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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy reading to you in the new year. 

-sundar. 

On music, cars, insulin pumps and hacking..

During the last week of March went to a geek conference to deliver a talk. While my focus was on Multicore processors, the conference had seven different tracks including Android, Multicore, Embedded systems design, Black hat, design for medical devices, etc. You can check out the conf site at http://www.ubmdesign.com/conference/keynotes/. 

The keynote speakers were interesting chaps. 

See http://www.ubmdesign.com/conference/keynotes/ 

Thomas Dolby is a musician from UK, who had started a company in US/UK, developed the RMF file format for music files (Rich Midi Format similar to Rich Text Format), created the beatnik music engine that got designed into pretty much all the phones (to play ring tones) in the late 90's and early 20xx (http://cloud-call-center.tmcnet.com/news/2005/Feb/1116860.htm). In the stage he talked for a while, played music, sang, demonstrated as to how he creates music, etc. Though it is easy to understand conceptually that using modern synthesizers and a bunch of audio clips, you can create music that sounds very elaborate as if put together by a 100 people orchestra, seeing it being done live is quite impressive. You can see some excerpts posted on the site. While his company's inventions helped resource constrained phones to play music/ringtones using Midi, as the constraints started easing up (due to faster processors/more memory/more bandwidth), now phones can play actual music itself obviating the need for his music engine and so it has become obsolete. After a decade or so now he is back fulltime composing music. To promote his new music venture, he has created a site called http://www.floatingcity.com/ that creates a mythology of melted icecaps, floating city in the ocean that seems to have been a result of an apocalypse letting site visitors explain how it got to that stage. It has become a community where people do different things, exchange ideas, post conspiracy theories and so forth. In the end Dolby and others seems to have settled on a theory where when Nicholas Tesla's idea of providing free power to everyone on earth was implemented in this imaginary world, Edison got in between to steal ideas and in the process created a catastrophe resulting in that post apocalypse earth. :-) 

On the second day the co-founder of the electric car company Tesla Motors spoke. While so far their cars have been great in performance (0 to 60mph in 3.6 seconds, can drive 300 miles in one charge, etc.), they have been awfully expensive (in the ~$200K range). But in 2013 they are planning to deliver a new model that will be their first entry into the mass market priced around $30K. He pointed out that while there may not be Moore's law type improvements in battery technology year to year, there still is about 10% improvement in battery performance every year. So, if you wait about 7 years performance doubles and the current technology is biting at the heels of gas engines. While Tesla has been designing all their components themselves, on the exhibition floor there was a Chevy Volt gas-electric hybrid car that has been torn apart on display showing how GM uses a "outsource as much as possible" approach. There were couple of guys who were giving 1.5hr long lecture on each one of the three days about what they found inside the car as they opened it up (first day about batteries, second day about drive train and third day about infotainment system). Sounded like an interesting job, if you can make enough money this way..!

Third day speaker spoke about how the firmware in washing machines and toasters that will be connected to the internet soon are not being designed with security in mind. There was an interesting demonstration by Black Hat group where an engineer demonstrated as to how Medtronics insulin pumps can be hacked remotely via WiFi, taken control of and asked to pump in all the insulin available into the person it is attached to..! When they contacted Medtronics with the findings, they were told to effectively get lost. So, they have handed over the information to FDA which is taking up an investigation to assess the seriousness of this vulnerability. 

There was another session where an Black Hat member was describing as to how he hacks silicon chips. Just search for Christopher Tarnovsky on the net. He runs a company called flylogic (http://www.flylogic.net/) that helps silicon vendors assess vulnerability issues in their design. You can find posts like http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/12/christopher-tarnovsky-hacks-infineons-unhackable-chip-we-pre/ on the net. It is interesting to see how much you can find out about a device without having the datasheet by your side, by carefully shaving off the layers of a silicon chip, pumping in clock and power and probing the buses. See http://www.flylogic.net/blog/?m=201203. Such steps could be used by hackers to figure out the details of a smart card used to pay for services so that fake cards can be used to cheat the system. Guys like Chris being on the legitimate side of the business, help develop things like security mesh for silicon chips (see http://static.usenix.org/events/smartcard99/full_papers/kommerling/kommerling.pdf particularly Section 3.6) that make hacking them more difficult. Interesting world to peek into. 

If all this doesn't excite you, you can go to http://www.multicoredevcon.com/common/session.php?expo_seq=12&track_seq=160&pres_seq=947 to see what I was blabbering about in the conference. :-)

-sundar.

Book Review: Dr. Folkman’s War

Saturday, May 18, 2002


Read “Dr. Folkman’s War: Angiogenesis and the Struggle to Defeat Cancer” by Robert Cooke. Dr. Judah Folkman while working in a navy lab in 1961 noticed that strangely, tumors do not grow unless they manage to recruit blood capillaries to provide them with a lot of blood to nourish their growth. After a period of 40 years this intriguing observation has blossomed into a multibillion-dollar industry in the biomedical arena racing towards possible cure for cancer. Since Folkman happened to be Chief of Pediatrics Surgery in the Boston Children’s Hospital (rather than a cancer researcher), the established cancer research fraternity refused to seriously look at his proposals/research/results and consistently scoffed him off until the 90’s..!

As you may know, the standard treatment for cancer is removing the tumor by surgery and/or killing the cancerous cells either by chemotherapy or by radiation. So the establishment has been all along focused on fine-tuning the Maximum Tolerable Dosage (MTD) of toxins or radiation that can be administered to kill the cancer cells while avoiding the killing of patient in the process (since a large number of non-cancerous cells also get killed in this shotgun approach). The Angiogenesis approach is to simply cutoff the needed blood supply to the cancer cells so that they can never grow beyond microscopic levels. People with microscopic cancerous tumors can live a long and peaceful life. Since this type of cancer management does not affect any normal cells, it is has very little or no side effect..!

Another well-known problem in cancer treatment is the appearance of secondary tumors once the primary tumor is surgically removed. As long as the primary tumor is in the system you don’t see too many secondaries in most of the patients. The traditional treatment is just to hope that the intervention is timely and pray that the cancer has not spread to other parts of the body yet. But in many cases once the primary tumor is removed, a whole slew of secondaries appear all over the body. Folkman’s team hypothesized that the primary tumor, in addition to releasing a chemical to invite and recruit blood capillaries, must also be releasing some other factor that keeps the secondaries at bay and limits their growth. Again cancer establishment threw out this idea asking what the hell does a pediatric surgeon know about the pathology of cancer cells that oncologists don’t already know. One of the main problems Folkman faced was that these factors are so small in quantity that no one could quickly separate them to demonstrate their effect. But in the last few years they have. Book details all the trails and tribulations Folkman went through to get funding for his research, establishment of his labs, all the fights he had to put up to fend of bad publicity, etc. What is nice is that it is not a biography of Folkman but a chronicle of the development of Angiogenesis as an accepted, recognized field of study solely developed and pushed into the lime light by Folkman.

He is portrayed as a very affable researcher, grooming his research associates well, constantly giving them credit for what they have contributed, free spirited researcher deeply committed to his work, willing to talk to anyone who is interested, etc. This seems to be quite true since every report/documentary I have seen mentions these aspects of his nature. The factors his team has isolated called angiostatin and endostatin are in clinical trials at this point in time. There are several more in the labs now since the U.S. Govt., NSF, American Cancer Society, etc. recognize this approach’s potential in treating, managing cancer. Pretty interesting. You can see a PBS documentary on this topic at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/cancer/program.html

While working on these issues, he has developed a polymer that is porous enough to releases chemicals stored on one side to the other at extremely slow rates. Since neither he nor Harvard wanted to patent anything (as they felt it is against the spirit of academic research), the idea was put into public domain and has been used very effectively in the Norplant contraceptive..! (If you don’t know about Norplant, read up on the web. It is a very neat application of this polymer.) BTW, Harvard no longer has that “not-patenting-anything-ever” policy. How sad. :-(

Updates on November 26, 2011
Dr. Folkaman passed away in 2008. Avastin, which is a drug developed based on Angiogenesis theory received its first approval in 2004 for combination use with standard chemotherapy for metastatic colon cancer. While at one point it was also approved for breast cancer by the FDA, the approval was revoked on 18 November 2011.

Book Review: Complexity

Saturday June 8, 2002

I bought this book called Complexity: the Emerging Science At the Edge of Order and Chaos by M. Mitchell Waldrop off the shelf of a book store without having heard about it before. It turned out to be a very good read. The field of complexity studies how individual entities like a cell or a stock or a human being join other such entities and with each entity functioning independently, still manage to evolve as a coherent whole system (like a biological being, national/international level economy, societies and civilizations respectively). Despite the second law of thermodynamics, how do these systems evolve into a more coherent order is indeed an intriguing question. This book discusses the research efforts that are ongoing in this field and the formation of The Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico to study such phenomenons. Naturally understanding the emergence of complex systems from smaller independent entities will have wide implications anywhere from population control, stock markets to formation of stars and galaxies, etc. The way the book is written, neatly mixing the details about the formation of the institute, research efforts that are ongoing, all the interesting characters that are involved in the process, the prose itself, etc. makes it delightful. Each chapter starting from a new point (instead of continuing the discussion from where the previous chapter ended) delineating a different thread relevant to the discussion and eventually all the threads crossing each other's path via the institute, was also quite nice.

Wide ranges of organizations like Citibank, NSF, DoE, etc. are funding the institute. Citibank for example, is interested in understanding the economies of different smaller countries. Apparently a whole lot of their investments based on old, traditional models of economic theory (that denounces "Increasing returns" type ideas and insists that supply will always be equal to demand) went bust and so they are trying to see if this complexity model can give them a better, more realistic projection. This idea of forming an institute that will work across fields in itself is quite interesting. Invariably research efforts funded by govt. funding agencies and university departments are quite narrowly focused in one small area. In order to go the other way, this institute has a philosophy of securing funds for the whole institute and then getting interesting people from various fields to come and work together in the institute on problems that span multiple subject areas obviating the need for the researchers to write grant proposals and secure their own research money. This method of operation, though harder to implement and monitor, ensures that researchers don't get stuck in a narrow area stipulated by the funding agency.

Next picked up "Fresh Blood: The new American Immigrant by Sanford J. Ungar. Heard a brief interview of the author couple of years back on Good Morning America or some such program. Since then thought I should read this book and kept it on the list. Finally bought a copy. Seems to be an interesting write-up about contributions new immigrants make. It is based on individual anecdotes, interviews as well as statistics. Will see how it turns out.. :-)

Book Review: The Case for God

Monday December 27, 2010

After reading a few books like The God Delusion by Dawkins, wanted to read some good literature covering counter-points. Didn't want to read books like "Purpose Driven Life", etc. but something more academic and nuanced. So, ended up buying Karen Armstrong's “The Case for God” I have been hearing about for a while. Though the title could be interpreted to mean how she is going to make a case for God, book is more of a study of how human beings always manage to come up with the concept of God irrespective of the era or the geographical area they belong to. You might have heard this famous quote attributed to Blaise Pascal about how human beings have a God shaped vacuum in their soul. It is listed in this book as well. While it captures the point well, it does appear to be an incorrect quote (see http://theconstructivecurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2006/05/incorrect-pascal-quotes.html). The first 300 pages of the book covers Paleolithic age's Unknown God moving from 30,000 BCE to 1500 CE while the next 300 pages cover 1500 CE to present discussing the Modern God. 

I felt a marked difference in the writing style between the two halves. Language in the first half was stuffy. To cite an example, here is a typical sentence: "Even though the Council fathers went to such lengths to enforce dogmatic orthodoxy, their prime concern was to promote regular liturgical observance to enable the laity to transform the old external, communal rites into genuinely interior devotion." Couldn’t she say “The Council fathers tried to calm the public by focusing into following rituals”? But the second half was a lot easier to read. This could be due to the fact that I personally didn't know a lot about the first half material while I was familiar with the second half content. Still, it did feel like two different people wrote them.

I was glad to see her covering Hinduism as well. Though it is one of the major religions in the world, Western scholars usually not well versed in Eastern religions routinely skip/gloss over it focusing only on Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Though her coverage of Hinduism lacks depth comparatively, it still is more balanced compared to other writers.

Read the book while I was on vacation in India last month. During that time came across a Tamil book titled “KadavuL” (means simply “God”) while just browsing shelves in a book store. It had a collection of articles, essays and columns writer Sujatha had written over a period of 10+ years (1993 to ~2004). There is a large overlap between the two books in the material discussed (not implying any kind of plagiarism anywhere). Between the two I actually found KadavuL lot more engrossing despite it being a collection and not one massive piece of work as Case for God is. Though most of the articles in KadavuL were written for less erudite audience, Sujatha had done a wonderful job of presenting this complicated material spanning vast areas in a very easily accessible narrative. Both books have traced various forms of religions and how God had to be brought into explain most naturally occurring phenomenon in the past and how as science demystifies nature, the need for God’s hand has been dwindling over the centuries and particularly in the last few decades.  

In the second half of the book, just like Sujatha, Karen discusses how quantum mechanics, Heisenberg's uncertainly principle and other such developments in science had made people realize that beyond a point nature cannot be understood fully. This realization has obliterated the confidence people once had that eventually anything and everything will be logically explained obviating the need for higher level powers to explain what we can’t understand. Lot of theologians and ancient Hindu religious writings have argued the same w.r.t. to knowing God as well. Both authors point out similarities in this convergence that is intriguing. There are areas of disappointment in Karen’s narration where she seems to stretch things to suit her convenience. For example, when mentioning Hilbert’s set of 23 problems in Mathematics, she implies (in the beginning of Chapter 11) Hilbert said that when these problems are solved, we’d have a complete understanding of the universe..! In all other material I have come across, Hilbert listed those as interesting problems in Math for people to work on. I don’t remember any assertion by him beyond that. Even if she is not an expert in Mathematics, I am surprised that the editorial process didn't catch/correct these assertions. I also noticed as to how she has avoided naming any fundamentalists she despises/looks down upon but limits herself to naming atheists like Dawkins, Hitchens, etc. that should be safe to do. :-)

Talking about God, have you heard what a dyslexic agnostic does lying on the roof top staring at the starry sky?

He wonders if there is a doG. :-)

Book Review: The God Delusion

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Read “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins a while back. I remember reading that Dawkins suggested this idea for a book to promote atheism to his agent around the year 2000. It got rejected initially since publishers didn't believe that there will be a market. When W. became president of USA, the pendulum had started swinging quite a bit towards the religious right that around 2004 it appeared like an opportune moment to write this book. Subsequently when it came out in 2006, it became a best seller and has garnered a lot of attention in the pop culture, being used even in the popular cartoon TV show Family Guy..! Basic argument in the book is that belief in any kind of supernatural God promoted by religions is nonsense and it always leads the world towards conflict and hatred towards each other. Dawkins strongly opposes even lighter versions of religion saying while it may appear harmless and altruistic, it only softens people up aiding and abetting a few to move further into religious extremism, suicide bombings and so on. Having grown up in Southern India where a famous atheist in the last century encouraged his followers to attack priests and demolish temples, I was wondering if Dawkins' argument will apply in the other direction as well, i.e. while preaching atheism may be harmless, it might prep a few extremists who may move further and turn violent. Obviously he is not encouraging violent demolitions of churches and synagogues but only a cerebral move towards a more rational, non-religious, logical, scientific world. 

Overall the book feels more like a collection of articles on this topic rather than one tightly written book. This may be excused since he had to touch upon various areas and topics to be comprehensive. Him being an evolutionary biologist, there is a lot of content related to evolution that are borrowed from his various other books. This perhaps indicates how difficult it is to be consistently creative and come up with original ideas.)

He talks about Einstein's use of the word God, and ideas like God could be a set of equations, etc. right at the beginning to say that is not the God he is talking about. His discussion is about the supernatural omniscient God who created the world as religions (particularly Christianity, Islam and Judaism) promote. He spends enough pages to answer arguments like there is an innate need for God in human beings, religion is what gives us our moral compass, etc. In case you haven't heard of Hauser's Denise's Dilemma, you can read this link. Hauser's idea is that we have a moral compass that is innate which has nothing to do with religion since people of all religion and atheists respond to these thought experiments the same way. Dawkins then dove tails to propose that the cynical religious argument "there are no atheists in fox holes" could possibly be countered with, "there probably are no atheists in prison". :-)  In addition he also asks if people will lead a moral life only if there is a God watching over them, doesn't that mean that they are only sucking up to God due to fear and are not righteous by themselves.

I was thinking along the lines of the amount of time/energy/resources that have gone into religion and wouldn't we lose it all if we simply get rid of every form of religion..? He acknowledges this point on his own towards the end saying we should treat, preserve and cherish it just as part of human history (like Egyptian pyramids for example). Though this book may not convert anyone anytime soon, it is a good read.  

I wrote about his documentary "Root of All Evil?" a while back. Got some good responses. While the Channel 4 link is still there at http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/can_you_believe_it/debates/rootofevil.html the Google video site that offered the video for download no longer exists. That documentary pretty much covered the content of this book as well. BTW, his website http://richarddawkins.net/ looks so cluttered and silly. I think he needs to hire a new webmaster. :-)

22 pens for one signature..!

Thursday, March 25, 2010

In U.S. whenever a new law need to be enacted, first the congress & senate vote on it to approve. It then goes to the president for signature. When the president signs the bill, it becomes law. Instead of treating the bill signing process simply as a procedure that need to be completed, they usually make a ceremony out of it. TV cameras record the event and broadcast it so that politicians can talk about the virtues of the newly enacted law and how it will help people. As part of this ceremony, the president gives the pen used to sign the bill as a memento to the individual(s) who worked hard for getting the bill through.

 

When a big bill like the health-care legislation gets signed, the ceremony becomes even more pronounced. With so many people involved in getting the bill passed, there are so many people who want the pen..! Solution? President signs the bill using multiple pens. :-) For the health-care legislation passed last Tuesday, there were apparently 20 people who deserved the thank you gift. President Obama wanted a pen for himself and they needed one more for a museum. So, he signed his name just once (see the picture below) using 22 different pens..! Individual pens were used to sign just a fraction of one letter in his name..! This sounded silly to me. I am not sure how many of these pens are going to end up in eBay in the next few years. :-)

 

Similarly there is a custom of sending the U.S. national flag that flies on top of the Capitol Building inWashington D.C. to dignitaries around the world as a memento. You can imagine how it would be nice for someone to own a flag that flew on top of that building for a whole year. But again, this idea need to be leveraged fully and so the system goes into "mass production". There are workers who tie a new flag to the pole, hoist it, let it fly for 5 minutes, pull it down, replace it with the next flag and repeat the process throughout the day..! This dilution again cheapens the idea for me. It would be much nicer to use just one pen for each bill and one flag per year and perhaps keep it in some museum if they need to be preserved.

 

Still treating such physical objects as treasures sounds similar to Bollywood movie fetish where heroes and heroins hold on to some clothing or hair clip, etc. of the loved one pining over it. I was quite amused few years back when the British Museum turned down a collection of her used hand bags ex-PM Margaret Thatcher tried to donate suggesting that they should be displayed as treasured exhibits. :-) To a small extent I can see some symbolic value in preserving one pen used to sign a big law that touches the lives of several million people. But used personal handbags..?!?!