Book Reviews: Early Indians & The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets

I have a regular book exchange program going on with couple of my friends for more than a decade. One among them keeps giving me two books each time we meet, while I give only one! When we met earlier this year, I received "Early Indians" by Tony Joseph, and "The Mathematical Secrets of The Simpsons" by Simon Singh. While I started reading Early Indians couple of months back, progress had been slow, since family & work kept me busy, and I was also watching way more TV shows than I should have been! Managed to finish both books during these holidays. 

Early Indians - The story of our ancestors and where we came from, is clearly written with Indian audience in mind, published in India and seems to be getting good traction there. Other books on anthropology (at least those I have read) tend to discuss human evolution and migration, out of Africa into various parts of the world, without focusing too much on the national boundaries. But this one tries to answer questions like who are genetically Indians? Where did their ancestors come from? What does the languages spoken in India tell us about the origins of Indians? Until few decades back, such questions are answered incompletely, in parts via archeological evidence. In the past couple of decades genetic research has helped close some of the gaps. Author spends a good chapter on mitochondrial DNA, how father side and mother side DNA can be traced back generations to establish descendance and elaborates the way it helps provide a fuller story. 

While the book is well researched, providing lot of references, author keeps jumping from DNA evidence to archeological evidence to language to references in Vedas back and forth too quickly too many times. It gives the book's flow a staccato quality. As I was wading through the pages, I was losing interest. While I certainly do understand why we need a lore and pride to bring cohesion amongst a nation's population to make a country run well, I am always looking for indications telling me that we are evolving beyond those simpler needs, as one civilization that spans the globe. This may not be realistic looking at current trend lines. But that outlook of mine, made reading about how Indian people are genetically, archeologically, and culturally distinct a bit boring. 

To the author's credit, he brought it all together in the end. He clearly states that all the people in the world share 99.9% of the genetic code and so the differences we are talking about are only about the 0.1% that is differentiates us from each other. Metaphorically he describes India as a pizza (a la melting pot, mosaic analogies used in the US). The pizza base is the "First Indians" that are descendants of the original Out of Africa migrants that reached India 65,000 years ago. They account for up to two thirds of the genetic commonality that exists among the Indian population today. Next the sauce is the Harappan civilization people that spread across North and South parts of current India, when that civilization fell apart about 5000 years back. He sees them as the glue that binds different parts of India together culturally & linguistically. Then comes the cheese part formed by the Aryans that came to India, that had more of an influence in the Northern parts than the South. Their significance is seen in the fact that about two-thirds of Indians speak a resulting language. Final round of varied toppings that completes the pizza metaphor are various others that migrated in, such as Greeks, Huns, that are not spread uniformly but are more visible in some parts of India than the others. 

His analysis on the caste system is that it wasn't anything brought in by any of the immigrants but a political development that had started only about 2000 years back. But interestingly, since the system encouraged endogamy, it created a large number of small populations that live close to each other in Indian cities and villages. Thus, neighbors within an Indian village living next to each other may have more distinguishing traits than say Northern and Southern Europeans. After digging through the details of academic papers, DNA analysis, linguistic and archeological evidence, his conclusions can be summarized this way. Political/communal forces may try to develop a narrative that Indian population/culture is something unchanging and unique that has lasted 5000+ years. But in reality, it is not true as it is always mixed, evolving, changing continuously. This conclusion does sound correct & complete, and simultaneously satisfying. While this book may not be of interest to all my friends (particularly non-Indian), it is good to see such works being published that analyze anthropological questions more methodically & rigorously rather than parroting out unsubstantiated national pride claims from echo chambers.

In between, while I was getting a little bored, switched books and picked up The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh. It was a breeze and a delight that I finished reading it within 24 hours (spanning 2 days)! I knew the author as I had enjoyed reading his earlier book Fermat's Last Theorem as well and so was aware of this decade old book. I have even read bits and pieces of it before, as I am a superfan of the TV show The Simpsons. In case if you haven't read it before, I'd request/urge you to read the article I wrote about  the show titled 27-Year-Old American Family as it also touches upon the math aspects of the show. 

As I wrote in that piece, this show provides at least three layers of entertainment. On the surface, the brightly drawn characters and the backdrop provides a Tom & Jerry type look & feel, even kids can enjoy. At the next level, it usually has two or three different stories running in parallel that nicely conflate to provide a neat climax that will be interesting for adults. On a deeper level, the show throws in so many arcane references, gags you can appreciate only if you freeze certain frames and spend few minutes to understand what is shown in the background. A specialty of the show is throwing in a lot of mathematical references that 99% of the audience will never get but the remaining 1% who gets them will cherish forever. This whole book is about that math aspect of the show. Among the writers of the show there are Math and Physics PhDs, and M.S. degree holders. While I knew all this before, learned from the book as to how the writers sincerely work to find places in the story where clever math puzzles, and factoids can be inserted. In addition, though I had known about Erdős number and Six degrees of Kevin Bacon before, didn't know about how low the combined Erdős–Bacon numbers are for some of the Simpsons writers! Just not to bore everyone, let me just provide a link to this Wikipedia page that lists remarkably low numbers for actors Colin Firth and Natalie Portman, and the lowest number for Bruce Reznick, a mathematician. Book discusses who, got to what number, how, in a very interesting chapter!

Since I had written about the math aspect with examples in the article I linked above, and have also talked about few topics discussed in this book in my Thought Experiments book (e.g. Hilbert & Cantor's work on infinity), I will restrain myself from repeating any of that stuff here. You don't need to be a math wizard to enjoy this book. 

When I realized the final chapter was about another TV show called Futurama, which was also created by the same Simpsons writing team, I thought Simon Singh was running out of math material solely derived from The Simpsons to fill the whole book. But to my surprise, that chapter turned out to be quite neat since it discussed a whole new mathematical theorem and proof derived from a Futurama episode storyline that has been published as a math journal paper! To someone like me, who used to be frustrated by the lack math or any technical depth in Indian cinema (of yester years) even when warranted, TV shows resulting in Math academic journal papers is naturally a pleasure to hear about! As David Cohen's (Writer for The Simpsons and co-creator of Futurama) blurb for the book states, "This book blows the lid off a decade-long conspiracy to secretly educate cartoon viewers". Certainly, read this book, my book and the article link above. You will laugh loud and live long! 

Happy New Year!

-sundar.

Simple Questions

The phrase or question, "What Would Jesus Do?" seems to have originated more than 100 years back, but was trending in the US zeitgeist during the 1990's. It was used as a shorthand to remind followers of Christianity that they should stick to their moral imperative consistently. There was even a wristband popularized at that time that had the letters WWJD. It was given to teenagers to wear, so that they will be nudged to make the "right" decisions whenever they get caught in a moral quandary. I liked the simplicity of the framing that is easy to remember to analyze any given situation that requires a right or wrong decision. 

Along those lines, I try to come up with simple questions that will help me assess large and complex worldly situations so that I don't get hoodwinked into compelling arguments that may be narrow or use emotional troupes. Here are two examples:

Take this nice Trevor Noah's take on the conflict between Palestine & Israel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeZ4yXyzUG0 

As he points out, depending upon which particular point in time you start your narration with, you can make one side or the other look like monsters/victims. Contrast this scenario with the discussions found in this old but delightful book called How to Lie with Statistics? that I was reviewing couple of years back. It shows how by selectively choosing data points (that are all technically true/correct but incomplete) you can paint different pictures out of the same scenario. This is of course made into a sellable art now, with the name "Spin Doctors" given to the practitioners of this trade! These points may remind us of the elementary school story where five blind people perceive different parts of an elephant and describe it in five different ways. Since the individual stories we are told in any given instance could be narrow, anecdotal, emotionally wrenching, one simple framing question I try to ask to orient myself is this: Is this complete? If we brush aside the latest/anecdotal/narrow stories that bother us and ask this question to get the full picture of the situation in both time and space perspectives, perhaps it will help us understand the issue more holistically that may move us towards solutions that are comprehensive.  

For the second example, I am going somewhere else. My wife routinely puts herself through a lot of inconvenience to do that right thing. She will go to extraordinary lengths to take cloth bags to grocery stores so as not to add to the environmental pollution by using single use plastic bags (though in the state of Pennsylvania plastic bag usage is not outlawed). She supports CSA (Comunity Supported Agriculture), always insists on us buying organic produce, etc. My friend friend Sanjay spends most of his Sundays volunteering to mentor economically impoverished young school age girls. The organization he works for guides them through school, basic college and careers. These girls come from such low strata of the society that you won't find Hollywood ending where they all become Doctors and highly paid software engineers in few years to happily live ever after. It is not practical. The organization guides them through the process to get a simple three-year degree and perhaps a bank teller type job. I admire both my wife and friend for the enormous amount of time and effort they put in to do the right thing. But if I step back and look at the big picture, I realize that the plastic industry has trained us to believe that it is the end users to responsibility to recycle plastic (or avoid single use plastic bags) absolving themselves completely. If you dig into the statistics, you will see how the recycle program is a big farce and <10% of plastic and other artificial material every produced were ever recycled. While CSA type programs may be very emotionally appealing, it boils down to subsistence farming type model that can't feed the entire world's population efficiently, as has been determined in the last century itself. Similarly, rather than spending years where Sanjay is donating all his Sundays to mentor a small number of girls to lift them up, perhaps going with what China did to improve its economy dramatically for 30 years will work better to bring lot more people out of poverty, lift them up to better careers much more quickly? Thus, while I have nothing but admiration for people trying to do the right thing at the local level, I try to ask, "Does this approach scale?". The word scale here means does this solution approach solve the problem at the world level? If not, should we spend our time and energy on models that will get big problems solved as a byproduct (like what economic growth does to solve so many problems related to malnutrition, living standards, career opportunities, exposure, etc.) rather than solving those problems individually, inefficiently? 

After reading this post, you may wonder, "Isn't this obvious? Does this require a page long write up?". So, I'd like to summarize the purpose of the post, so that the reader is not mislead to think that I am debating the areas discussed in the two examples. I am asking/hoping that I will learn something through any interesting responses you provide as to how you distill complex scenarios. Do you use any such framing devices to distill or analyze problems in a simpler way?