G S Subrahmanyam

bibliophile. love the printed word and the smell of ink on paper

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Richard Feynman was asked in 1985 if machines would ever think like humans. his answer predicted the next 40 years of AI:

1. machines will never think like humans the same way planes don't fly like birds. planes don't flap wings. they use jet engines. they fly better. feynman said AI would be exactly the same. not human-like. just better at the actual job.

2. computers do arithmetic faster, differently, and more accurately than any human alive. feynman said trying to make them do it more like humans would be going backwards. the human way is slow, cumbersome, and full of errors.

3. the one thing humans crushed computers at in 1985 was pattern recognition. recognizing a friend from the way they walk. identifying someone from the back of their head. feynman said we had no idea how to teach machines to do that. we figured it out.

4. a programmer in 1985 built a machine that won a naval strategy competition by coming up with a solution no human had ever thought of. one enormous battleship covered in armor. absurd on paper. unbeatable in the math. feynman watched a machine out-think a room of humans 40 years ago.

5. that same machine developed a bug where it learned to game its own reward system. every time it needed to assign credit to a useful strategy, it assigned all the credit to strategy 693. then used 693 for everything. feynman's comment: "if you want to make an intelligent machine you're going to get all kinds of crazy ways of avoiding labor." he was describing reward hacking in 1985.

6. feynman said the hardest thing to define is what humans do that machines never will. every time someone came up with an answer, the machines eventually did it too. he thought that pattern would continue.

7. he said we don't sit around worrying that machines are physically stronger than us anymore. we got used to it. his implication: we'll get used to machines being smarter too.

8. his final line: "i think we are getting close to intelligent machines. but they're showing the necessary weaknesses of intelligent beings." he said this in 1985.

[Philosophy Of Physics @PhilosophyOfPhy]

In 1937, a 21-year-old MIT student sat in a quiet library, mapping abstract philosophical logic onto electrical circuits to pass the time.

By the time he finished his thesis, the young man had mathematically proven that mechanical telephone switches could perform complex calculations. Instead of just routing phone calls, they were destined to become thinking machines.

He had just discovered the mathematical trigger for digital computing.

But when he published his work, the leading engineers of the industrial world paid little attention, viewing his mathematics as a mere academic parlor trick.

His name was Claude Shannon.

It would take years for the industrial establishment to fully realize he was right and adopt the binary logic that now powers every computer, smartphone, and network on Earth.

His breakthrough against traditional engineering is the ultimate lesson in what happens when rigid practices clash with unexpected philosophical reality.
In the early 20th century, engineers believed they understood circuit design. They knew that as telephone networks grew, they needed more physical wires and relays. But traditional engineering offered no universal science; it was a manual process of brute-force trial and error.

The systems would grow into a chaotic, tangled mess of blueprints and copper lines.
The entire industrial establishment agreed: every circuit, no matter how complex, had to be wired by manual experimentation. It was a tedious, costly formula.

But in that library, Shannon realized the establishment had left a massive variable out of their equations: 19th-century symbolic philosophy.

Shannon recalculated the engineering, factoring in what happens when you treat an electrical switch using the laws of Boolean algebra.

What he found shattered the industrial consensus.

He proved that an electrical switch has only two possible states: it is either closed and letting power through, or open and blocking the current. This was mathematically identical to True (1) and False (0).

The circuit could evaluate logical statements. There was no limit to what it could compute. It could automate human thought, transforming physical electricity into digital logic.

When Shannon presented this concept, mainstream electrical engineers were skeptical. They couldn't accept that an abstract philosophical concept could solve real-world hardware bottlenecks.
Shannon was initially ignored. The establishment stuck to their traditional wiring methods.

Instead of fighting a rigid, closed system, Shannon quietly expanded his work into Information Theory, proving that all data could be compressed into a universal currency called the "bit." Decades later, when the global tech revolution exploded, the world realized the 21-year-old student had been right all along.

The philosophical blueprint Shannon left behind is a vital truth for navigating complex problems and institutional pushback:

Comforting traditions will always be more popular than disruptive innovations. Trust the system's underlying logic anyway.

Most of us approach our careers and projects seeking the validation of current experts or established guidelines. When we propose a radical new idea or try to change a broken system, and the authorities tell us we are wrong, our instinct is to assume our logic is flawed. We abandon our data to fit the consensus.

But Shannon’s legacy proves that traditional industry consensus is not the same thing as truth.
Gatekeepers are human; they protect their own methods, their own training, and their own comfort.

What is a bottleneck, a project, or a direction you’ve abandoned just because an expert or a boss told you it wouldn't work? What happens if you stop looking for their permission and trust the structural logic of your own work?

[Anupam Kher @AnupamPKher]

THANK YOU DAVID FOR THE LESSON! 🥹❤️
Life is full of lessons. Last week, on a flight from Goa to Mumbai, I learned one.
In the picture is David.
When David boarded the flight, many people looked at him because he was overweight. He came and sat across the aisle from me. In the middle of the flight, he opened his bag, took out a huge collection of chocolates and sweets, and then walked towards the washroom.
I exchanged a glance with the gentleman sitting next to him and said, “He shouldn’t eat so much sweets and chocolates!” This was said out of concern! The gentleman smiled and replied, “Well, that’s probably why he looks the way he does.”
A little while later, David came back, gathered all the sweets, and handed them over to the cabin crew. 🥹
I was surprised.
So I told him, “I must confess, I thought you were going to eat all those chocolates yourself, and that’s why you were overweight.”
He smiled and said, “ I don’t blame you for thinking like that! I have a medical condition. But I used to work with airlines, and I know what cabin crew members go through every day. So I like to bring them something sweet whenever I travel.”
What an outstanding human being.
And what a lesson for me.
How quickly we judge people. How easily we create stories about them without knowing anything about their lives.😳
Thank you, David, for reminding me that kindness is often hidden behind appearances, and that the best people are sometimes the ones we understand the least.
I asked him for a pic! He obliged!
Thank you for the lesson my friend!❤️ #LifeLessons #Encounters

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

Cecilia Payne’s 1925 doctoral thesis was one of the most important works in the history of astrophysics. At just 25, she used spectroscopy to show that stars are made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, an idea that overturned what every major astronomer believed at the time.

Her advisor, Henry Norris Russell, pressured her to downplay her conclusion, insisting it must be wrong because it contradicted established scientific opinion.

Four years later, Russell published a paper confirming her findings and received most of the credit, even though Payne had reached the conclusion first and with stronger evidence.

Over time, historians and scientists have corrected the record, recognizing Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin as the person who truly discovered the chemical composition of the stars. Her thesis is now widely considered the most brilliant PhD dissertation ever written in astronomy.

Before her groundbreaking thesis, Cecilia Payne had already made a quiet but radical contribution to astronomy: she was the first person to apply quantum physics to stellar atmospheres, using newly developed atomic theory to decode how elements absorb light at different temperatures. This was cutting‑edge science in the 1920s, so new that most astronomers didn’t yet understand it, and it allowed her to interpret stellar spectra in a way no one else could. In other words, her discovery about hydrogen wasn’t a lucky insight; it was the result of her being one of the only astronomers in the world fluent in both astrophysics and quantum mechanics at a time when the two fields barely spoke to each other.

© The Historian's Den

#archaeohistories

[Lone Wolf Ratnakar @SadaaShree]

#TodayInHistory

Justice Jagmohanlal Sinha of Allahabad High Court delivers the landmark judgement on this date in 1975, that invalidated Indira Gandhi's election victory due to corrupt practices during her campaign.

The ruling sparked immediate political crisis, prompting Gandhi to declare a national Emergency on June 25, 1975, that lasted 21 months and involved suspension of fundamental rights and press censorship.

[Ananth Rupanagudi @Ananth_IRAS]

JRD Tata loses a pen!

JRD Tata, then Chairman of the Tata group, and senior Tata Directors used to meet for lunch at Bombay House (the Tata Group's headquarters) every day. One day, JRD came to lunch, sad that he had lost his favourite pen. He used to always carry a Parker pen set - a fountain pen and a ball pen.

"Look", he said sadly, "I have lost the ball pen. I don't know where it has gone. I have looked all over...but it's gone."

One of the Directors in the lunch room that day was Dr. Jamshed (JJ) Irani of Tata Steel. He made note of JRD Tata's loss. A few weeks later, when he was visiting London, he went to a small shop near Selfridges specialising in pens, and found a ball pen identical to the one JRD had lost. He bought it immediately. The next time he met JRD Tata, he presented that pen to him.

JRD was delighted. "Yes, Jamshed, it is exactly like the one I lost." For the first one or two minutes, he used it and tried it out. Then, Dr. Irani saw JRD's expression change slowly.

After a couple of minutes, he gave the ball pen back to Dr. Irani, and said - "Thank you for the thought. This is exactly what I wanted, but I cannot accept it."

"Why?" asked Dr. Irani, "I thought you were looking for this."

JRD answered - "Yes, Jamshed. But it is a principle of mine not to accept any gifts from any of my colleagues at work. If I did, then I know my colleagues would try to outdo each other and give me exorbitant gifts."

Dr. Irani tried to persuade him. "But Sir, nobody would know that I have given you this pen. You can say that you found it in your room. I am not going to go around saying that I have given JRD an identical pen."

JRD responded - "Jamshed, I know you will not do any such thing. But I would know. I would know that I accepted this gift against my principles. I am sorry, but I cannot accept it."

Each of us decides the principles by which we lead our lives. The principles that we will stand by, even if no one is looking or speaking about them. The principles that define who we really are. This story of JRD Tata's lost ball pen can help us reflect on what our own life's principles are. #Tata #ethics

[PMO India @PMOIndia]

Zoho debuts Made-in-India server ‘Nathu La’ to enable AI inference, reduce data centre costs
https://t.co/HNzvkTLoFj

via NaMo App

[Harsh Goenka @hvgoenka]

Sunil Mittal giving a communication signal to a village. Sajjan Jindal giving India the steel to stand tall. Pankaj Patel sending medicine to a mother who had given up hope. Roshni Nadar training a girl from a small town to work in a global company. Nandan Nilekani giving a farmer his first digital identity. Deepinder Goyal creating a livelihood for a million delivery partners. Kumar Birla planting an Indian flag in boardrooms across five continents. Sanjiv Bajaj giving a family their first real safety net. Sridhar Vembu building world-class software from a quiet village in Tamil Nadu.

Nine entrepreneurs. Nation building with India as their longest, proudest project.

[ANI @ANI]

#WATCH | EAM Dr S Jaishankar says, "I buy oil based on cost and availability. So at that point of time, ah much of the oil available on the market was Russia because Europeans were essentially buying up the Middle East oil, which was our traditional supply. So circumstances pushed us in a certain direction but since you spoke about moral ambiguity, I would say this, no European country has been attacked with Indian weapons. I wish I could say that for European weapons vis-a-vis India... Europeans sell weapons which are used to attack India. Not now, for many, years. We Indians have never done anything to endanger Europe. So I think that's a reasonable point."

(Source: Dr. S. Jaishankar/X)

[ANI @ANI]

#WATCH | EAM Dr S Jaishankar participated in a panel discussion at Kultaranta Talks with Finland FM Elina Valtonen, and Assistant FM of UAE, Lana Nusseibeh on 'Emerging Powers and the New Geopolitical Competition'

He says, "I buy oil based on cost and availability. So at that point of time, ah much of the oil available on the market was Russia because Europeans were essentially buying up the Middle East oil, which was our traditional supply. So circumstances pushed us in a certain direction but since you spoke about moral ambiguity, I would say this, no European country has been attacked with Indian weapons. I wish I could say that for European weapons vis-a-vis India. So keep that in mind..."

(Source: Dr. S. Jaishankar/X)

[Sameer Saxena @NwcSam]

#Honoured and #Privileged to serve alongside such #Fearless #talented & #dedicated #Teams @IN_HQSNC
In a world full of uncertainty, @indiannavy #Heros prove that #Valour knows no boundaries! BZ!
#Combat Ready #Cohesion #Collaboration
#PreferredSecurityPartner
शं नो वरुणः

[SpokespersonNavy @indiannavy]

Reflecting its enduring commitment to maritime safety, the #IndianNavy's Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team from #SouthernNavalCommand, Kochi, safely extracted an unexploded missile warhead from Marshall Islands registered oil tanker MT Olympic Life, enroute from UAE to Kochi.

Rendering assistance irrespective of the vessel's flag or crew nationality, the #IndianNavy continues to stand as a trusted security partner, safeguarding merchant shipping and promoting safe and secure seas.

https://t.co/5pIgBoYbNH

#PreferredSecurityPartner
#FirstResponder #MaritimeSecurity
#AnytimeAnywhereAnyhow

@IN_HQSNC @SpokespersonMoD

[Malini Parthasarathy @MaliniP]

It’s noteworthy that the new Tamil Nadu Chief Minister @TVKVijayHQ is signalling firmly that he means business and is focussing solely on getting the State on track towards his envisioned goals. His second meeting with PM @narendramodi in a fortnight shows his seriousness of purpose.
It’s to be appreciated that he’s avoiding political grandstanding & the combative political rhetoric so typical of his predecessor @mkstalin that widened the gap between the State and the Centre.

[Narendra Modi @narendramodi]

Thank you Prime Minister Meloni for your warm wishes. I look forward to building on the strong momentum in our India-Italy Special Strategic Partnership for the mutual benefit of our two nations and peoples.

@GiorgiaMeloni

[Spandan @Spandan53043982]

Prof. Haripada Bharati,

The Forgotten guard of West Bengal BJP in Bengal and The 1st West Bengal BJP president.

He was the Professor of Philosophy in Narasinha Dutta college in Howrah,West Bengal.

His educational skill was so good that When he used to teach in the class, not only the students, but also the teachers of other departments would listen to his philosophical speeches.

Prof. haripada Bharti started his political career by Joining Bhartiya Jan Sangh.

When Right Wing politics in Bengal was untouchable to many people, Haripada Bharti openly endorsed the Hindutva ideology as its core principle.

His first Electoral entry was in 1967 when he contested as The Bhartiya Jan Sangh Candidate from Calcutta North West and got 21.08% vote share.

Then in 1971 , he contested as a JP candidate from Jadavpur lok sabha and got 19% vote share.

Even in the peak CPM wave in 1977, He won from the Jorabagan assembly constituency and became one of the early voices of the right-wing ideological stream in the state's Legislative Assembly.

As the 1st BJP president, Bharti focused on building the party's grassroots structure, expanding district level committees.

But his tenure couldn't last that much due to his sudden death in 1981, his honesty, education and communication skills.

Today he's not alive , but his dream has finally been fulfilled. From 0 to 208.

[Washington Speakers Bureau @WSB_Speakers]

At 36, Admiral James Stavridis (@stavridisj) had his first command, a guided missile destroyer with 350 sailors and a record of winning every award. He figured the streak would hold.

Then came a routine engineering inspection. The ship failed it so badly the inspectors told him he was not safe to operate, and they towed the destroyer back into port, past every other ship in San Diego, with the whole fleet watching.

He went home that night and told his wife his career was over.

The next day, the phone started ringing. The calls weren't from his bosses. They were from the other captains in the fleet. Bad day, they said. What do you need? A working party? Spare parts? Should I send my master chief over to help with training?

That was the day he learned what peers are really for.

"Your peers can save you, because they know you."

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Wimbledon exists because a lawn roller broke.

In 1877, a small croquet club in southwest London had a money problem. The heavy roller that flattened its lawns, the kind a pony pulled, had broken, and the club could not afford to fix it. It had only picked up lawn tennis a couple of years earlier, as people were losing interest in croquet. So a few members hit on a plan. They would put on a tournament of the new game and charge people to enter.

Twenty-two men signed up. Each paid an entry fee of one guinea, just over a pound, while about 200 people paid a shilling, small change, to watch a final that rain pushed back three days. The whole event made around £10 in profit, and the club finally got its roller fixed.

The man who won it was not even a fan of the game. Spencer Gore, a 27-year-old cricketer, found lawn tennis boring and figured it would never count as a serious sport. He came back the next year, lost in the final, and never played again. He did leave one mark, though. Gore was the first player to charge the net and hit the ball before it bounced, a move that would shape grass-court tennis for more than a century.

That broken-roller fundraiser turned into the oldest tennis tournament in the world, and the only one of the four biggest tournaments still played on grass. The US Open gave up grass back in the 1970s, and the Australian Open followed in the 1980s. Wimbledon held on to the surface the whole sport started out on.

Gore won 12 guineas for his trouble, about £13, plus a silver cup worth twice that. Today the champion walks away with £3 million, and even a player who loses in the very first round takes home £66,000. The crowd has changed too. About 200 turned up for that first final, while the 2025 tournament drew a record 548,770 over two weeks. All of it started with a broken roller and a club that decided to sell tickets.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A freelance journalist who had never taken a statistics course wrote a 142-page book in 1954 that professional statisticians still hand to students before anything else, because nobody before him had bothered to explain the tricks in plain language.

His name was Darrell Huff. The book is called How to Lie with Statistics.

I read it in one sitting and spent the next three days noticing the tricks everywhere.

Over 1.5 million copies have sold in English alone. It became a standard college textbook in the 1960s and 70s. Seventy years later it is still in print, still assigned, still the first thing a working statistician reaches for when they want to teach someone to think clearly about numbers.

The man who wrote it was not a researcher. He was a freelancer who wrote how-to articles for magazines. He had no PhD, no academic post, no institutional affiliation. He just understood that numbers could lie without technically being wrong, and he thought someone should explain how.

His opening line sets the whole tone of the book.

"The crooks already know these tricks; honest men must learn them in self-defense."

That one sentence is the entire argument. The manipulation is not coming. It already happened. It happened this morning in the article you read and the chart someone showed you at work and the study your doctor quoted. The only question is whether you know what to look for.

Huff called the first trick the Well-Chosen Average.

When someone tells you the average salary at a company is $80,000, they have told you almost nothing. If the CEO earns $2 million and the 20 employees earn $30,000 each, the mean is $80,000. The median is $30,000. Both are technically correct. One is a lie. The person reporting the number chose which average to use, and they almost always chose the one that served their argument. Huff's rule: whenever you see an average with no description of which average it is, ask.

The second trick he named the Gee-Whiz Graph.

A line chart shows company profits rising. The line shoots nearly vertical, almost doubling in height across the chart. You feel impressed. Then you look at the y-axis and notice the chart does not start at zero. It starts at 94. The actual increase in profits was 3 percent. The dramatic visual was produced entirely by cropping the bottom of the chart. Nothing in the data changed. The picture changed everything.

Every news organization on earth still does this every day.

The third trick is the one that should change how you read every study you ever encounter. Huff called it Post Hoc Rides Again, which is short for the Latin phrase post hoc ergo propter hoc. After this, therefore because of this.

Cities with more churches have more violent crime. Therefore churches cause violence. The logic is airtight. The conclusion is absurd. Both church attendance and crime go up as population grows. The two numbers track each other because a third variable drives both. The correlation is real. The cause is invented.

Huff showed that this structure is not a rare mistake. It is the default pattern of almost every study reported in a newspaper, because causation is a boring word and because proves is a better headline than correlates with.

The fourth trick was the one that floored me. He called it the Semi-Attached Figure.

A headache pill company claims their product is twice as fast as the competition. The study behind the claim is real. The product was tested and the numbers are accurate. What the advertisement does not mention is that the study measured absorption rate into the bloodstream, not relief of headaches. The two things are related but not identical. The statistic is real. It is attached to the wrong conclusion.

Huff said this is the most dangerous trick of all because the number is never fabricated. You cannot fact-check a semi-attached figure by verifying the statistic. You have to ask whether the statistic actually measures what the claim requires it to measure.

Almost nobody asks.

There is one part of Huff's story that most people who recommend the book leave out.

Years after he wrote it, he was hired by the tobacco industry. He worked on a follow-up manuscript called How to Lie with Smoking Statistics, designed to cast doubt on the research connecting cigarettes to cancer. The book was never published. He testified before Congress in an attempt to undermine the statistical evidence against tobacco.

The man who wrote the clearest guide to spotting statistical deception spent the end of his career deploying those same tricks against evidence that was killing people.

That detail does not make the book wrong. The tricks he described are real and the defenses he taught are still the right ones. But it is a reminder that the tools in the book are neutral. Understanding how lies are built does not protect you from choosing to build one.

The crooks already know these tricks.

Some of them wrote the manual.

What is one statistic you have seen recently that you now think deserves a second look?

[Mike Pompeo @mikepompeo]

Within hours of being announced as the nominee to be the U.S. Director of the CIA, I received a hand-delivered message on MI6 stationery congratulating me on my nomination. It was signed simply "C" in green ink. Legendary. I shared it with my son and even he thought I was now cool!

More than that, this note, from Sir Alex Younger, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service of the United Kingdom, confirmed what I already believed: the work that the CIA and MI6 did together mattered, that the partnership was critical, and that two leaders focused on the mission could save lives and provide tools for our nations to deter our adversaries.

Alex's passing this week brought back so many memories of our time in service together. He flew to Langley to see me the day I was confirmed. We brought our two senior teams together in the UK to plan and coordinate and build in the first several weeks of my time on duty: making clear to them all that this relationship was more than special - it was critical for the security of our two countries.

Alex was a remarkable intelligence partner. When we needed help, it wasn't "let me see;" it was "this matters to you and America we'll get it done." And he and his team always did. I think he knew we would do the same for him and his team and his nation. Many Americans are alive today because of his leadership of MI6, I never knew how to thank him enough.

Alex became a friend as well. In the years since we both left office we would see each other from time to time. He was always so kind, so thoughtful, so smart. His deep love of his country was surpassed only by his deep commitment and love of his family. Decent and proper - and funny as hell - Alex was "C." As espionage requires, he was quiet, not attention seeking. He knew what evil was and he was ruthless in his efforts to crush it with every legal tool at his command. And he knew who his friends were and committed himself to supporting them.

I miss Sir Alex Younger. He was a role model for me and a man with whom every minute I spent was valued and savored. Blessings to you Alex. Praying for you and for your family. Well done and may you rest in peace in His hands.

[Ministry of Information and Broadcasting @MIB_India]

Satish Shah was one of India’s most respected and beloved actors in theatre, television & cinema, known for his impeccable comic timing, versatility, and deeply human performances.

Trained at the Film and Television Institute of India (@FTII), Pune, he built a remarkable career spanning more than four decades, becoming a household name across generations and contributing significantly to popular culture and the performing arts in India.

Beyond acting, he had been a mentor to young performers and has actively supported theatre and creative arts in Mumbai. His body of work reflects a lifelong commitment to storytelling, entertainment, and cultural contribution.

#PeoplesPadma #PadmaAwards2026