of the camps, he had setup a successful practice and had treated depression, loss of hope, bi-polar and other range of psychiatric disorders using this model. He describes his approach by discussing several case studies. For example, a mother who had a mentally disabled child that eventually dies and a remaining one that is crippled. While this situation will be extremely depressing to the mother pushing her towards suicide and pursuit of happiness beyond that point in her life will be very difficult, figuring out a meaning as to how/why it happened appears to work better. In this example, asking the mother, would she have not had the child at all rather than going through this pain always makes the mother realize that her love for the child trumps the pain and so as painful as it may be, she still treasures the experience.  The child that died early lived though short a life filled with her love rather than a long life that is bereft of love while the second one is surviving thanks to her. One can view these as nothing more than clever arguments or tricks. But viewing the same scenario from a totally different perspective does change one's view and if that makes you happy/satisfied giving you a reason to go on with life even under extenuating circumstances, then there is all the more reason to embrace such arguments. Reading such books/ideas periodically should help us realize how blessed we are in our lives and how silly the things we keep worrying/fighting about on a daily basis be it a silly ego tiff with our spouses or some work related issues not going right temporarily. Frankl's genuine tone of humility in his writing is humbling. 

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Also read a novel titled "The Sunshine when she is gone" by Thea Goodman. 

It is a story of a rich young couple living in NYC with a small baby. The city/career oriented life they lead, with a nanny to look after the baby, gets under their skin. So, one day the husband just takes the baby and gets on a plane going to Barbados for a weekend without telling his wife. Of course he flies back after two days and gets back with his wife. While the idea is interesting, execution is not that interesting. To balance out husband's this heinous "crime" violating the wife's confidence, wife cheats on the husband in a contrived scenario and so when they find out what the other did, they are even and they move on. I bought the book after hearing about it in the radio thinking Maya might enjoy the novel. She gave up halfway and I was the one who read the whole book. You can skip this one. :-)

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My son Arjun is on summer vacation. Just to keep him engaged, I get him books to read that should be just above his level. I have commented about Malcolm Gladwell's books before, saying he usually has a grain of a good idea worth writing a Newyorker article about but then adds a lot of fluff and builds a book around it. So, thought they should be good choices for a kid that had just finished elementary school. :-) So, got him The Tipping Point and Outliers from the public library. He loved them and finished reading them in one day each..! 

I had read Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" and "Blink" before and since then swore off Gladwell books. But, Arjun finishing these books one per day put me to shame as I usually take months to finish "Collapse" type books I pick up. I had to convince myself that it is indeed the dense content that slows me down. So, decided to pick up Outliers and I am relieved to report that I could finish it in a day too. I knew the outline since I had read Gladwell's related articles. This might have accelerated my phase. But I could certainly zip through the pages since this book also follows the same model of some simple good observations/ideas written out elaborately in a news paper article style. Gladwell keeps churning out these "academic lite" books that people like to clutch and talk about in dinner parties making him popular and rich. If you agree and haven't read this book, you can just read his articles at http://www.gladwell.com/archive.html on Canadian ice hockey players and  Christopher Langan or read the book synopsis posted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book).

Phew.. I feel vindicated and eligible to retain my snobbish notions for some more time, that is until my kids put me back in my place once again. :-)

-sundar.

Book Review: Collapse by Jared Diamond

Read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. Similar to his other famous book Guns, Germs and Steel, the breath of material he covers in this book is amazing. This is the opposite end to the kind of books celebrities & authors who churn out dozens of manuscripts produce, where each piece has some little idea or observation with a lot of fluff around it making up some 200 pages. Since Diamond is a Professor in UCLA, he teaches graduate level courses based on this book material.

This 500+ page long book takes us on a nice guided tour of current and ancient civilizations. It starts out in the Bitterroot Valley in Montana and continues on to discuss Easter Islands, Pitcarin and Henderson Islands, The Anasazis, Mayans, Vikings and Fugues, Japan, Somalia, Greenland's Norse, Rwanda/Burundi, Tikopia Island, Haiti Vs. Dominican Republic, Russia, China, Australia and so on darting back and forth in the timeline, geography and civilizations. (As usual India is hardly mentioned anywhere but for a line or two in passing. :-)

Underlying theme is that societies that thrive for several centuries can collapse precipitously just in a decade if attention is not paid to few factors. He distills them into the following five:

- Environmental damage caused by the society

- Climate change

- Hostile neighbors

- Friendly trade partners

- Society's reaction to its environmental problems

It may look like points 1 & 5 could be combined into one and similarly 3 & 4 could be combined into one. Still this gives a framework through which he analyzes multiple societies both in the past and present, some successful and many failed ones. His conclusion is that if we don't pay attention to these factors, our current societies are also vulnerable to such catastrophic collapse. Though some may argue that scientific advancement, communication technology and our awareness of what goes on in different parts of the world will allow us to react to changes to prevent such a collapse, he elaborately argues that it need not be the case. Compared to Easter Island society, we may be much bigger but that gargantuan size can lead to faster environmental damage that may be hard to reverse and a setup with a lot of built-in inertia to implement changes quickly. Globalization also ensures that no one is isolated from changes taking place in one part of the world. So, such collapses to even countries/societies like US are very real possibilities.

The comparison study of Haiti Vs. Dominican Republic is fascinating. While both countries are part of the same island and are poor countries, comparatively DR is in much better shape due to its policies where as Haiti is in miserable condition despite possessing same resources. In another case study he compares the lives of Norse and Inuit in Greenland. The Norse from Norway moved into Greenland and lived there for 450 years and then were forced out of existence completely not being able to survive, though the local Inuits have been successfully living in the Arctic for 1000's of years. There seems to be 4 reasons as to why the Norse vanished from Greenland.

- Fluctuating weather cycles. They entered Greenland during a mild period that was conducive to invasion & settling down but made them complacent.

- Their preconceived ideas of how to live based on the Norwegian society's living style and values helped them first but then lead to their decline.

- They looked down upon Inuit and refused to learn from them.

- The powerful, wealthy Norse had short term interests that were counter to their long term well being.

These observations seem to fit into the five point framework he provides early. As he works through the material the amount of information he throws around is quite impressive. There is a long description as to how the Inuit kayaks are custom made for individuals, thus converting kayak into something the Inuit "wear" as an extension of their clothing as one kayak won't fit the next guy in line. I never viewed the kayak in this way. In a different chapter he describes in detail as to how similar to cross sectional tree rings that are used to study the age of trees, pollen found in successive layers of mud is studied to create a record of weather patterns (how extreme snow was in a year, etc.) spanning decades, cross checking it with tree rings found in the same geographical area. Extremely slow and painstaking research explained well.

The last item on this list is perhaps the most important take away. As societies evolve beyond initial stages where everyone is involved in subsistence agriculture, a class structure gets setup. People on top of this pyramid were kings/queens/chieftains in olden days and billionaires today. This ruling class is usually insulated from negative impacts of their and the society’s actions. So, they become oblivious, fail to take corrective actions though they are the ones with power that could implement changes. They become more and more preoccupied with palace intrigues, fine-tuning laws to favor them, topping the billionaire lists and thus maintaining their hold on power. This “Let them eat cake” mentality might look like an historical artifact that cannot repeat today due to instant communication, democracy, etc. But how the near collapse of the banking system late last decade hardly affected the top bosses could serve as a clear illustration that it applies to contemporary societies as well. We can also argue that the collapse of the US Auto industry, the collapse of the railroad industry before that, collapse of the canal industry before that are all cases in point. In the end when the whole system/society goes down, it takes down everyone with it.

While the title and the framework may paint the author as a rabid environmentalist, he does talk in detail about specific MNC efforts to be environmentally friendly as it makes good business sense for them in the long run. He encourages his readers to strongly support such companies and points out Chevron's oil exploration operation in Papua New Guinea as one such excellent example. This book is certainly worth the read. In addition to this book, there are good lectures given by him on this topic available on TED.com site.

-sundar.

Rigged calculators and toxic water streams

I served as a judge for a middle & high school science competition event last Saturday. It is conducted by an organization called PJAS (Pennsylvania Junior Academy of Sciences) setup to promote science education among school students. See http://www.pjas.net. I went in for the first time last year. Thought it was a good experience and a nice opportunity to do some volunteer work for the community and so signed on this year again. There were more than 120 judges and 1200+ student participants (~600 students in the morning and another ~600 in the afternoon sessions). 

The entire state of PA gets segmented to into dozen regions, each covering multiple county/district schools. In the morning session middle school students (7 & 8th graders) presented their findings. Afternoon session was for high school students. Though it is not necessarily original research, the process gives students a good overview of how research is conducted in science. With the help of a mentor, they choose a topic (you can find a list of supported subject areas here), develop a question, pose a hypothesis, conduct tests, analyze the data, make a conclusion as to whether the hypothesis is supported or rejected, put together a presentation describing their project and present it in this forum. While individual schools may hold science exhibition like events where students give demonstrations, in this event they are required to make only a presentation using transparencies (no 3-D models/aids or show & tell allowed). This helps keep the format consistent and fairly fail proof.

Interestingly the morning session where middle school kids present, had better quality projects both last year and this year compared to afternoon session where high schoolers present. This appears to be due to couple of reasons:

- Middle school students are not required to participate in this event and so those who do are genuinely interested smart kids doing this voluntarily with enthusiasm. On the other hand several high schools make it compulsory diluting the quality of student pool. 

- After seeing middle school presentations in the morning, my expectation for high school presentations probably goes up. :-)

- With so many high school students trying to participate quality of mentoring also probably goes down.

Areas like Physics, Chemistry and Behavioral Science seem to attract a lot of participants, each with more than 70 students. Computer Science and Math had abysmal participation with just 2 each in the morning and less than a dozen in the afternoon. In the morning I went to judge a behavioral science session with 12 participants. One seventh grader in this session had bought 4 calculators, opened them up herself and rewired + with multiplication, - with division, etc. She then recruited student subjects to take a math test that will require a calculator and gave them these rigged calculators to see how quickly boys & girls recognize that there is something wrong with the calculator. This is to study gender based differences in observational skills. I thought this was a good/clever experiment for a seventh grade girl to conceive and conduct. Interestingly she found that her male student subjects found that the calculator is broken far quickly compared to her female students. I was joking that perhaps the girls didn't even need a calculator to complete the test and so never bothered to use them. :-) 

In the afternoon went to judge a session on Ecology. A high school student in this session wanted to see if a water stream used as a source for potable water is contaminated by nearby plants releasing pollutants. Very valid idea for an ecology related study. But he simply called a water testing company, sent them just one sample set and reported their test result saying the water is clean. Looks like the mentor didn't explain the need for good sample size, importance of designing and doing the tests yourself, varying variables in the experiment, etc. 

I heard about another 8th grader in the morning session who had built a scaled 3D model of a house to see how green a house can be, used enough thermal insulation & drywall material, installed multiple temperature sensors around the model, collected readings using a microprocessor, wrote FPGA code, analyzed the results using Excel (resorting to sliding window approach as the number of data points he had gathered exceeded a million overwhelming MS Excel), etc..!! So, there was a wide range in the quality of work presented. Still considering the fact that when I finished high school I hardly knew what posing a hypothesis meant, this whole exercise is commendable. 

This event has all the ingredients you need to make it very chaotic:

- It is held in a high school that most participants have never been into before (i.e. new large building, you don't know which room you need to go to, where the rest room is, etc.). 

- There are 100+ judges who are new to the school as well. 

- Presentations take place in about 50 to 60 parallel sessions in different class rooms simultaneously.

- Each room has about dozen students presenting and 2 or 3 judges. 10 mins for presentation followed by ~5 mins of Q&A. 

- Whole thing is repeated in the afternoon for high school students.

- Packets need to be put together for each judge with evaluation rubric, instruction hand outs, programs, participants list, stop watch for one lead judge to time the presentations, and so forth

- Judges/participants may not show up at the last minute.

- Winter weather

- Providing free lunch for all the judges, selling lunches for everyone else, etc.

Despite all these factors, it went off without any hitch, people showed up at the right time, judges' orientation got over as per schedule, there were enough people guiding judges/participants to the correct rooms, all the participants were ready in the correct room exactly on time, we submitted our results and left the premises earlier than expected..! Need to learn these organization skills. 

There were more than a dozen judges from LSI alone. An astute friend & colleague who accompanied me for the first time as a judge made a good but subtle observation. When we attend a presentation in the office, we usually ask follow up questions to get our doubts cleared so that we understand the contents of the presentation well. He said material the students presented were all easy to understand and so he didn't have any questions initially. His co-judge who has been doing this for the past 15 years or so, kept asking a lot of questions. Soon he realized that the purpose of co-judge's questions is not for him to understand the presentation better but to enrich the students & push/encourage them to think more. In the end he came out with a recalibrated view of attending presentations. 

Thus, in more than one way, we learned a thing or two in exchange for our Saturday. :-) 

-sundar.

Book Review: The Faith Instinct by Nicholas Wade

I think I picked up Nicholas Wade's "The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures" when I was browsing through discounted books at a Border's book store on its way to closure last year. It turned out to be a very good work by the author who is a science reporter forNYT. In the book Wade doesn't come across as a strong theist or atheist but simply as someone studying the evolution of religion and making observations. Books by authors like Dawkins, while arguing vigorously about the negative effects of religion on civilizations, usually gloss over the reasons as to why human beings seems to have an innate desire to have and practice religion. This book seems to fill that gap. His basic tenet is that religions are memes that served purposes such as social cohesion, a way to impart morality, help in trading of goods, etc. that confers evolutionary advantages to the population that practice it. So, it tends to stick around in successful population and has evolved over the centuries so as to remain relevant. In several sense it is more like a  business that modifies and adapts to changing circumstances and needs of the population it serves. In his own words, "Many of the social aspects of religious behavior offer advantages--such as a group's strong internal cohesion and high morale in war--that would lead to a society's members having more surviving children, and religion for such reasons would be favored by natural selection. This is less true of the personal aspects of religion. Religion may help people overcome the fear of death, or find courage in facing disease and catastrophe, but these personal beliefs seem unlikely to enable them to have more surviving offspring, natural selection's only yardstick of success. Rather, the personal rewards of religion are significant because they draw people to practice it, without which the social benefits could not have been favored by natural selection." 

He starts off with a chapter discussing the works of moral psychologists on trolley experiments and such. I always found them quite intriguing and have talked about it with family and friends. You can see the Wiki version if you haven't heard about these thought experiments before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

He then moves on to discuss different aspects of religion such as music, dance and trance that was a big part of primitive religions, and how the behavior evolved over time towards the formation of the three big Abrahamic religions. There are lot of interesting little pieces of information buried in the discussions of research on three contemporary hunting and gathering societies--the !Kung San, the Andaman Islanders, and Australian Aborigines. For example there is a group of Melanesian islands near Papua New Guinea inhabited by Trobriands who practice what is called Kula exchange system. Though individual islanders don't interact with all the other islands, they do trade with islands adjacent to them. When they do, there is a practice of exchanging very prestigious gifts that may have no practical value as well as trading commodities that are needed for their survival/living. The prestigious gifts are of two kinds, something like a necklace and a decorated arm band, where the necklace is given to the island on the left and the armband to the right..! These exchanges may take place couple of times a year and the gifts may get enhanced while they are in possession of an island. Though the islanders never seems to have understood that they are a part of a big ring of couple of dozen islands, as per their religious practices they know they are supposed to honor the gift exchange practice. So, an islander who is old enough may see the same gift coming back to the island couple of times in his lifetime though he may not understand the mechanism involved (similar to Americans participating/using financial products without understanding all the details of how say a CDO works). But this religion based prestige gift exchange that revolves in opposite directions ensures that trust is established for accompanying commodities trading..! 

In later chapters he discusses as to why religion bothers itself so much about regulating sexual practices of its followers. Though it may not make much sense to imagine an omnipotent God being bothered by what goes on inside individual bedrooms, from a very practical business point of view, it makes all the sense to regulate these practices to ensure the number of followers of a religion continues to increase so that the religion can thrive. He argues that this self-preservation motivation prompts religions to oppose abortion, gays and encourage child-bearing and so forth. Sects that do not follow this model, Shakers being a prime example (they expect everyone who is a Shaker to remain celibate), tend to decline over time. He also discusses the high entry price some religions stipulate on its followers. For example, Mormonism insists that all its followers donate 10% of their earnings and considerable personal time to proselytizing for the church. This model helps ensure that those who get in can be trusted as motivated followers that in turn ensures cohesion among Mormons. 

He concludes discussing the kind of civic religion that is in vogue in US (where there is no state sponsored church or religion) for the past few decades. There is reference to God in presidential oath (that wasn't there in the original constitution), oath of allegiance, and in all public speeches and even in bringing backing to the US treasury bills without explicitly referring to any specific God but sort of keeping the references to a generic version. :-) Thus, as long as it continues to slowly evolve and perceived to be providing a service that helps the economy and social cohesion, religion may not go away for a long time. One thing I found a bit disappointing is the lack of effort spent to discuss Hinduism, while even Confucianism is discussed a bit more. Though it is practiced by 1/6th of the world's population, it is always a footnote in the thoughts of western scholars. Reminded me of The Simpsons TV show where in an episode Reverend Lovejoy lovingly points out as to how people of various religions in the town came together to help Ned Flanders, an ardent Christian. Pointing out Christian, Muslim, Jewish neighbors standing next to each other, he turns to Apu next and says "Miscellaneous". When Apu protests saying there are a billion people on this planet practicing Hinduism, the Rev. brushes him aside with a patronizing "Oh, that's super". It seems to satirically but correctly sum up the Western view of Hinduism. :-)

Book is only 285 pages long. Pick it up if you can and let me know what you think.
-sundar.

Book Review: How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life

Read "How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life” by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky recently. It explores an interesting and profound question as the world continues to race towards globalization with the economies of all the nations getting intertwined leading to changes in one part of the world affecting the rest. It starts off nicely with a discussion of a 1928 lecture delivered by John Maynard Keynes in which he foretold a future that will require its citizenry to work very little letting them spend most of their time in leisure activities.  His thinking was that as the productivity of manufacturing processes improve, there will be diminishing need for workers to put in long hours to maintain the same standard of living. Thus for example, if the world needs 1 billion paper clips a week, once the production process gets automated, same 1 billion clips can be produced with very little need for manual work relieving those workers to lead a life of leisure with the same salary/quality of life. But in reality this idea never came to pass since instead of four paper clip making workers now working 10 hours each, enjoying the rest of the time in leisure activities, our version of capitalism employs one worker for 40 hours a week  rendering the other three unemployed..! 

The counter argument that the continued workload has brought in so much of new inventions and discoveries that have improved life on the whole has been glossed over a bit. While we can deride inventions like iPod as frivolous, there is a case to be made for meaningful inventions like vaccines and such. But you can still appreciate the overall thought process. If we don't stand back and look at the big picture/trend, what each one does on a daily basis at the microeconomics level will appear right making all the new 'wants' look like 'needs'. While reading the book, I was reminded of a Newsweek issue few months back. Each issue usually carries few pages of full spread photos from that week's news events from different parts of the world. This particular issue showed a bunch of kids on one page from sub-Saharan Africa that were struggling to find food and were subsisting on lot less than a dollar a day. Next page showed a full page photograph of a young socialite that had conceived a child out of wedlock to a heir of a multibillion family fortune while she was his girl friend for couple of months. The photo showed her standing on the Manhattan court steps after she had won a court order granting her $22,000 living expense per month. This is basically for her to do nothing but just raise that child. She can perhaps learn a thing or two from the Amish community that lives an hour away from where we live. Unfortunately the Keynes idea didn't get anywhere close to reality as the want part continues to raise and exotic hard to get wants (private island, personal jet) being created more and more conditioning the rats to run on the treadmill faster and faster.  

While the first and last chapters are well written, sections in between often read like stream of consciousness writing, as in "Hegel's dialectic was the perfect intellectual instrument for resolving Marx's ambivalence towards capitalism". It might plausibly be due to different chapters being written by the two different authors. If so, one is quite engaging and accessible while the other is soporific and not so cogent. Authors should read "The History of Western Philosophy" to learn from Russel how to write lucidly even when writing an entire book on topics like philosophy. :-) Still, while the work may not be a page turner from cover to cover, the authors do cover the subject well discussing how to define what is a good life, moral/religious/philosophical/historical views of what is happiness, ethical Vs. utilitarian arguments for protecting the environment and finally how we can structure the society to move towards that Keynes' utopia. 

There have been attempts in Europe to reduce the work week to 35 hours, provide more vacation time, etc. But the authors present enough data and charts to show that despite all the improvement in productivity, and all the wealth that has been created in the last 100 years, in developed countries working hours have either stayed the same or actually increased and the wealth has been garnered by an increasingly smaller section of the population. This is indeed quite sad. Their prescription in the last chapter titled Exits from the Rat Race has a lot of top down ideas (i.e. what govt. and societies should do), which made me wonder if the authors were American, would they have tilted towards more bottom up (i.e. individual options) solutions. They propose the following:

- Guaranteeing a basic income for everyone so that people can choose to work as much as they want (this is being done in parts of UAE, but only to a very small section of the population that forms the citizenry leaving the rest who are migrant workers that can never become citizens with no such guarantees), 

- Reducing the pressure to consume (reducing advertisements, taxing consumption), 

- Filling up the chasm between ultra rich and poor/middle class that has widened considerably in the last few decades (via increased taxation)

- Temporary halt to globalization (they argue that no poor country has entered the free trade regime and become rich), 

- Getting societies/political parties to stop focusing on growth and getting them to refocus on basic goods/happiness, 

- Reducing working hours in different ways (a 1993 Danish law recognizes people's right to work discontinuously while simultaneously recognizing their right to continuous income thus allowing people to take sabbatical every 4 to 7 years which in turn lets more people be employed to fill those spots).

Not sure if I will see such a turnaround in US policies in my lifetime. :-)

Happy reading to you in the new year. 

-sundar.