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. 

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 and to analyze any given situation that requires a right or wrong decision. 

Along those lines, I try to come up with simple frameworks 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 take on the conflict between Palestine & Israel by Trevor Noah: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeZ4yXyzUG0 

As he points out, depending on 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 from 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 (Community Supported Agriculture), always insists on us buying organic produce, etc. My 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 with this mentoring, 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, things look different. I realize that the plastic industry has trained us to believe that it is the end users' 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 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 is meant to ask if the proposed solution solve the problem at the world level? If not, should we spend our time and energy on improvements 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 not. I am asking how do you distill complex scenarios? Do you use any such framing devices to distill or analyze problems in a simpler way? I am hoping to learn new models & frameworks through any interesting responses you provide.

Book Review: False Allies by Manu Pillai

I have been listening to this podcast called The Seen and the Unseen with Amit Verma, after it was introduced to me by my friend Sanjay Padubidri an year or two back. This is counter programming to twitter and WA, where each episode runs from 3 to 5 hours but never boring! In one of the recent episodes author Manu Pillai who has written this book titled False Allies: India's Maharajahs In The Age Of Ravi Varma was interviewed. Since I enjoyed the interview and haven't read anything substantial on India in a while, decided to pick it up. It was quite an interesting read.

Westerners may not know much about pre independence India. Even for those who grew up in India, the history taught in schools generally used to portray the the kings (and few queens) who ruled dozens of small kingdoms that together formed today's India, as these not so bright, lazy characters that didn't pay much attention to the welfare of their subjects but whiled away time, watching dancing girls smoking hookah, dressing themselves up in a lot of jewelry while the citizenry eked out a living toiling away in farmlands. The understanding was when India finally got its independence from the British in 1947, all these kings were kicked out of their palaces as they deserved forming the new Indian Union. Pillai argues that the reality is a lot more complex and nuanced. Britain in the 19th century was a super power, that colonized countries allover the world. Kings ruling small part of India didn't have the wherewithal to militarily oppose Britain militarily. So, they had to perform a delicate dance, appeasing their British overlords while maintaining their dignity among the people of their kingdom. Certainly there were some rulers who were inept as well and the author is not pulling any punches while talking about their shenanigans. But by and large, these were reasonable monarchs who did their best to retain their position, protect their own prestige and people while trying not to antagonize the crown. Pillai employs a very nice troupe to weave these stories of six different kingdoms together using Ravi Varma, the famous early 20th century Indian painter as a common thread. This works well as he has traveled among multiple capitals within India in those days, taking up commissions from one king to the next, painting their portraits, their queens, children, country scenes and so on.

Book covers the period of roughly 1880 to 1930, traveling through Travancore, Pudukkottai, Mysore kingdoms (called Samasthanam in the Indian parlance)  in Southern India and Baroda, Mewar kingdoms in Northern India, diving into a lot of details. Initial chapters talk about Asvati Tirunal, Uthram Tirunal and Swathi Tirunal of the throne of Travancore, where what sounds like the first name is the name of the star (one out of 27) that is associated with the king's birth and Tirunal (meaning auspicious day) referring to their birth, thus each king being referred to by the birth star. Next sections talks about a robber sect that elevated itself royals and ruled Pudukottai, struggled to manage finance and taxes and then pulled themselves up by employing good administrators that served with the title of Dewans. I had heard of the title Dewan during my school days as a sort of Minister. But through the book (re)learned the important role they played in the administration of the kingdoms from managing taxes/finances to communicating with the British and so on, like a home + finance minister of a country in this century. Some men who functioned in this role (Madhava Rao and A. Seshiah Sastri) in more than one kingdom during their lifetime have managed to turnaround the fortunes of poorly functioning administrations, while also serving as good or bad bridges between the kings and the Britishers. There is a long and interesting chapter about the Kerala territories that were matriarchically managed, where succession flows through the women's side. Last few chapters talk about Baroda and Mewar kingdoms, ending with the Rana of Mewar, who resisted and disliked the "progress" as promoted by the British and insisted on administering his land on his own terms. Thus, while not bothering to improve roads, trains but maintaining forts or patronizing artists well. Book ends saying how while this particular king was quite selfless and cared a lot about his subjects, his insistence on keeping his kingdom in the 19th century forever, eventually made him unpopular allowing the British to push him out, making him king in name only, while they took control of the whole kingdom.

Both the Indian rulers as well as the British empire had used every detail involved in visits, gift giving, protocols, paying tribute/taxes, sending reports, language used in reporting and so on to gain leverage. British had the practice of installing one Resident in the palace of each colonial kingdom, to monitor everything that is taking place. The kingdom was diplomatically but firmly forced to get clearance from the Resident for any new rule they wanted to promulgate, projects they wanted to fund, etc. Since kings had no capacity to throw these Residents out, they will oblige but won't meet with them often enough or invite them to the court and give them lavish gifts establishing who is superior. There are examples such as Lord Hastings touring India from Britain, avoiding Delhi since as per convention he would have to appear in front of the Mughal emperor and receive gifts, which is perceived as a mark of servitude. Similarly, Sayajirao, a famous Indian king, when he was forced to go to Delhi to meet British monarch, George V in 1911, stand in a line of kings from India, paying tribute to the British king one by one, refused first. When he was really forced to, he did. But the Resident who didn't like Sayajirao, exaggerated details like he didn't wear enough regal jewels & attire to show respect, didn't walk back 7 steps before turning his back to George V to make a huge issue calling it the Durbar Incident and managed to depose him completely. Though the level of racism exhibited by the British is mind boggling by today's standards, it is quite interesting to learn that even younger children of Indian kings weren't totally scared or look up to them. For example, an Indian princess getting English lessons from a British teacher once starts to cough badly. When the teacher asked her to drink some water, the princess says, as per her custom, since she is sitting down with a foreigner considered unclean, she has to finish the session, go take a bath to cleanse herself and only then can drink or eat anything. There are tons and tons of stories and incidences in the book.

While the book is 556 pages long, about 200 pages are full of extensive references. Ample material and pointers to those who are interested in any particular era, king to dive deep. There are sections of the book that delve deep into administrative practices, how the treasury was turned around in a kingdom, and so on that are not directly related to the thesis of the book. Those parts could have been trimmed down to make the work more crisp. But if you get into the flow (of the author's slightly different Indian prose compared to the Western style of writing one may be used to), the details are not uninteresting. 

Since the book wasn't available in US, I asked my brother Sarathy who lives in India to order the book for me to read while being in India on my sabbatical visit. He got me a Kindle copy that when I read on a tablet, allowed me to enjoy dozens of Ravi Varma paintings that are included in the book in glorious colors! This was indeed a treat as the paintings are so intricate and exquisite. Since I often complain about how most books I read don't include enough pictures (even graphs, photos where they could help immensely) due to costs & complexities involved, I could really appreciate these included paintings as they fit very well into the flow of the narration while being delightful to look at. Ravi Varma himself being a descendant of a royal family, had not only established the preeminence of Indian artists but had done a lot to make the Indian culture palatable to the Victorian era Britain as well. For example, in a painting he portrays a mother with child and a house dog, awaiting the arrival of the father. This portrayal is in line with the values of the Britain at that time where the man worked and the woman stayed home with the child & dog waiting for him to return. While this may have been true in some parts of the India at that time, in the part where Ravi Varma grew up, women ruled, didn't wait for their husbands to come home and considered animals like dogs dirty and so would not allow them inside their homes! He similarly reimagined even the Hindu goddesses and painted them in fairer skin color and high neck blouses and shiny silk sareers. Since he also managed to make these paintings available for mass consumption via lithographic printing, how these goddess are portrayed has remained the same in India till date! Thus, though one can argue that Ravi Varma is a loose thread to connect all these kingdoms and stories, it is an exquisite one nonetheless. 

As I am wrapping up my stay in India, also finished reading couple of Tamil novels my brother bought for me that were originally published circa 1930. Though some parts may not be PC by today's standard, I found the language, flow, stories all to be totally amusing and enjoyable. 

Regards.

-sundar.