Do you call this a vacation?

When I went to India on a two-week trip last March, ended up in a hospital there forcing my wife and BIL to fly in to get me back! Last July when we had big trip planned to go to Europe, we got into the plane, sat on the taxiway for 7 hours, only for the flight to be cancelled with the whole plan collapsing! Not giving up, we booked an all-inclusive resort vacation for five days between x-mas and new year, for our extended family of nine, thinking third time will be the charm. The reservations got totally messed up, thanks to a friend who was helping us with the booking process. Still managed to find alternate arrangements at the last minute and successfully boarded the plane with just one of us being slightly sick with cough/cold on Dec 25th. That virus turned out to be quite contagious, resulting in 7 out of the nine of us falling sick one after the other during this vacation! I set several new not so good records. 

- Stayed in the room for the maximum time ever, thanks to spiking fever, body ache, cough, cold. 

- With multiple buffets galore surrounding us, ate the least amount of food. 

- Didn't swim in the resort pools even once, 

- Didn't go to the gym or jog around the nice tracks they had around the Hacienda. 

Guess we did our best to subsidize the facility for other patrons!

If you ask was there any upside to all this, it is the amount of undisturbed time I got to start and finish reading the book Who got Einstein's office? Eccentricity and genius at the institute for advanced study by Ed Regis. This is another book our family friend Sriram Tyagarajan loaned me along with The Idea Factory, I was writing about couple of months back. Similar to that book which talks about the Bell Labs as an institute, its culture, personalities and glory days, this fairly old publication that came out 1987, talks about the Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey. This is a more difficult one to write as a popular book since the institute and its residents are all dedicated to theoretical work in physics and mathematics, compared to Bell Labs that generated a ton of practical appliances that readers will be easily able to relate to. Still the author has done a splendid job.

As the author documents, The Institute was founded in 1930 with a brother and sister duo providing the funding while a gentleman named Abraham Flexner putting the whole concept together and also serving as is first director for several years. The institute was founded along the lines of Greek philosopher Plato's idea of an academy where you forget the existence of a real world but sit and think about the abstract concepts and principles that govern the entire universe.

Flexner reached out to Einstein, roping him in as the first permanent faculty for the institute. When Flexner asked how much of a salary he would expect, Einstein replied $3,000 per year and wondered if he could live on anything less than that. Of course, this is the 1930s and so $3,000 meant a lot but still it goes well with the principles of an academy where academics come in, not to earn a lot of money but to think about problems that govern the universe. Flexner apparently told him that the institute will actually pay him $10,000 a year, since the idea is to eliminate any real world worries from the faculty thus allowing them to work on their problems of choice undisturbed without any institute or family/personal pressures. I couldn't help relating this exchange to a recent article I read in which an actress claimed that the best move she has made in her career recently is firing her whole team because they did not get her multimillion-dollar deals based on a successful TV series character she had portrayed. It was an emotional and angry interview where she talked about women not getting paid well, and even when media reports that one received 10 million dollars, actually half the money goes to Uncle Sam, and you still need to pay your team from the remaining 5 million and so on. Of course, I totally support everyone getting paid equitably for their work. But you can't help comparing that article with Einstein's ask that sets the tone of the institute.

Over the decades the institute has hosted so many luminaries such as Kurt Gödel, John von Neumann, Dirac, Witten and Oppenheimer who served as its director for 16 years. Since I remain awe struck by the rate of growth in physics during the first half of the twentieth century, and have read several books on that topic, first half of the book that discusses developments in that time period in physics felt like a revision of what I had read in other books before. While I was settling into this notion that the whole book will continue repeating material I had read elsewhere, it pivoted into the story of John von Neumann building the first stored program computer and then into string theory, Astro physics, Mandelbrot sets, cellular automata, and so on very nicely. Though occasionally you come across sentences like, "Schwarz and Scherk realized that if the spin-2 particle predicted by string theory where in fact the graviton, then string theory would have the near miraculous result of requiring that gravitons existed, of necessitating them as an inescapable and ineradicable part of the theory, whereas all other quantum theories could not be made to accept gravitons through any amount of forcing, juggling, or mathematical hocus-pocus", overall the prose is very accessible, if you are interested in this material. 

Reading about Regis' stories about von Neumann reminded me of this notion. Becoming world's best on anything, or even belonging to the top 0.01% of something is incredibly difficult. Think about being the best in playing violin or being the richest, fastest or one with most patents or any other skill/specialty we can think of. You have to be dedicated to doing just that one thing, that consumes all your energy and attention, invariably spoiling other aspects of your life. Even Einstein had marital/family life related difficulties. Since I am not cut out to be the world's best on anything, I generally tell myself and my kids that I'd rather be on the 90th percentile of four, five things that gives me a more balanced Life, covering health, wealth, happiness in career/family, etc. But as the author describes, John von Neumann comes across as an exception that excels in everything. He pioneered the idea of stored instruction architecture for computers, and actually built the first computer of this kind in IAS. It was a revolution (and a beautiful one at that) since computer hardware were usually built/connected to do specific type of computation at that time. One computer doing any kind of computation was unknown, and his effort set the standards for the model that is still in use. He was a gregarious person enjoying the company of others, throwing great parties while also being brilliant not only in physics but also in computer science and minting money easily out of his creations! Homer Simpson being cute-dumb as he always is, in one of The Simpsons episodes when offered a witness relocation program by the FBI, says, "Okay, I would like to be John Elway" (famous American Football player), forcing the FBI officer to explain that is not how the program works. If I can get in the program as Homer envisioned, probably I would like to be John von Neumann.  

I have read (and still have a copy of) Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions book, that came out in 1962. Decades back when I read it, I didn't find it that brilliant. When I said that to my grad school classmate Amit Nanavati, he was quite disappointed. Amit, being Amit, won't say "Idiot, go read it again". but that was the message. I liked this author's discussion of Kuhn's book and what a paradigm shift it was when it came out. Good nudge for me to go read it again, particularly since the book's main theme is understanding perspectives from the viewer's point of view (instead of from your current status of mind & experience). In its glory years many of the institute's scholars have been awarded the Nobel, path breaking work in the areas of particle physics and string theory has published papers dealing with 26 dimensions, reducing 40-page long math papers published to 4 page long newer, more elegant math papers and so on. The institute served as such an abode of theoretical work, Oppie serving as its director, once chided two young physicists who submitted their paper on Gravitation to a competition and won a $1000 prize, as Oppie thought such material pursuits shouldn't enter the minds [f the institute's scholars! From math to particle physics to Astro physics to computer science to history and humanities, contributions have been impressive to say the least. But visiting their website now, I don't see physics listed or highlighted as a big area of expertise anywhere!

Similar to the idea factory book about the Bell Labs, this one also argues that the institutes glory days are more in the past. Currently the older faculty who are there, come to the Institute for a few hours a day but are not producing a lot, basically resting on their old laurels. Newer younger ones don't find the place as attractive as it used to be anymore. One solution to this issue could be admitting PhD students who are guided by the older faculty, with the Institute starting to award PhD degrees. Though it was in the institute's charter, this institute never ever awarded even one degree till date. Though it was created in the mold of Plato's academy, where there are "no duties, but only opportunities", as Abraham Flexner used to say, keeping human beings motivated to produce the best quality work consistently continuously is quite difficult. People complain about how they are hard pressed for time in regular universities as they are burdened with teaching responsibilities and course material preparation and grading, guiding graduate students, leaving them with very little time for undisturbed research. But if they are put in a place like this institute that gives you the salary, breakfast & lunch every day, dinner twice a week and lets you do whatever you want without asking you to even write a report when your thumb is over, in the long run, people somehow don't find it that invigorating. Visiting the institute's website, we can find their mission listed this way: 

The Institute is pledged to assemble a group of scientists and scholars who with their pupils and assistants may devote themselves to the task of pushing beyond the present limits of human knowledge and to training those who may "carry on" in this sense.

––Mission statement of the Institute for Advanced Study by founding Director Abraham Flexner, Organization Meeting, October 10, 1930

Such ideal versions of institutions being in existence close to a century is certainly admirable. Going back to the subject line of the email, these last 5 days gave me a small taste of how the life in The Institute will be. I had no responsibilities, didn't even have to take the dog for a walk, didn't have to cook, didn't go out of room much since I was sick. It gave me ample time to sit in the room, read this book, think about how string theorists are trying to "compactify" 26 dimensions in to 11 and actually finish it within the last 4 or 5 days while I normally would have taken a month to read such a piece. If I had to go through one round of sickness, perhaps this was the best way to do it since we didn't have to worry about food or washing clothes or feeding the dog or of any other such responsibilities. Since my wife had packed enough medication to take care of all our medicinal needs, we didn't have to rush out to any pharmacy or hospital either. But this may not be the life one would want to live permanently, even if you remove the sickness aspect. When I was a judge in a high school science competition, I remember a psychology professor commenting motivation is so hard. How true indeed! I hope the institute finds newer ways and personalities that will reinvigorate it all over again. If you find such books/institutes interesting, do check out book Complexity by Mitchell Waldrop about Santa Fe Institute as well.

Well, we are back home in Allentown and are all starting to feel a bit better, health wise, though we are not out of the woods yet. it is the end of the year. I recall someone remarking how new year celebration is "an extremely precise countdown to an arbitrary point in time"! Thus, though it may be irrational, I am going to carry a belief that all our travel nightmares will be over with 2023, and in the new year, we will have a fresh start with smooth and pleasant travels ahead!

Wish you a very happy, healthy, prosperous, wonderful 2024!

-sundar.

 

Book Review: Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World by Matt Parker

Several months ago, I was browsing the shelves of a bookstore to pick a book to give as present to a friend who is a math professor. When I came across Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World by Matt Parker, found it interesting enough and so bought a copy and presented it to him, though I hadn't read it before. That title got stuck in my head and so bought an eBook version of it recently and read it on Kindle. It is quite a fun read and can give us a lot of stories to tell in parties!

There are many approaches to writing a non-fiction book. One is to pick a thread that seems to have enough to write about, and then collect material related to that topical thread in different domains and put them together. In this approach there may not be a clear dovetailing build up from one chapter to the next, and so you can even read most chapters out of order, and it will make sense. The underlying thread certainly will remain visible, providing an overarching view. I did that to some extent in my own Thought Experiments book. Matt Parker has done the same and has managed to string together chapters that are quite accessible. 

Book starts off with Leonard Vs. PepsiCo case as a clear example of how even TV commercials put together for big companies meant to be widely seen don't spend the time to check their math. It is an interesting case worth reading about, if you haven't heard of it before. Then he talks about UK lottery, where public had a hard time understanding -8 is lower than -6 and had to stop a particular lottery offering since many were complaining that though they "won" by getting a "bigger" number, they are not getting the prize! Next couple of chapters discuss errors in calendars, Y2K issue introduced into computing when years were coded using two digits, and a bunch of examples related to Microsoft Excel messing things up, when used in certain ways. 

While these initial stories are funny, subsequent ones related to errors in engineering and medicine were actually deadly. There are stories about X-ray machine code that had math errors that allowed high dosage of radiation that actually killed a patient, bridge construction errors that resulted in dozens of workers dying in early 20th century, drug dosage calculation errors that had affected real patients adversely and so on. I had heard of some of the stories, such as the one about 20 Fenchurch street building in London that formed a lens focusing sun's rays heating up the area nearby dangerously. See the solar glare problem section of that Wikipedia page! There is whole section dedicated to blunders committed due to incorrect units usage (as in metric units Vs. British units) related to Hubble telescope, Challenger disaster, aircraft accidents, etc. 

While many of the stories could be scary, overall, the author is trying to maintain a tone of levity. It is also heartening to note that institutions related to the field of engineering usually take these errors seriously and are trying to come up with solutions that will prevent disasters. The approach to addressing these issues is discussed from the Swiss Cheese model. This approach expects some amount of errors to creep in in each layer of implementation (e.g. design, installation, usage). If these errors are seen like holes in a slice of Swiss cheese, ensuring that when the slices are used together the holes do NOT line up can still prevent disasters. Thus, a design error can be blocked by better processes used in installation stage or the usage stage. Parker points out that unlike the field of engineering that tries to develop better methodologies at the system level, field such as medicine, still tries to blame individuals for errors/blunders, prevent them from working again, claiming the issue is resolved, without looking at systemic, holistic solutions. One can only hope this will change as the world matures. 

Book has a few illustrations and tables, that were hard to see on the Kindle edition, which was a big disappointment. At times the authors attempted humor may fall flat. But overall, it is a good fun book, particularly engineering/medicine students should read. Will teach us to be humble. 

Book Review: Prediction Machines by Agrawal, Gans & Goldfarb

Last time I was in India, my friend Madhu Parthasarathy gave me this book titled Prediction Machines - The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. It is a Harvard Business Review Press book and so is a bit too much of a business book than one that explores the topic academically. As a result, book's prose is very simple, making the content highly accessible to anyone interested in this topic irrespective of whether they are inside or outside the field. Since it is only about 200 pages long, it is a thin volume, making it an easy read. 

Material is laid out in five simple parts titled, Prediction, Decision Making, Tools, Strategy, and Society, that were all very easy to follow. The authors appear to be moonlighting as business consultants, and so I can understand how having such a book published will help them with their street cred. They seem to be quite pleased with themselves in figuring out that AI is mostly prediction (rather than pure intelligence). They keep reiterating this point umpteen times, though it is not necessarily their own original discovery. Some ideas resulting from this understanding are indeed good & interesting. For example, the cost of computing going down and the quality of prediction going up considerably, can potentially transform business models. In case of Amazon, they may be able to predict exactly who will need what and when, in addition to their affordability. If this prediction is close to 100%, Amazon can start shipping items to people on their own and setup the logistics needed to collect very rare returns if/when needed. Thus, their business model may flip from shop first & ship next to ship first and collect returns. While this is a nice change in the business model that may make business leaders salivate, describing this insight takes up the first ~40% of the book, that covers Prediction & Decision Making parts. Perhaps the authors know that some/many of their intended readers won't even read this book in full or be so distracted that they won't follow even these simple discussions and so they summarize the key points at the end of each chapter. One key point (page 68) reads, "Humans make poor predictions, overweight salient information and do not account for statistical properties. Many scientific studies document these shortcomings across a wide variety of professions. The phenomenon was illustrated in the feature film Money ball." While that is all correct, is this the level of summary that should be provided? It is either meant for "Future business leaders still in high school" or else, we need to worry about the quality of our business leaders' natural intelligence! 

Throughout the book authors touch upon every conceivable area that is connected to AI. This includes Amazon's Echo, robots used in their warehouses, Australian mining industry, self-driving cars, Google/Microsoft type companies' language translation tools, iPhone, Siri, and so on. There are quotes by Nobel laureates, jokes, 2x2 business charts, couple of graphs. But everything discussed is quite superficial, with none of the discussions spanning even couple of pages in the book. The advice they dispense also seems too simple. For example, one of the key points listed is that "C-suite leadership must not fully delegate AI strategy to their IT department". Chapter 16 opens with what is presented as a brilliant insight provided by one of the authors. Apparently, an early-stage ML company was trying to deliver a disease diagnosis tool to doctors and were struggling to get all the approvals needed to be able to do that, since they are basically doing what doctors are certified to do. The author, who is a business consultant had suggested that they deliver a probability number indicating how likely the patient has the disease and leave the yes/no diagnosis decision to the doctor. While we can agree that it is the right thing to do, is this a brilliant insight worth hyping as the opening paragraph for a chapter titled "When AI Transforms Your Business"? Reminded me of the recent John Oliver's Last Week Tonight episode, where he discussed business consultants. Watch 7:30 to 8:02 of this episode. As John Oliver himself says in that episode, I do have friends who are business consultants that are brilliant and who certainly add value to the business they work with, though that may not be the case always!

The last part titled "Society" is limited to just one chapter of about 10 pages (which is pretty much the topic of my entire 1.5 hour long lecture on Ethics & Emerging Technology). Of course, their answers and conclusions are aligned with my beliefs, which is heartening. For example, AI/ML has a lot of potential for increasing income inequality and so societies need to regulate/manage it well. Better AI performance may mean less privacy, without proper regulation, some companies may end up controlling everything in our lives, from production to distribution of all the goods & services. Hopefully this consistent view evolving on multiple fronts will help their intended readers get educated and aligned on these notions. 

I was reminded of watching two travel documentaries way back in the early 90's when I was planning a visit to the UK. Since touring Wales was on the cards, picked up two VHS tapes about Wales tourism from the local public library. One talked about each attraction for 5 mins, provided a summary and a slide, listing bullets of the places/things one should see/do. Then moved on to the next part of Wales. Perhaps it was quite useful/productive to potential tourists taking notes. But the other video tape presented Wales beautifully like poetry. There were no bullet lists or take away summaries. I enjoyed that version so much that I watched it couple of times before returning the tape to the public library. This book belongs to the first kind. 

Book Review: Half - Lion: How P.V Narasimha Rao Transformed India by Vinay Sitapati

In one of the episodes of the Seen and the Unseen podcast I have written about earlier, this author was interviewed few months back about this book. Interview was very good. My longtime friend & colleague Sanjay Padubidri and I were discussing the episode and thought we should read the book. Lo and behold, when I saw him last March, Sanjay gave me the book as part of our regular book exchange program. So, read it, liked it.

P.V.Narasimha Rao was the Prime Minister of India from 1991 to 1996 (5 years that form one full term). This book is about his time and administration. TBH, I am not much into biographies. I generally think more than someone's personal story, I should focus on and learn from their unvarnished contributions. Naturally there are exceptions, and those who like biographies may have different perspectives that could be justified. Though this book is mostly biographical, spotlight was on this gentleman's unusual administrative style, and so it was engaging, informative. 

For those who may not be familiar with Hindu mythologies, there is a story of a demon king (named Hiranyakashipu) who had a pious son (named Prahalatha). The king had boons from the Gods that said he can be killed neither by a human being nor an animal, neither in the daytime nor at night, neither inside the house nor outside the house. Thinking that he has conquered death, he becomes a tyrant. Finally answering his son's prayers, God appears in one Avatar called Narasimha that is half human (Nara) and half lion (Simha) and kills the demon king on the door sill, during the evening hour, meeting all the conditions stipulated in the boon! This Indian PM who had that name, ruled successfully for five years, by being a lion sometime and human being sometime and even a fox or a mouse as time/conditions required, as he headed a minority government throughout his term, that could have fallen down any day (as it was common in the multi-party democracy of India). While his hold on power was tenuous, he managed to herald the kind of economic reforms never seen in the Indian history, that has now lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and has set India on a course to becoming an economic superpower in the coming years. While many other leaders around the world might have brought in economic reforms that transformed their country, all of them had either unassailable democratic majority mandate or were some form of dictators that didn't have to worry about their government falling apart. Doing great/difficult things while you don't have to worry about the stability of your Govt is comparatively easier. Doing it while you don't have such stability is completely different, visionary, courageous endeavor. P.V.N.R managed to pull this off and so deserves a lot of credit that he didn't get for a long time. Thankfully he is starting to be recognized for his contributions now, due to works like this one.

First chapter of the book starts with his death in 2004. Though he was Ex-PM, he wasn't accorded the kind of state funeral/respect in the country's capital New Delhi since his own party leaders (particularly Sonia Gandhi) didn't want him to get a lot of fame/name. He was cremated in his native state of Andra Pradesh, where he served as Chief Minister decades earlier. The book then goes back to his earlier days as a party worker. He was elected as CM (equivalent to State Governor in the US), mainly because he didn't have a lot of personal fandom/base and so the party elites thought he will be easy to manage. They did knock him off power before he completed his CM term and ostracized him for a while. Instead of forming a competing party or accusing the leadership of not supporting him, he remained loyal, focused more on literature, writing, etc. for years. 

Though he was born in 1921, he traveled outside India for the first time only in 1976 to visit his daughter living in the USA. That trip apparently changed some of his socialistic views. After the scion of the Nehru/Gandhi dynasty Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in 1991, when the party came to power, he was made PM, again primarily because he was considered weak with no support base of his own. But decades of his experience in state and the central level had given him enough insights into the Indian politics. Leveraging these skills, he immediately took up major economic reforms with Dr. Manmohan Singh (who became PM more than a decade later himself) serving as his finance minister. Often the reforms were painted as initiatives forced on India by IMF since India needed loans, its foreign exchange reserves were so low, etc. But the ideas for reforms were there for several years without anyone at the helm willing to take them up. PVN made good use of the opportunity, blamed the IMF rolling them out and stuck to it, even after the finance crisis was over. There are lot of interesting stories, tactics related to his administration that are quite interesting. To give another example, India becoming nuclear power is mostly thanks to him. In many of these cases, he tactfully avoided taking credit for them or intentionally gave credit to Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi, etc. so that his party base will continue to support him, while most of the actual changes he brought in were totally opposite to the party's old policies! 

It was heartening to note that the subsequent BJP PM Vajpayee, who was heading the country when India became a nuclear power, gave all the credit to PVNR saying, all the prep work was already complete during the previous administration, while he only exploded the device. PVNR spoke 10 different languages, learned to do computer programming on his own, knew Unix, wrote novels, could use very clever tactics suitable to Indian politics to get things done were all very well chronicled. The author being a an academic, certainly didn't write an all-appreciation ode, but points out his negative qualities, talks about marital infidelity, areas where he failed also well. But after about chapter 10, the initial chronological writing comes to an end and so it feels like the book is starting all over again to go back and discuss specific areas (e.g. nuclear detonation prep, Babri Masjid debacle) that drags the pace down. Still, it is not too boring, and the prose is quite accessible. Though I wasn't living in India during his PM years, along with the rest of the Indian diaspora and many economic scholars around the world, I did follow his reforms closely with a lot of enthusiasm and so was quite familiar with the period and the changes he brought in that were such a breath of fresh air. Current Indian PM has a cult like following in India and these days politicians all around the world have learned to leverage social media to get the limelight on them. But PVNR's admin style was quite the opposite and so it is good to see him getting the credit he deserves through works like this one. 

In case you don't think you can read this whole book, you can consider listening to this podcast episode that covers most of the details discussed in the book very well. 

Episode 283: The Forgotten Greatness of PV Narasimha Rao | The Seen and the Unseen (seenunseen.in)

Book Review: The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner

When our family friend Sriram Tyagarajan mentioned this book titled "The Idea Factory Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" by Jon Gertner, it immediately piqued by curiosity since my first business card after my grad school days looked like the first picture attached! Of course, Sriram (and many other friends on my mailing list) are also Bell Labs alumni, that immediately amplifies the resonance for many of us. I should confess that the few years I served as an MTS (Member of Technical Staff) there were well past the glory years discussed in the book. Still, I remember being mesmerized by the small museum adjacent to the Murray Hill office's cavernous front lobby when I stepped in there for the first time while being there for the job interview, that displayed plaques describing six Nobel prizes the Bell Labs scientists had picked up in the previous decades. 

While I can summarize the book in few sentences saying it discusses the flood of innovations that came out of this institution (that forms the foundations of the modern communication system, and thus has touched practically every human being on the planet), the book is even more than that. So, I'd strongly encourage you to put it on your reading list. Though there were tens of thousands of employees who worked for Bell Labs at its peak, the author has intentionally chosen the approach of telling the story via a selected set of characters that ran the labs or were the leading scientists that delivered the stunning array of innovative products and ideas out of the lab. Mervin Kelly, Jim Fish, William Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce and WIlliam Baker are the main characters that stand in for more than 1,200 PhDs and 15,000 workers it employed as early as in the 1960's. (Reminds me of the 4-part HBO miniseries Chernobyl I saw last year, in which hundreds of engineers & scientists were represented by one fictional female scientist to make the story telling easier. Interesting troupe.) 

In the early parts of the 20th century, the American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) was a US Govt approved monopoly that provided telephone service to customers all over the country. It was vertically integrated with Bell Labs at the bottom and Western Electric company in between, with AT&T at the top. Bell Labs did the research to design & develop the needed equipment, right from telephone cables/poles all the way up to the various incarnations of the switching systems. Western Electric is the manufacturing arm of the conglomerate that produced everything from individual telephone sets to switches, cables to provide an end-to-end telephone system solution, while AT&T ran the operation. The DoJ (Department of Justice) of the US Govt often looked at this monopoly with suspicion and had sued it to break it up periodically, i.e., every other decade. But the company will appease the Govt with some changes/concession to allow it to continue as this one massive organization. As a result, the money generated from the business could fund Bell Labs to support its research efforts exceedingly well, with stellar characters managing the labs and producing inventions that certainly benefited the public that wouldn't be possible otherwise. 

Huge business houses that are supported by Govts is not that unusual. From many public sectors companies (including telephone companies) in India to Chaebols in South Korea can be sighted as examples of this model. But none of them come anywhere close to the level of inventions/products Bell Labs delivered over the years. Can you believe vacuum tubes, transistors, electronic telephone switching systems, lasers, Telstar satellite, the whole field of Information Theory, Unix operating system, the programming language C, cell phone system, were a small subset of just this one institution's contributions to the world? Book tells this story amazingly well. Chapter where a very primitive satellite (that is just a spherical structure covered in a thin metallic wrapper to reflect any electrical signal coming in back towards earth) circling the planet is being tracked for the first time by Bell Labs scientists to test its viability to serve as a communication channel gave me goosebumps! It is humbling to realize ideas like cell phones should NOT have a dial tone like landline phones, so as to make more efficient use of the cell phone bandwidth, originated from here and subsequently proved to be a great fit for SMS texting. Naturally the transistor invented in Bell Labs is the backbone of the semiconductor industry even today and so I also saw my current employer Intel mentioned in multiple parts of the book (e.g. latest Intel devices that are size of a postage stamp come with about 2 billion transistors, and Intel manufactures about 10 billion transistors every second of every day!).

Eventually in the 1980s the conglomerate was split up. The local telephone companies formed what are called Baby Bells, while AT&T focused on the long-distance telephone service. The Western Electric company along with Bell Labs became Lucent Technologies that I joined after grad school. During my time, its stock price dropped from a high of about $80 to less than $2, which is all solemnly covered in the last chapter, including the formation of the spin off company Agere Systems that I belonged to in the early 2000's. Though it is sad to see such a great institution practically vanishing (now the name Bell Labs belongs to Alcatel-Lucent) along with most of its staff, with its buildings where I have worked in Murray Hill, NJ practically empty (and even worse the Holmdel, NJ facility, which was architecturally stunning when I had worked  occasionally, totally abandoned), author argues that the model had served its purpose and is not sustainable in today's age for various reasons. Concluding chapters are touching. Even if you are not in the field of telecom/computers, the content/prose/narration are all extremely accessible for anyone interested in reading this book. As the author says in the acknowledgments, the material, time span, stories are all unwieldy but have been put together in a nice and balanced manner. 

The organization I belong to in our office sends out internal email newsletter discussing interesting details/factoids about one team each month. Just by happenstance, yesterday they asked me for titbits about my team/site that they can include in next month's newsletter that would interest other employees in our company dispersed all over the world. I provided this small write-up closely tied to this book, along with the attached photos of a brick I have at home!

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Allentown, PA is a smaller Intel site with about 230 team members. Two decades back, the division we belonged to in Lucent Technologies (called Lucent Microelectronics) got spun off as a separate company called Agere Systems (in 2002). After few more M&A, some of us belong to Intel for the past 8 years, with blue blood running in our veins! The Western Electric manufacturing facility, which was part of AT&T/Lucent conglomerate had a manufacturing facility located in Allentown. It was the first facility to produce transistors on a large scale in the entire world. Silicon Valley in CA followed. About 15 years back when that building was taken down for new construction, the bricks were given out as souvenirs (and pen holder) to employees. Many of the old timers, like yours truly, have one of these at home! 

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Link to photos I took when we visited the Bell Labs office in Murray Hill, NJ earlier this month:

If you found this material interesting, you may enjoy this series of videos related to the birth & growth of the Japanese semiconductor industries. You can see Bell Labs and AT&T inventions discussed in multiple places. 

Birth of The Transistor: A video history of Japan's electronic industry. (Part 1) - YouTube

Electronic Circuits in Stone - A Video History of Japan's electronic industry - (Part 2) - Re Upload - YouTube

Book review (Encounters with Einstein), movie trailer, podcast..

My friend Amit and I are longtime admirers of the early parts of 20th century that formed the Einstein era in Physics. We are certainly not unique since those decades are still considered the golden years of R&D in Physics and wax eloquently as such by many in several books and articles. So, earlier this year when he read & raved about this book titled "Encounters with Einstein And Other Essays on People, Places and Particles" by Werner Heisenberg, promptly ordered a paper copy. It is a short book of only about 140 pages and is made up of a small collection of essays, and transcription of some of his speeches. It is engaging/entertaining, particularly if you like reading about the development of physics during that time. 

This version is published by Princeton Science Library, which seems to have changed the original title of the book "Tradition in Science", perhaps to cash in on Einstein's fame! Amusing. Hence the first chapter still remains the old title of the book and discusses how progress in science tends to be extremely cumulative over decades and centuries. Starting from Greek philosophers and gliding through Copernicus, Galileo, author argues that Einstein wouldn't have been a great scientist if he had lived in the twelfth century, since the building blocks needed for his work wouldn't have been available to him then. Thus, even what problems we get to work on, is quite constrained by the time/history that precedes us. In a way, it reminded me of the notion of Overton Window in social sciences. 

Next two chapters delve into the development of Quantum Mechanics, particularly from Göttingen pov. It is impressive to read about all the interactions that went on between him, Neils Bohr, Pauli, Schrödinger, et al since we have heard of them only as historical legends that appear as larger than life figures in our high school physics classes. Copenhagen, Göttingen and Munich were the places where a lot of QM developments took place and they were all close to each other, allowing these researchers to exchange letters, travel to give lectures and so on. Before the age of Internet, how ideas evolved and people interacted to workout details of complex ideas is quite inspiring, that continues on the following two chapters related to elementary particle physics. The chapter actually describing his encounters with Einstein shows up only in the latter half of the book. Einstein was already a legend and so young Werner looks up to him, seeks his meeting/blessing for his ideas. But as we all know, Einstein was quite skeptical of QM and so though he invites Heisenberg to his home, has long discussions, expresses his doubts. 

As the WWII was ramping up, it is sad to see him describe as to how even Einstein's Theory of Relativity was opposed by Nazi regime, including some famous physicists claiming it as a Jewish conspiracy to which no major attention should be paid. At times Einstein even avoided giving lectures due to safety concerns and the author says he was even given a red leaflet when he went to attend a lecture, approved by the Govt., saying Theory of Relativity shouldn't be trusted since because of its Jewish origin. Heisenberg says he was so upset and disturbed by that smear campaign that he got very agitated and left the lecture, without even bothering to talk to Einstein. Subsequently Einstein had relocated to Princeton in the US, where Heisenberg meets him one more time in 1954 while he was on a lecture tour in the US. 

If we read up on Heisenberg himself, two kinds of images emerge. One is portraying him as a Nazi sympathizer, who worked for the regime. Other is that he is quite supportive of Jews and was against the Nazi regime, but naively thought it was just a party governing Germany for a while and will go away soon, while he continues his work in Physics. My take is the second one. 

Last couple of chapters on closed theories and scientist's journey into the abstraction, though written half a century ago, still gives some interesting insights into the process of scientific evolution. On the flip side, I found the prose to be quite stuffy and stilted. It was originally written in German. I was trying to find out who translated it into English but couldn't. Perhaps the author translated it himself. Sentences like, "The empirical correlate of compactness is the internal connectedness of many experiments, that is, the knowledge that a deviation of experience from theory in one experiment would also inevitably result in such deviation in many others." is quite off-putting by today's standards. 

Check it out if you are interested in this era/topic. I was looking at the cover image for a while to understand what it is. The back cover says it is "Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2". Oh, yes, nice cover!! 

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On a related note, check out this trailer for a new movie coming out in July of this year: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYPbbksJxIg

Titled Oppenheimer, it is about the Manhattan Project. You all may know about director Christopher Nolan, who made Memento (badly copied as Gajini in Tamil/Hindi), Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, etc. He always plays with time, giving it a non-linear treatment in his scripts. He took it to an extreme in Tenet, making the movie a bit hard to follow. This trailer makes it look like the story telling is very linear in time, which is odd for him. Will have to see the movie to see how the script flows. I was also reminded of a low budget, made for TV documentary type movie on this topic titled Day One that I saw circa 1991, which was pretty good for its time.

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On an unrelated note, since it is pleasant springtime in Pennsylvania, I went on a long jog this morning listening to an episode of Heavy Networking podcast (free to download/listen under the packetpushers.net umbrella of podcasts). It talked about WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) experiences that was simultaneously entertaining and reasonably technical. Consider listening to this episode if/when you get a chance: https://packetpushers.net/podcast/heavy-networking-679-mountaintop-networking-and-long-haul-wireless/

Even if you are not a nerd/hardcore techie, you may gather some interesting stories about the impact of wild horses on communication networks, and BATMAN protocol that will be good fodder for your next family get together or team lunch! 🙂

Book Review: The Weather Machine by Andrew Blum

 I was reading some article online which mentioned the book The Weather Machine - A journey Inside the forecast by Andrew Blum. On a whim, ordered a paper copy, read and enjoyed it quite a bit. Since I was curious/wanted to learn more about how modern weather prediction reports were being put together, this short (less than 200 pages), popular science book scratched that itch nicely.  

Narration of the material is mostly in simple chronological order which works for this book. First part titled calculation, talks about the establishment of telegraph lines in the mid 19th century and how it enabled different telegraph offices to exchange basic information about how the weather is in their location instantaneously. Before that point, the importance of weather was in the minds of Govt officials and scientists, as it affected transportation of goods/armies. But there was not much one could do to put together even a rudimentary global picture, since information couldn't be moved faster than weather. Once telegraphing became possible, within couple of decades, International Meteorological Organization was formed and met in Vienna in 1873. Newly formed weather office representatives from about 20 countries met and had started talking about international exchange of weather information. Even before 1900, a Norwegian scientist named Vilhelm Bjerknes develops a model (called circulation theorem) to predict how air at different pressures & altitudes will move around earth's curved surface, that made predicting weather a possibility! But he himself had lamented that (manually) calculating weather patterns of tomorrow using his model may take perhaps a month, rendering it totally useless. But it was certainly a good start! In the early part of 20th century, a British scientist suggested building a huge palace or coliseum type structure filled with 64,000 "human calculators" that would compute the weather, which is a great leap in imagination as it suggested parallel processing the weather information for different parts of the earth. 

The second part of the book titled Observation talks about all the different ways in which data is collected today, as there is no weather prediction without observation. It also gets into looking up (to the sky from the surface of the earth) and looking down (from space) and merging the information in 3D, plus time. There still is a lot of manual observations that get reported and conflated. There is also a lot of variation in the quality and type of information collected (simple temperature reported by a human being in an island three times a day, minute by minute temperature, cloud coverage, humidity reported by sensors, satellite data and so on), all of which has to be blended into one flexible/forgiving model that will accept all these variations and will still provide coherent future predictions. Even the quality of data provided by weather satellites can vary widely. He points out a 20-year-old Indian satellite still sending data as it races towards the end of its life Vs. a brand-new Chinese satellite launched just an year back still being prepped to go into full service. 

He has traveled to Norway, Reading (England), various parts of the US to personally see offices, installations, large control rooms, satellite launch facilities, interview scientists and so on to collect the needed information, which makes it quite interesting to readers like me. As per his view, though US is contributing a lot both from funds as well as knowledge/data points of view, the bureaucracy that exists in the US is a mess with jumbled up bunch of acronyms that forms multiple departments that don't coordinate or work well. Comparatively the European setup is fantastic and coherent and so currently is the leader in providing the best predictions. This is why in the US TV weather reports we have started hearing about the European Model predictions more often now.

Author's visits to EUMETSAT (European Meteorological Satellite Agency) office in Darmstadt, Germany and to ECMWF (European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecast - located in Reading, England) discussed in the following Part 3 titled Simulation, are the really neat parts of the book. These chapters discuss the satellites that are getting launched routinely to cover the earth to make observations, and how the data is received on earth. The GEO satellites that are located about 36,000 kms above earth, that move in the same speed/direction as earth and so remain on top of the same spot of the earth, provide the big picture but are considered a bit boring since they are designed to "stay" in one place and continue beaming information continuously. But the LEO, lower earth orbit satellites that circle the earth every 90 minutes going from north pole to south pole and then back up to north pole repeatedly, while slowly changing the longitude with each round so that they can cover the entire planet regularly, are considered much more exciting. During that 90-minute cycle, as they fly over Norway, for just about 10, 15 minutes, they dump Gigabytes worth of data they have gathered over the previous 1.5 hours. This is like downloading an entire digital movie using Wi-Fi, into your home computer from a fast-moving car that drives by your home, but it works reliably, consistently day in and day out! As soon as the data comes in, it gets transmitted to supercomputer centers around the world to be assimilated to produce updated reports. 

In my Ethics & Emerging Technologies lecture, I talk about ML (Machine Learning) models that take past data, make future prediction and as future data becomes available, keep correcting themselves to adjust any predictions that were made but were not correct, so that next round of predictions will be more accurate. Blum explains this flow being used in weather prediction nicely. Thus, they don't take a set of data, run through computation to predict tomorrow's weather and then start all over again. Instead, they have a continuously evolving model of weather prediction that goes on inside the supercomputers. The actual earth is another "model" that is being observed via all the data that is coming in. The observed data is continuously fed into the supercomputer's predictive model to keep correcting its errors. This has been going on for years now and so currently the European model is able to predict about a week's worth of weather changes ahead! As available computing power, precision and types of observations (e.g., moisture/humidity data in addition to temperature) improves, the Reading center wants to keep pushing the envelope further, predicting 7th, 8th, 9th day more and more precisely. Since this provides a clear, linear measure and there are tons of scientists who come to the Reading office from different countries to test & contribute their ideas to improve the model to make the prediction better and better, for now there is no end to how far they can advance the field. This is truly a global, nation/border less endeavor in science that we should be proud of.

Last part titled Preservations talks about parts of the systems that are getting privatized and what negative impact it may bring about in future. It also discusses how mundane receiving weather reports through our smartphones have become despite the herculean efforts involved in the background, diplomatic conferences, mechanics/funding of international efforts and organizations (as per Blum, US funds 20% of the entire world's efforts but also acts arrogantly by dissing down the annual meetings) that rounds off the story. 

As I had mentioned in other reviews, I am still puzzled as to why books don't include a ton of photos and illustrations, as this one screams for visuals but has absolutely none. I had tried to look up the reasons online and came across two recurring themes. 

1. In the years past, adding pictures to books was an expensive proposition and so they were not added to keep production costs low. In parallel, since children's books had lot of pictures, a bit of snobbery developed among authors/readers of non-fiction books that carried the notion that serious adult books shouldn't have pictures. 

2. Fiction writers preferred to paint word pictures so that there is a bit of latitude allowed for readers to imagine what is described in their minds as they prefer, rather than locking down the visuals in precise illustrations. (Just as a side note, there is century long tradition of illustrating stories and novels in Tamil magazines I grew up with, that continues to this day in India.)

I am not able to buy either one of these two arguments for non-fiction books I read. Even in the one book I published, I did include a bunch of pictures that I truly think helped explain things better and the cost was including pictures during the printing process is nothing. Only reason I can accept/understand is that getting permissions and approvals costs a lot of time and money and so authors avoid them. But I wish this trend would change. This book could have used a lot of pictures since there are lot of descriptions of buildings, satellites, people the author had personally visited. He could have just snapped photos with his cell phone and included them in the book (which would have mostly eliminated the getting permission hurdle). Perhaps there are other reasons I am not aware of.

Book Review: The Autonomous Revolution by Davidow & Malone

More than one year back, Madhu, another longtime friend of mine in my "book exchange program" gave me "The Autonomous Revolution - Reclaiming the Future We've Sold to the Machines" by W.H.Davidow & M.S.Malone, saying it should keep me entertained on my long return flight. I got around to reading it only now, and realized his prediction was correct for couple of reasons. Content & narration wise, it is an easy read and so potentially one could finish reading it in few hours. Since it is less than 200 pages long, it is not a big tome either. Second reason is a bit more personal. Since I have been giving this lecture titled "Ethics & Emerging Technologies" for a while now, I had thought/read about most of what the book had to discuss and so the material was quite familiar to me. I was looking for new insights, ideas, concepts that I could use in my future lectures. I did find some but not that many. 

First chapter titled "Autonomous Revolution - A third social revolution" discusses how what is going on now, constitutes the third revolution after agricultural and industrial revolutions of the past. After using the word revolution twice in the first chapter title, second chapter, a bit confusingly, talks about transportation revolution (when cars became common in the 20th century), telecom revolution and says some are calling the current autonomous revolution as the "Fourth Industrial Revolution" and tries to explain why it is not appropriate. While the authors points of how "this time it is different" is well taken, the overuse of the term revolution by themselves and then saying why this is not fourth industrial revolution didn't come across as well articulated clear cogent writing to me. 

The substitutional equivalence that leads to societal phase change is a good insight presented in the following chapter. What this means is when a new method introduced to do the same old task more efficiently, it provides a substitutional equivalence. This is the case when spreadsheets replace handwritten ledgers in a bank, since the work performed is still the same. But when the new technology enables the industry to do its business in a totally different form, it leads to societal phase changes. Thus, when banking has been moved online, eliminating the need for buildings, tellers and so on, that is a phase/societal transformation. While the first equivalent change leads to productivity gains but may not affect the number of people working in the industry much, phase changes eliminate large numbers of jobs permanently. Travel agents, agricultural labor are all examples of this kind. 

Book also discusses non-monetizable productivity increase that adversely affects certain industries, including ours (i.e., semi-conductors). Authors give the example of Intel specifically. As everyone knows, our industry is legendary when it comes to efficiency improvements in cramming more transistors per square millimeter and reducing the power consumption, leading to orders of magnitude better microchips. But since the competition is fierce worldwide (e.g., there is no license or regulatory protection that prevents one country/company from selling its products anywhere in the world), price keeps coming down, preventing us from monetizing this phenomenal productivity increase. But the efficiency improvement is still felt/enjoyed by the whole world in the form of cheaper electronics over the past few decades. Luckily since the volume of sales increased thanks to improved affordability, the pie size became bigger. So, we managed to make a good living. But in cases where the volume of sales cannot increase that much due to market saturation, industry might be doomed. For example, if AI improves newspaper article writing efficiency, the reduced cost is not going to keep increasing newspaper sales, helping newspaper industry to thrive. If self-driving cars reduce the costs involved in providing transportation, the usage may increase a little bit. But most of the car sales will go away since there will be no need to own/maintain your own transportation anymore. Since these changes are coming, society has to rethink how the fruits of these efficiency improvements are going to be shared across the population more equitably. 

Authors do touch upon "algorithmic prisons" we are starting to live in (since social media algorithms limit what you get to consume), loss of privacy and other issues I keep talking about in my lectures and posts. Everyone know they have become big topics of discussion though no one seems to be seriously trying to get out of these constraints, as we are used to the freemium models and don't know how to get out of them. It is not easy to come up with a neat silver bullet solution and so authors talk about well-known solutions like basic income guarantees, end users owning their data and being able to decide who gets to see how much (and possibly getting paid for it), etc. that I also often talk about. For those who may not be thinking about these issues regularly, book may be a good, easy read.