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  • Gravitational lensing and facial recognition

    These images of gravitational lensing, especially the one on the left, are pretty famous because apart from demonstrating the angular magnification effects of strong lensing very well, they’ve also been used by NASA in their Halloween promotional material. The ring-like arc that forms the ‘face’ is a result of a galaxy cluster, SDSS J1038+4849, lying directly in front of the object (on our line of sight) the light from which it is bending around itself. Because of the alignment, the light is bent all around it, forming what’s known as an Einstein ring. This particular instance was discovered in early 2015 by astronomer Judy Schmidt.

    Seeing this image again prompted me to recall a post I’d written long ago on a different blog (no longer active) about our brains’ tendency to spot patterns in images that actually don’t exist – such as looking at an example of strong gravitational lensing and spotting a face. The universe didn’t intend to form a face but all our brain needs to see one is an approximate configuration of two eyes, a nose, a smile and a contour if it’s lucky. This tendency is called pareidolia. In more ambiguous images or noises, what each individual chooses to see is the basis of the (now-outmoded) Rorschach inkblot test.

    A 2009 paper in the journal NeuroReport reported evidence that human adults identify a face when there is none only 35 milliseconds slower than when there is really a face (165 ms v. 130 ms) – and both through a region of the brain called the fusiform face area, which may have evolved to process faces. The finding speaks to our evolutionary need to identify these and similar visual configurations, a crucial part of social threat perception and social navigation. The authors of the 2009 paper have suggested using their findings to investigate forms of autism in which a person has trouble looking at face.

    My favourite practical instance of pareidolia is in Google’s DeepDream project, which is a neural network used to over-process, differentiate between or recognise images. When software engineers at Google fed a random image into the network’s input layer and asked DeepDream to transform it into an image containing some specific, well-defined objects, the network engaged in a process called algorithmic pareidolia: picking out patterns that aren’t really there. Each layer of a neural network, understood to go bottom-up, analyses specific parts of an image, with the lower layers going after strokes and nodes and the higher layers, after entire objects and their arrangement.

    In many instances, algorithmic pareidolia yielded images that looked similar to the work of the human visual cortex under the influence of LSD. This has prompted scientists to investigate whether psychedelic compounds cause electrochemical changes in the brain that are similar to instructions supplied to convolutional neural networks (of which DeepDream is a kind). In other words, when DeepDream dreamt, it was an acid trip. In June 2015, three software engineers from Google explained how pareidolia took shape inside such networks:

    If we choose higher-level layers, which identify more sophisticated features in images, complex features or even whole objects tend to emerge. Again, we just start with an existing image and give it to our neural net. We ask the network: “Whatever you see there, I want more of it!” This creates a feedback loop: if a cloud looks a little bit like a bird, the network will make it look more like a bird. This in turn will make the network recognize the bird even more strongly on the next pass and so forth, until a highly detailed bird appears, seemingly out of nowhere.

    Diving further into complex neural networks may eventually allow scientists to explore cognitive processes at a pace thousands of times slower than at which they happen in the brain.

  • An opportunity to understand the GPL license

    Featured image: Matt Mullenweg, 2009. Credit: loiclemeur/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

    Every December, I wander over to ma.tt, the blog of WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, to check what he’s saying about how the CMS will be shaping up in the next year. Despite my cribbings as well as constant yearning to be on Ghost, I’m still on WordPress and no closer to leaving than I ever was. And WordPress isn’t all that bad either (it runs The Wire, for example). In fact, I’m reminded of the words of a very talented developer from earlier this year with whom we at The Wire were consulting. When I brought up the fact that PHP (the programming language on which WordPress is a script) isn’t very conducive to scaling, he replied, “Anything can be built on anything.” So, for all its problems, WordPress does do some other things well that other CMSs might usually struggle with.

    Anyway, lest I digress further – On a post on October 28, Mullenweg described the impact of the GPL license on WordPress’s development as “fantastic” – possibly because, as Linus Torvalds, who created the Linux kernel, has noted, the GPL license enforces itself: code derived from GPL-licensed code also has to be GPL-licensed. As a result, those making modifications to WordPress for their own use could not wall themselves off, preventing fragmentation as well as, in the words of University of Pennsylvania law professor Christopher Yoo, persevere in an environment that allows “multiple actors to pursue parallel innovation, which can improve the quality of the technical solution as well as increase the rate of technological change”.

    GPL stands for ‘general public license’, and is widely used on the creation, modification, deconstruction, use and distribution of software on the web. Mullenweg’s broader post was actually about him noticing how the UI of the mobile app of Wix, a platform that lets its users build websites with a few clicks, closely resembled WordPress’s own, and how there was – as a result – a glaring problem. In its composition, WordPress uses code that’s on the GPL. GPL’s self-enforcement feature makes it a copyleft license: works that are derived from GPL-licensed work also have to be copyleft and distributed on the same terms. As a result, the code behind Wix’s mobile app had to immediately be made available (by, say, making it available on GitHub) and publicly accessible. It wasn’t.

    Last I checked, the post had one update from Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami and 120 comments. And all together, they illustrated how the terms of the license, though written in language that was lucid enough, were easy to confuse and the sort of impedance that poses to its useful implementation. I spent an hour (probably more) going through all of it; if you’re interested in this sort of thing – or learning something new – I highly recommend going through the comments yourself. Or, if you’d like something shorter (but also trying to be wider in scope), you could just keep reading.

    The tale has four dramatis personae: the GPL license, the MIT license, Wix’s mobile app and WordPress’s code (plus a cameo appearance by the LGPL license). Code derived from GPL-compatible code also has to be GPL-compatible – a major requirement of which is that: “… you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things” (emphasis added). This is also the clause that’s missing from the MIT license. As a result, code that’s originally under the MIT license can later be licensed as GPL (i.e. its source code made available) but code that’s originally under the GPL cannot later be licensed as MIT (i.e. source code that a GPL license has made accessible cannot be hidden away by the MIT license) – unless all the relevant copyright holders are onboard with the shift.

    Paul Sieminski, the general counsel of Automattic – the non-profit company that originally built WordPress – commented on Mullenweg’s post thus: “[Wix would] probably be in the clear if you had used just the original editor we started with (ZSSRichTextEditor, MIT licensed). Instead, Wix took our version of the editor which has 1000+ original commits on top of the original MIT editor, that took more than a year to write. We improved it. A lot. And Wix took those improvements, used them in their app… but then stripped out all of the important rights that they’re not legally allowed to take away. We’re just asking Wix to fix their mistake. Release the Wix Mobile App under a GPL license, and put the source code up on GitHub” (link added). So far so good.

    Wix CEO Abrahami’s response – posted on his blog on Wix – though cordial, makes the mistake of being evasive and in denial at once. As many commenters pointed out, Mullenweg’s ask was simple and clearly articulated: bring the source code behind Wix’s mobile app under the GPL and upload it on GitHub. Abrahami, however, defended Wix’s decision to keep the source code proprietary by saying that it only used an open source library modified by WordPress (“that is the concept of open source right?”) for a “minor part” of the app, and that he would “release the app you [Matt] saw as well”. The latter statement should have resolved the dispute because GPL only mandates that the source code be made available when asked for – not necessarily on GitHub. George Stephanis, a developer at Automattic, added: “The source code has to be freely available to everyone that has the software. If you want a paywall, it has to treat the software and source as a unit — you can’t distribute the software, but then charge for the source code.”

    Some commenters pointed out that Abrahami may have been confusing the GPL license with the Library GPL (LGPL), and as a result not be entirely clear about the “viral” nature of the GPL license. When code is LGPL-compatible, extensions to the code needn’t be GPL-compatible. For example, in the Wix case, if the WordPress-modified open-source library was LGPL-, instead of GPL-, compatible and the mobile app had used parts of it, then the app’s source code doesn’t have to be GPL-compatible. In colloquial terms, the LGPL doesn’t infect code it is associated with the way the GPL does; it is less “viral”.

    Nonetheless, I’d think it’s arguably harder to know Wix’s code has to be GPL-compatible, or even to know what the license on it ought to be, if it isn’t publicly available at all times. In support: the relevant part from the license’s preamble, which I quoted earlier, is “that [the users] know [they] can do these things”. I use the word ‘arguably’ not in the legal sense but in the spiritual one – the spirit being that of the free-software movement. And this is why I’m glad Mullenweg chose to hammer this issue out in public (via his blog) instead of via email. Moreover, I’m also glad that he didn’t initiate legal action immediately either: the conversation between Mullenweg, Abrahami and all the commenters – despite the occasional passive-aggressive animus – deserved to happen instead of the groups splintering off and blocking each other. The open source community always needs more unity.

    Then again, the licenses that help sustain these communities could do more harm than good if they become too restrictive – especially when they fall out of step with changing governance practices while striving to keep the open source ideals we’ve associated with Richard Stallman alive even as they don’t offer too much freedom to users, which could result in a proliferation of alternatives that deprive useful software of its coherence. For example, Yoo writes in the paper I quoted from above,

    … some restrictions on what people can do with open source operating systems are necessary if consumers are to enjoy the full benefits of competition and innovation. My point is not to suggest that open source software is inherently superior to proprietary software or vice versa. Both approaches have distinct virtues that appeal to different users. Moreover, any attempt to cast the policy debate as a choice between those polar extremes [i.e. open source and modular development] is based on a false dichotomy. Instead, the different modes for producing software platforms are better regarded as occupying different locations along a continuum running from completely unrestricted open source to completely proprietary closed source. Indeed, companies may even choose to pursue hybrid strategies that occupy multiple locations on this continuum simultaneously. The diversity of advantages associated with these different approaches suggests that consumers benefit if different companies are given the latitude to experiment with different governance models, with the presence of one open source platform serving as an important competitive safety valve.

    Subscribe to The Wire‘s weekly science newsletter, Infinite in All Directions (archive), where I curate interesting science news, blogs and analyses from around the web.

  • The nomenclature of uncertainty

    The headline of a Nature article published on December 9 reads ‘LIGO black hole echoes hint at general relativity breakdown’. The article is about the prediction of three scientists that, should LIGO find ‘echoes’ of gravitational waves coming from blackhole-mergers, then it could be a sign of quantum-gravity forces at play.

    It’s an exciting development because it presents a simple and currently accessible way of probing the universe for signs of phenomena that show a way to unite quantum physics and general relativity – phenomena that have been traditionally understood to be outside the reach of human experiments until LIGO.

    The details of the pre-print paper the three scientists uploaded on arXiv were covered by a number of outlets, including The Wire. And The Wire‘s and Forbes‘s headlines were both questions: ‘Has LIGO already discovered evidence for quantum gravity?’ and ‘Has LIGO actually proved Einstein wrong – and found signs of quantum gravity?’, respectively. Other headlines include:

    • Gravitational wave echoes might have just caused Einstein’s general theory of relativity to break down – IB Times
    • A new discovery is challenging Einstein’s theory of relativity – Futurism
    • Echoes in gravitational waves hint at a breakdown of Einstein’s general relativity – Science Alert
    • Einstein’s theory of relativity is 100 years old, but may not last – Inverse

    The headlines are relevant because: Though the body of a piece has the space to craft what nuance it needs to present the peg, the headline must cut to it as quickly and crisply as possible – while also catching the eye of a potential reader on the social media, an arena where all readers are being inundated with headlines vying for attention.

    For example, with the quantum gravity pre-print paper, the headline has two specific responsibilities:

    1. To be cognisant of the fact that scientists have found gravitational-wave echoes in LIGO data at the 2.9-sigma level of statistical significance. Note that 2.9 sigma is evidently short of the threshold at which some data counts as scientific evidence (and well short of that at which it counts as scientific fact – at least in high-energy physics). Nonetheless, it still presents a 1-in-270 chance of, as I’ve become fond of saying, an exciting thesis.
    2. To make reading the article (which follows from the headline) seem like it might be time well spent. This isn’t exactly the same as catching a reader’s attention; instead, it comprises catching one’s attention and subsequently holding and justifying it continuously. In other words, the headline shouldn’t mislead, misguide or misinform, as well as remain constantly faithful to the excitement it harbours.

    Now, the thing about covering scientific developments from around the world and then comparing one’s coverage to those from Europe or the USA is that, for publications in those countries, what an Indian writer might see as an international development is in fact a domestic development. So Nature, Scientific American, Forbes, Futurism, etc. are effectively touting local accomplishments that are immediately relevant to their readers. The Wire, on the other hand, has to bank on the ‘universal’ aspect and by extension on themes of global awareness, history and the potential internationality of Big Science.

    This is why a reference to Einstein in the headline helps: everyone knows him. More importantly, everyone was recently made aware of how right his theories have been since they were formulated a century ago. So the idea of proving Einstein wrong – as The Wire‘s headline read – is eye-catching. Second, phrasing the headline as a question is a matter of convenience: because the quasi-discovery has a statistical significance of only 2.9 sigma, a question signals doubt.

    But if you argued that a question is also a cop-out, I’d agree. A question in a headline can be interpreted in two ways: either as a question that has not been answered yet but ought to be or as a question that is answered in the body. More often than not and especially in the click-bait era, question-headlines are understood to be of the latter kind. This is why I changed The Wire copy’s headline from ‘What if LIGO actually proved Einstein wrong…’ to ‘Has LIGO actually proved Einstein wrong…’.

    More importantly, the question is an escapism at least to me because it doesn’t accurately reflect the development itself. If one accounts for the fact that the pre-print paper explicitly states that gravitational-wave echoes have been found in LIGO data only at 2.9 sigma, there is no question: LIGO has not proved Einstein wrong, and this is established at the outset.

    Rather, the peg in this case is – for example – that physicists have proposed a way to look for evidence of quantum gravity using an experiment that is already running. This then could make for an article about the different kinds of physics that rule at different energy levels in the universe, and what levels of access humanity has to each.

    So this story, and many others like it in the past year that all dealt with observations falling short of the evidence threshold but which have been worth writing about simply because of the desperation behind them, have – or could have – prompted science writers to think about the language they use. For example, the operative words/clause in the respective headlines listed above are:

    • Nature – hint
    • IB Times – might have just caused
    • Futurism – challenging
    • Science Alert – hint
    • Inverse – may not

    Granted that an informed skepticism is healthy for science and that all science writers must remain as familiar with this notion as with the language of doubt, uncertainty, probability (and wave physics, it seems). But it still is likely the case that writers grappling with high-energy physics have to be more familiar than others, dealing as the latest research does with – yes – hope and desperation.

    Ultimately, I may not be the perfect judge of what words work best when it comes to the fidelity of syntax to sentiment; that’s why I used a question for a headline in the first place! But I’m very interested in knowing how writers choose and have been choosing their words, if there’s any friction at all (in the larger scheme) between the choice of words and the prevailing sentiments, and the best ways to deal with such situations.

    PS: If you’re interested, here’s a piece in which I struggled for a bit to get the words right (and finally had to resort to using single-quotes).

    Featured image credit: bongonian/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

  • TIFR’s superconductor discovery: Where are the reports?

    Featured image: The Meissner effect: a magnet levitating above a superconductor. Credit: Mai-Linh Doan/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

    On December 2, physicists from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) announced an exciting discovery: that the metal bismuth becomes a superconductor at a higher temperature than predicted by a popular theory. Granted the theory has had its fair share of exceptions, the research community is excited about this finding because of the unique opportunities it presents in terms of learning more, doing more. But yeah, even without the nuance, the following is true: that TIFR physicists have discovered a new form of superconductivity, in the metal bismuth. I say this as such because not one news outlet in India, apart from The Wire, reported the discovery, and it’s difficult to say it’s because the topic was too hard to understand.

    This was, and is, just odd. The mainstream as well as non-mainstream media in the country are usually quick to pick up on the slightest shred of legitimate scientific work and report it widely. Heck, many news organisations are also eager to report on illegitimate research – such as those on finding gold in cow urine. After the embargo on the journal paper lifted at 0030 hrs, I (the author of the article on The Wire) remained awake to check if the story had turned out okay – specifically, to check if anyone had any immediate complaints about its contents (there were two tweets about the headline and they were quickly dealt with). But then I ended up staying awake until 4 am because, as much as I looked on Google News and on other news websites, I couldn’t find anyone else who had written about it.

    Journal embargoes aren’t new, nor is it the case that journalists in India haven’t signed up to receive embargoed material. For example, the multiple water-on-Mars announcements and the two monumental gravitational-waves discoveries were all announced via papers in the journal Science, and were covered by The Hindu, The Telegraph, Times of India, Indian Express, etc. And Science also published the TIFR paper. Moreover, the TIFR paper wasn’t suppressed or buried in the embargoed press releases that the press team at Science sends out to journalists a few days before the embargo lifts. Third, the significance of the finding was evident from the start; these were the first two lines of the embargoed press release:

    Scientists from India report that pure Bismuth – a semimetal with a very low number of electrons per given volume, or carrier concentration – is superconducting at ultralow temperatures. The observation makes Bismuth one of the two lowest carrier density superconductors to date.

    All a journalist had to do was get in touch with Srinivasan Ramakrishnan, the lead author of the paper as well as the corresponding author, to get a better idea of the discovery’s significance. From my article on The Wire:

    “People have been searching for superconductivity in bismuth for 50 years,” Srinivasan Ramakrishnan, the leader of the TIFR group, told The Wire. “The last work done in bismuth found that it is not superconducting down to 0.01 kelvin. This was done 20 years ago and people gave up.”

    So, I’m very curious to know what happened. And since no outlets apart from The Wire have picked the story up, we circle back to the question of media coverage for science news in India. As my editor pointed out, the major publications are mostly interested in stuff like an ISRO launch, a nuclear reactor going critical or an encephalitis outbreak going berserker when it comes to covering science, and even then the science of the story itself is muted while the overlying policy issues are played up. This is not to say the policies are receiving undeserving coverage – they’re important, too – but only that the underlying science, which informs policy in crucial ways, isn’t coming through.

    And over time this disregard blinds us to an entire layer of enterprise that involves hundreds of thousands of our most educated people and close to Rs 2 lakh crore of our national expenditure (total R&D, 2013).

  • If Rajinikanth regrets some of the roles he played, and other questions

    Featured image: An illustration of actor Rajinikanth. Credit: ssoosay/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

    Read this about the Dileep-Kavya wedding and the crazy thing the groom said about the bride and why he was marrying her (protecting her honour, apparently). Reminded me of the widespread misogyny in Tamil cinema – as well as the loads of interviews I daydream about conducting with the people who both participate in and create one of my favourite enterprises in India: ‘Kollywood’. So many people have so much to answer for: fat jokes, moral policing, stalking, the so-called “amma sentiment” (nothing to do with JJ), love, superstitions, punch-dialogues, etc.

    (What follows is by no means exhaustive but does IMO address the major problems and the most well-known films associated with them. Feel free to pile on.)

    Fat jokes – What do actors like Nalini, Aarthi Ravi and Bava Lakshmanan feel about elephant-trumpets playing in the background when they or their dialogues have their moment on screen? Or when actors like Vivek, Soori and Santhanam make fun of the physical appearances of actors like Yogi Babu, Madhumitha and ‘Naan Kadavul’ Rajendran for some supposedly comedic effect? Or when actors like Vadivelu and Goundamani make fun of dark-skinned women?

    Moral policing – Applies to a lot of actors but I’m interested in one in particular: Rajinikanth. Through films like Baasha (1995), Padayappa (1999), Baba (2002), Chandramukhi (2005) and Kuselan (2008), Rajini has delivered a host of dialogues about how women should or shouldn’t behave, dialogues that just won’t come unstuck from Tamil pop culture. His roles in these films, among many others, have glorified his stance as well and shown them to reap results, often to the point where to emulate the ‘Superstar’ is to effectively to embody these attitudes (which are all on the conservative, more misogynistic side of things). I’d like to ask him if he regrets playing these roles and the lines that came with them. I’d be surprised if he were completely unconcerned. He’s an actor who’s fully aware of the weight he pulls (as much as of his confrontation with the politician S. Ramadoss in 2002, over the film Baba showing the actor smoking and drinking in many scenes, from which he emerged smarting.)

    (Oh, and women can’t drink or smoke.)

    Misogyny – Much has been written about this but I think a recent spate of G.V. Prakash movies deserve special mention. What the fuck is he thinking? Especially with a movie like Trisha Illana Nayanthara (2015)? Granted, he might not even had much of a say in the story, production values, etc., but he has to know he’s the face, the most prominent name, of the shitty movies he acts in. And I expect him to speak up about it. Also, Siva Karthikeyan and his ‘self-centred hero’ roles, where at the beginning of the plot he’s a jerkbag and we’ve to spend the next 100 minutes awaiting his glorious and exceptionally inane reformation even as the background score strongly suggests we sympathise with him. Over and over and over. What about the heroine’s feelings? Oh, fuck her feelings, especially with lines like, “It’s every woman’s full-time job to make men cry.” Right. So that’s why you spent the last 99 minutes lusting after her. Got it. Example: Remo (2016).

    Stalking – This is unbelievably never-endingly gloriously crap. And it’s crappier when some newer films continue to use it as a major and rewarding plot-device, often completely disregarding the female character’s discomfort on the way.

    Respect for mothers – I hate this for two reasons. In Kollywood pop culture, this trope is referred to as “amma sentiment” (‘amma’ is Tamil for ‘mother’). It plays out in Tamil films in the form of the protagonist, usually the male, revering his mother and/or mothers all over the place for being quasi-divine manifestations of divine divinity. It began with Kamal Haasan’s Kalathur Kannamma in 1960 (though I’m not going to hold that against him, he was 6 y.o. at the time) and received a big boost with Rajinikanth’s Mannan (1992). But what this does is to install motherhood as the highest possible aspiration for women, excising them of their choice be someone/something else. What this reverence also does is to portray all mothers as good people. This it delegitimises the many legitimate issues of those who’ve had fraught relationships with their mothers.

    The Moment When Love ‘Arrives’ – Stalking-based movies have this moment when Love Arrives. Check out the cult classic Ullathai Allitha (1996), when Karthik Muthuraman forces Rambha to tell him she loves him. And then when she does, she actually fucking does. The Turn is just brutal: to the intelligence of the female character, to the ego of the male character (which deserves only to be deflated). But thanks: at least you’re admitting there’s no other way that emotional inflection point is going to come about, right?

    Endorsement of religious rituals/superstitions/astrology – Sometimes it’s frightening how casually many of these films assume these things are based in fact, or even in the realm of plausibility. Example: DeMonte Colony (2015), Aambala (2015), Aranmanai (2014), Sivaji (2007), Veerappu (2007), Anniyan (2005), etc.

    Punch dialogues – Yeah, some actors like Vijay, Dhanush, Ajith, even Siva Karthikeyan and *cough* M. Sasikumar of late, deliver punch dialogues on screen to please their more-hardcore fans. But the more these dialogues continue to be developed and delivered, aren’t the actors and their producers also perpetuating their demand of mind-numbing levels of depersonalisation from the audience?

    Obsession with fair skin – Apart from the older fair-and-lovely criticisms, etc., some movies also take time out to point out that an actress in the film is particularly fair-skinned and deserves to be noticed for just that reason. Example: Poojai (2014), Maan Karate (2014), Kappal (2014), Goa (2010), Ainthaam Padai (2009), Kadhala Kadhala (1998), etc.

    Circlejerking – The film awards instituted by the South Indian film industries are like those awards given to airports: a dime a dozen, no standardised evaluation criteria and a great excuse to dress up and show off. On many occasions, I’ve felt like some of the awardings might’ve better served the institutions that created them if they weren’t given out in a particular year. Another form of this circlejerk is for a mediocre or bad film to have multiple throwbacks to its male protagonist’s previous films and roles.

    Miscellaneous WTFs

    Manadhai Thirudivittai (2001) – For completely rejecting the idea that a woman has feelings or opinions about something that affects her

    Endrendrum Punnagai (2013) – For a male protagonist who never feels the need to apologise for his boneheadedness and its emotional impact on other people

    Kaththi (2014) – For portraying a female lead prepared to be part of a strike that cripples an entire state but is okay being slapped by random people

    The actor Santhanam – I’ve always found that Tamil cinema’s comedians and comediennes are among the industry’s best actors, and Santhanam is no exception. He’s been extremely successful in the last five years, and it’s been evident of late that he now wants to make it big as a hero. Good luck! Except what hurts is that he’s trying to be the painful-to-watch hero: engaging in stalking, delivering punch-dialogues, telling women what they should or shouldn’t do, etc.

    It is as the art critic John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing (1972) – with the following prefix: “In most of Tamil cinema…”

    … men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

  • Workflow: Making a mailer

    Some of you might remember that, well before Infinite in All Directions, a friend and I used to send out a science newsletter called Curious Bends. After quickly raking in a few hundred subscribers, both of us lost interest in sending the newsletter even as we continued to believe that doing so would be a valuable service. One of the reasons it may have stopped – in hindsight – is likely set-shifting. From next week’s newsletter:

    … the newsletter didn’t take a hit for lack of time as much as for the cost of switching between tasks that require different aptitudes. Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon: set-shifting. Research has shown that when a person switches from one task to another, there are two kinds of costs. One is the cost of readjusting one’s mental settings to be ready for the second task after the first. The other is the erosion of our efficiency at performing the second task due to ‘leftover’ settings from the first task. And these costs are exacerbated when the tasks get more complex. In effect, I skipped the newsletter because the second kind of cost was just getting too high for me.

    Now, I don’t want that to happen with Infinite in All Directions because when I do compile and send it out, I have a gala time as do many of its subscribers (based on the feedback I’ve received – but feel free to tell me I’m wrong). And this is now making me think harder about mitigating the costs, or even prevalence, of set-shifting.

    One way out, for example, is for me to reduce the time it takes to create the newsletter. Right now, I send it out through MailChimp, which has its own editing and formatting tools/area. I didn’t choose MailChimp as much as I chose the email newsletter as a medium through which to deliver information. And my workflow goes like this: See a link I like → Save it on Evernote → Make some points on Evernote → Port them at the end of the week to MailChimp → Format the newsletter → Send → Copy the email and reformat → Publish on The Wire (WordPress).

    Now what if I could use one tool – like iA Writer (and its amazing transclusion feature) – instead of two (Evernote + MailChimp) so I can publish what I compile via the same platform, while you – the subscriber – receive an auto-compiled list of posts once a week via MailChimp? I.e.: Ulysses/iA → WordPress → MailChimp. It sounds quite appealing to me but if you think I’m missing something, please let me know.

    Featured image: A few server racks with disks and switches. Caption & credit: Alex/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

  • Thanksgiving turkey and drinking water

    Saw this 20-something-second long video going around on Facebook and Twitter:

    By itself, the video, produced by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, tells me nothing apart from what I shouldn’t be doing, no reasons or explanations. Versions of the video were also carried by The Guardian, USA Today, Reuters, NBC News, Washington Post and Scroll. (Disclosure: I work for The Wire, which competes with Scroll.) So I went looking – and found the answer on mental_floss:

    The instant the frozen food hits the oil, the ice crystals melt, then momentarily sink. This exerts an upwards force on the oil. An instant later, these small sinking bubbles of water boil, expanding as they heat up and adding further force to the oil. This bubbling and forcing the oil upwards creates an aerosol of boiling oil and air violently shooting up out of the pan and towards the other parts of the kitchen.

    I believe this also has a technical term, though it seems forced: ‘boiling liquid expanding vapour explosion’. The explosiveness arises from a process called flash evaporation (*junior year thermodynamics memories*) – when the pressure surrounding a liquid is suddenly reduced significantly, causing some of the water to instantly turn, or ‘flash’, into vapour (Business Insider has the video explainer). Because gases occupy more volume than liquids, flashing can also be interpreted as an explosive expansion.

    One useful application: In most desalination plants around the world, salty water is passed through a throttling valve that converts some of it into salt-free vapour, which is condensed into potable water. The remaining salty water is then sent through another throttling valve at a lower pressure to repeat the process. This is called multi-stage flash distillation. Other applications: fire extinguishers and pressure cookers being able to let off steam. Some unfortunate ‘applications’: boiler explosions and rapidly worsening accidents involving tankers.

    Relevant to the case of the frozen turkey: water boils at 100º C and oil boils at 450º C – both at atmospheric pressure. So when the turkey is dipped into a vat of very hot oil, the ice crystals falling off into the container sink beneath the oil but begin to boil on the way because of the oil’s temperature. Because water is denser, the boiling water remains trapped under its hot oil ceiling, although it’s also expanding because of the heat. At one point, the ceiling ruptures and the water flashes out, carrying some oil with it. The real problem begins when the oil is splashed into the fire below the container. Then, as mental_floss writes, “in a matter of seconds after putting your dinner on, your dinner has destroyed a large amount of your property and a significant portion of your, well, life.”

    Featured image credit: toasty/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

  • Reporters in Delhi should get a wintertime allowance

    Featured image credit: souravdas/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

    I recently moved out of Delhi. The air made it easier to decide to leave. What I’ve learnt is that a source of amusement to many friends in the country’s south is actually a nightmare up north, where a five-minute stroll outside can leave you with an irritated throat, watering eyes and the feeling that something is burning its way through your nose. In the week right after Deepavali, you woke up in the morning smelling something toasty; the view through your window was always more orange than it ought to be. You couldn’t go to and return from work without feeling short of breath – irrespective of how you travelled.

    The effects of the disaster are undoubtedly classist – and sometimes more than they need to be. Recently, Delhi’s chief minister Arvind Kejriwal announced that air purifiers would be installed at a few major traffic intersections around Delhi to clean up the air. Sarath Guttikunda, a scientist and environmental activist, wrote for The Wire about how insipid the idea is. His article highlights the vacuity of Kejriwal’s desperation, that he would resort to a downstream solution that would affect so few people in the city instead effecting something upstream – at the sources – that would help everyone. What about those who can’t afford air filters? What about those who live on the roads?

    The scale of changes that will have to be implemented implies that Delhi’s wintertime pollution problem will maintain its classist manifestation for a few years at least – assuming that the changes are implemented at all. To quote Guttikunda, they are broadly to increase the quality of public transportation and reduce the amount of waste sent to landfills. Now, the issue here is that – assuming you’re a middle-class person with a job that pays 25k to 75k a month – unless your boss is perfectly reasonable and considerate (or is a Kejriwal under pressure to be seen to act), you’re not going to get time off work unless the pollution makes you really sick (i.e. enough to have you bed-ridden for the day).

    Delhi has four popular public transportation options: auto, bus, metro and cab (Ola/Uber). There are also rickshaws but they operate over shorter distances. Only the metro is immune to traffic jams; the others contribute to and are stuck in one regularly, especially when going from south Delhi, east Delhi and Gurgaon to central Delhi in the morning and the other way in the evening. If you want to get to work on time, the metro is your best option. Even then, however, given the number of stations together with the size of the city, your odds of finding a metro station that’s close to home as well as close to where you work are really low. You’re going to have to walk, or take an auto/rickshaw, through the crappy air over the course of a few arduous minutes.

    What’re these daily minutes of exposure going to do, you ask? Deepak Natarajan, a cardiologist in Delhi, has a list of diseases likelier to beset you after short-term exposure to heightened PM2.5 levels:

    1. Acute myocardial infarction
    2. Unstable angina
    3. Increased likelihood of heart attacks by 8-26%
    4. Heightened risk of thrombosis
    5. Endothelial dysfunction,

    and a host of other cardiovascular ailments. As Natarajan writes, air pollution kills more people every year than AIDS and malaria. The next time you’re walking through the smog, feel free to imagine you’re walking through a cloud of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.

    Circling back to the fact that there are no laws securing anyone’s choice to not work – or at least to not have to visit the workplace – with that bilious overhang: consider the plight of journalists. Reporters among them have an especial obligation to spend time on the outside, and the more seasoned among whom hardly ever think about the pollution as a vocational hazard. It’s a job that requires a modicum of physiological fitness that’s simultaneously almost never discussed. In fact, the conversation is swept away by the pretext of a ‘reporter allowance’. I used to receive one at The Hindu, a Rs 1,600 to cover intra-city travelling expenses. But it could cover very little that my salary (then at Rs 30,000) already hadn’t. And this was in Chennai, where the cost of living is lower than that in Delhi.

    (Just the way poverty makes all the small, niggling issues in life seem more maddening, a rapidly shrinking set of class-sensitive solutions available to those labouring in wintertime Delhi can drive people similarly close to the edge: such as auto-drivers refusing rides to certain areas, a perpetual shortage of buses and surge pricing. We all know these are not immediately fixable, so how about doing a Kejriwal and heading downstream to check in on your local news-bearers?)

    The reasonableness and consideration of your supervisors and employers matters in this context because Delhi’s pollution becomes easier to live through the more privileged you are. And if your editor isn’t considerate enough, then she’s probably assuming pollution affects you the way it does her, which isn’t good if she lives closer to central Delhi. Many media houses*, almost all government offices and all the more-genteel things are located towards the centre, a.k.a. Lutyens’ Delhi, which is marked by open spaces, abundant greenery, its radial outlay and wide roads – all contributing to the reduced prevalence of dust. The cost of living drops as you move further away from this area (with a marked drop once you exit the radial areas). This means the hierarchy in a journalist’s workplace is likely to be mirrored by each employee’s residence’s proximity to Lutyens’ Delhi – evidently, a proximity by proxy to healthiness.

    And privilege, as has often been the case, often blinds those who enjoy it to the travails of those who don’t. In this case, it is established by having access to the following (at a cost that doesn’t burn holes in clothing):

    1. A house in a clean neighbourhood away from dusty roads
    2. Abundant greenery in your immediate neighbourhood
    3. An air-conditioner
    4. Air filters/purifiers/fresheners
    5. A car to commute in
    6. A proximate workplace
    7. Clean, well-maintained public spaces
    8. Sufficient time and/or resources to keep the house clean
    9. Affordable medicines and medical assistance

    Without access to them, daily life can be quite disorderly, unfulfilling and hard to establish a routine with – especially if you can’t really live dirty without such a state of affairs taking a toll on your productivity and peace of mind. As a result, Delhi’s pollution imposes high entry barriers for healthy living on its residents – barriers that become less surmountable the farther away from the city’s centre you are (to add to which you spend longer to get to the city’s centre). And if you’re a reporter, you’re likelier to have it well and truly harder than most others of your means, thanks (in sum) to central Delhi being cleaner, areas farther more removed from it cheaper, air pollution being easier to live through the more privileged you are, and there being no laws to secure your right to a clean working environment.

    To address these issues and even out inequities, reporters in wartime wintertime Delhi should receive an additional allowance as well as shorter and more flexible working hours. Other staffers should also be allowed to work from where they feel comfortable apart from receiving an allowance that will help cover medical expenses, to begin with. (These measures make immediate sense for online news establishments comfortable with decentralised work environments – but they aren’t to exonerate newspaper offices that are used to having everyone work out of a common newsroom.) Those who can’t or won’t should be kept mindful of what they’re asking their journalists to give up and compensate them accordingly as and when the opportunities arise. And even so, no amount of fondness or pride for situating themselves in the national capital can save journalism establishments from the steady toll the city is taking on their journalists.

    *Offices are becoming more spread out – but that doesn’t matter.

  • The power of the Sun

    https://www.facebook.com/NowThisFuture/videos/1285188638188980/

    This video was pretty cool until the end. “Harness the power of the Sun”? This torch emits 2,300 lumens from a battery that lasts 30 minutes. The Sun? About 98,000 lumens, equivalent to 100 billion megatonnes of TNT blowing up per second for 9 billion years. This is also a chance to marvel at the hypernova, a.k.a. the superluminous supernova: a few billion billion megatonnes of TNT per second, a.k.a. 10 million Suns blowing up per second. It’s the hypernova that actually harnesses the power of the Sun.

  • We did start the fire

    This is one of the dumbest things I’ve seen done in a while:

    The Asian News International network tweeted that a group of Indian priests had performed a long yagya in Tokyo for the express purpose of purifying the environment. A yagya (or a yagna, although I’m not sure if they’re the same) typically involves keeping a pyre of wooden logs lubricated with ghee burning for a long time. So a plea to the gods to clear the airs was encoded in many kilograms of carbon dioxide? Clearly these god-fearing gentlemen insist that they will accept only the gods’ solutions to their problems – not anyone else’s, no matter how motivated. I dearly hope that, if nothing else, the event will create an ironic awareness of what’s at stake.

    At least the other shit-peddlers back home have had the sense to not force the cow piss down our throats (ignoring the massive public healthcare and R&D funding cuts, of course). If my ire seems disproportionate to the amount of pollutants these yagnas will have released, it’s because I fear someone else will get ideas now, especially those aspiring to get into the record books. (How often have you heard the anchor on Sun TV news croon at the tail-end of the segment at 7 pm everyday, “XYZ கின்னெஸ் சாதனை படைத்தார்” – “XYZ set a Guinness world record”?)

    Featured image credit: kabetojamaicafotografia/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.