Yantrakaal

The world as a product of information image credit :  https://pixabay.com/en/fantasy-eyes-forest-aesthetic-face-2824304/ With social media spewing facts like a firehose, the world today is in danger of drowning in a pool of information. Or as the cynic would say, in a cesspool of fake news because, as anyone who has been on Facebook would know, most what is peddled as news is really alt-news, an euphemism for propaganda and misinformation. In an earlier era of the internet, spam had similarly threatened to undermine the utility of email. Even today, 60% of all mail sent through the internet is spam but thanks to intelligent spam filters, most are trapped and never reach the main inbox. Unfortunately, similar filters for fake news are not yet available and so our social media timelines are cluttered with material deliberately placed to confuse us or to convince us of things that we would not otherwise agree with. IRA, the St. Petersburg, Russia, based Internet Research Agen...

The astonishing rise, and fall, in the price of Bitcoin has suddenly made everyone -- other than geeks who have been at it since 2009 -- sit up and take notice of an extraordinary new phenomenon called cryptocurrency. We call it a phenomenon because while it certainly carries value, it is not linked to any traditional investment product like equity, debt, commodity or real estate. What is even more mysterious is that the value is recorded in a database called the blockchain, a shared ledger that resides simultaneously across multiple computers that are operated by unknown, unregulated entities. image from techbullion.com Bitcoin is to the transfer of value what the internet is to the transfer of information - made it possible to effect transfers easily, anonymously and most importantly without the intermediation of any central authority. This makes both technologies a favourite with libertarians and an anathema to despotic and autocratic governments. But while most governments, b...

Like demonetisation and GST, Aadhaar has been in the news for both good and bad reasons. On one hand we have heard how crores of rupees in non-entitled subsidy have been saved by the government but then on the other hand we have had horror stories of destitutes being deprived of entitlements because of the lack of an Aadhaar identity. In general, those who believe in the current prime minister are bullish about Aadhaar but they forget that many of them had opposed the same on the grounds of privacy when it was proposed by the previous government. What is missing in all such discourse is a clear understanding of how Aadhaar operates and how it could fail. image from techniknow Ever since it was freely and finally admitted that 90% of all money that the Central government transmits to citizens as subsidies is stolen by middlemen there has been a demand for a direct benefit transfer (DBT) mechanism. One obvious mechanism is through bank accounts : Instead of selling 3 kg of rice to...

In the evolutionary ascent of man, the idea of time is perhaps the first concept that differentiates him from his animal past. Unlike a human being, an animal, say a cow, has no -- or very rudimentary -- memories of the past, and certainly no hopes and plans for the future. It lives in the perennial present and is motivated only by the current state of its environment and its own current state of hunger, fear, libido or discomfort. Time is also an enigmatic concept that defies definition. Trapped in a peculiar case of circular logic, where “the snake swallows its tail”, we say that “Time is what is measured by clocks and a clock is what measures time”.  We obviously sense the passage of time but this flow is another mystery because if it indeed flows, like the water of a river, then what exactly are the banks of the river that it flows through? Then again, do we sit still while time flows past us? Or do we move along through stagnant time? There have been questions galore but hard...

Every morning, when the sun rises, birds wake up and start chirping. We are not surprised because we see a very clear connection between a cause, the increase in ambient light, and the effect it has in waking up the birds. But when the sun rises, the Ispat Express moves out from Howrah station as well. Even in this case we are not surprised even though there is no obvious connection between the ambient light and behaviour of the engine. We explain the first phenomenon through causation and the second through correlation. Perhaps if we look very hard we might find a causative mechanism that explains why the Ispat Express departs at the crack of dawn and not at any other time, but frankly that is of little interest to the passenger. We are happy with the correlation, we are not really bothered about the causation. That is the crux of this article where we explore astrology from the perspective of data science and machine learning. Traditional scientists would of course hesitate to view...

The three ‘R’s -- Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic -- are the three fundamental skills that are compulsory in the curriculum of all primary schools. Should another R --  computer progRamming --  be also included as the fourth fundamental skill?  Computer programming -- as in Java or C++ -- is already being taught as an optional subject in many schools in classes  IX and X as  and Computer Science is generally available as the “fourth” subject in classes XI and XII. Then why do we need to make it compulsory and burden our already stressed out kids with one more subject? Before we address this question, we must first stop viewing computers as just another career option, a vocational skill, on par with, say, medicine, accounting, music or sports.  Instead, we need to see it as an enabling tool that impacts all aspects of life. Programming teaches students to think logically, solve problems in a systematic manner and stimulates creativity. Eventually it will ...