Author: drsriramnathan

I had always wondered why the plural of child is not childs but children!

Apparently even the plural of many words was similar, like the plural of house was not houses but housen!

It is also a mystery of what the letters which come after Q in queue are doing there in the first place!

How p is silent in psycho but loud in protest!

Of the 26 letters of the alphabet according to Bill Bryson; not even a single letter is consistent when it comes to pronunciation!

The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way is a really interesting novel by Bill Bryson which explores the English language’s history and quirks, highlighting how its evolution from a “mongrel” language makes it both incredibly flexible and maddeningly inconsistent!

Now see the combination OUGH!

There are so many ways it is pronounced! Like though, through, trough, tough!


Then like the Q above you have those ‘silent’ letters who are like the Babus standing on a stage giving prize to the winning team and staying on with the photo!

The language is littered with silent letters that reflect old pronunciations (e.g., knife used to be pronounced “kuh-neef-uh”)!


Bryson points out that English lacks a formal governing body, meaning its rules are often based on arbitrary customs rather than logic!

Like the biggest issues with on and in!

You can be “on the bus” but “in the car”! I would prefer to walk!

Then you have the irregular Plurals which are the words that do not follow the standard “-s” rule, such as mouse/mice (rather than mouses), require excessive memorization!

Everyone must learn at least three languages in his or her lifetime! One is his or her mother tongue, then the predominant language of the place of his work or stay and the last must be English!

This is because all said and done; English is the Global Lingua franca! You cannot escape it! Since there are so many different forms of English no country can actually claim it as it’s own! Which is why it is the language of the world!

Now just the fact that a person can speak English is enough! Do not go into the Grammar or pronunciation or even the fluency! It is the effort which matters!

The biggest flaw pf English pronunciation is that you have to know or hear the pronunciation before! You cannot simply read and combine the letters like many scientific languages!

This means that the fact of the matter remains that you have to be knowledgeable to know English but just knowing English may not make you knowledgeable!

Like Kanneganti Brahmanandam may not be known for his english but his talent is legendary! Not only as an actor but also an amazing artist!

Now sleep in all languages!

Shub ratri!

It has been said that if there are more than two ‘human’ in any fixed or confined place for long intervals; then one thing is for sure! They will fight!

It does not matter if they have come from the same ancestor! The fact is that this fight is as old as the beginning of life!

In Ken Follett’s latest novel called the Circle of Days he talks about Herders and farmers!

The novel is set so far back in time that the time literally stands still!

But some things do not change! Humans form two groups and they fight! Even if they both would have originated from one group!

The novel talks about Herders and Farmers!

Herders and farmers represent two distinct, historically significant, and often conflicting methods of human subsistence!

Herders are nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists who move seasonally to find pasture and water for their livestock. In contrast, farmers are sedentary, staying in one location to cultivate crops and raise animals.

So while Herders are mobile (nomadic) the farmers are settled or sedentary.

Herders primarily focus on animal rearing as their primary occupation and life’s work while Farmers focus on cultivating land, though they may also keep animals.

Now even those days resources were low so due to shrinking resources like water and land—driven by climate change and desertification—these two groups often face conflicts, where pastoralists may overlap with farmers!

Then again all they have to remember is that historically, these groups developed from hunter-gatherers who settled down many years ago!

In fact in some regions, they have established, or historically maintained, systems of mutual benefit, such as trading goods or managing livestock migration routes!

Trust Ken to bring drama into a prehistoric landscape! Then again the other thing apart from fight which Humans usually get into is well; DRAMA!

Another thing humans like is a good movie now and then! Growing up I was a big fan of Jaikishan Kakubhai Saraf! Now before you say who!? Well, it’s Jaggu dada!

Now forget about your hunter gathering ancestors and get some well deserved sleep!

Shubh ratri!

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Hope you can see that dot above!

It may not sound so ‘sound’ coming from me but in the novel Pale blue dot, Carl Sagan tell about this small ‘dot’!


This is the dot which has everyone you love and everyone you hate!, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam!

That pale blue dot (ok my dot is black!) is the EARTH!

In the novel Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan , Carl uses the iconic Voyager 1 photograph of Earth as a tiny pixel to explore humanity’s place in the universe, the folly of our conflicts, and the urgent need for space exploration as a condition for our long-term survival!

The central argument is that the image of Earth as a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam” challenges our imagined self-importance and the delusion of having a privileged position in the universe.

Sagan uses this perspective to highlight the absurdity of human conflicts, such as wars fought over a “fraction of a dot”!

Sagan actually emphasizes our shared responsibility to preserve and cherish our planet, the only home we have ever known, in the face of threats like climate change and environmental degradation!

Remember that the time we spend on this Pale Blue dot is not a luxury only! It is also a responsibility!

Our time in this ‘dot’ is limited so let’s make it as blissful as possible! One way is to appreciate artists like Dattatreya Ramachandra Bendre!

Now sleep in that small space you and everyone needs to sleep!

Shub ratri…

So we practically have winter all over the world (at least the Northern Hemishere! I added this point only so that the person reading would stop with the flaw search!)

We also have nice and cold winter in Kuwait right now! You simply feel like wearing thick warm clothes and burying yourself in warm blankets and not do anything!

But (you knew the but was coming!); do you know about the AI winter!?

In most books on AI like the Generative AI 360° (ZebraLearn) or A Brief History of Intelligence by Max S Bennet they speak about this winter!

Of course the AI winter like every other thing AI; is not human! So it is not actually cold but a little different! Here the cold is (surprise surprise!) a metaphor!

So an AI winter is a period of reduced funding, interest, and research in artificial intelligence!

These cycles of stagnation occurred primarily in the 1970s and late 1980s , when optimism regarding AI capabilities (such as machine translation or expert systems) failed to materialize into functional technologies

The primary causes were inflated, unrealistic promises (hype) made by researchers, followed by disillusionment when technology could not meet those goals!

These periods are characterized by a “domino effect” starting with disappointment among researchers, moving to the media, and ending in severe funding cuts.

While some fear that the high costs and overhyping of current AI (generative AI) could lead to a new winter, many experts suggest that, unlike in the past, AI is now deeply embedded in the economy, making a full-blown “winter” less likely

In fact 2025-26 has now been the year of the AI!
Many analysts believe that 2026 is becoming a “year of reckoning” for AI, as the industry enters a critical phase that mirrors the warning signs of previous AI winters!

But this time the “Winter” Might Be Different because of several reasons!

The primary reason is the deep Integration unlike previous eras where AI was a laboratory curiosity. The modern AI is already embedded in core tools like Microsoft 365 and Oracle Cloud. In fact it is a part of your social media app like WhatsApp, FB and even twitter. You also have your emails already integrated with the AI

Both Android and Apple ecosystems have deeply enabled AI systems! Your standard Google Search also now has an AI option!

There is simply no escaping the AI!

On top of all this the ongoing geopolitical competition between major powers and countries creates a “space race” mentality that may prevent the total funding collapse seen in previous winters!

The FOMO is a big deal as far as AI is concerned!
So you may have a Human winter but AI winter may only be history!


Historic were also movies by Priyadarshan!

You can watch some of his movies and sleep with a smile!

Shub ratri!

Bill Bryson writes so well that his novels are a treat to read and listen!

In this amazing novel called  ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’, Bill Bryson tells us about DODO!

Has anyone called you one!?

I am actually a DODO! Trusting and, well an idiot!

If you are one then, well be careful (That is a note to myself!)

Now maybe DODO is akin to being dumb, it has been found that they were not ‘DUMB’ in any sense!

In fact based on recent scientific research, dodo birds were not “dumb” or stupid as historically portrayed.

CT scans of their skulls revealed they had average brain sizes relative to their body size, with intelligence likely similar to that of modern pigeons.

Their fearlessness of humans was due to a lack of natural predators on Mauritius, not a lack of intelligence! This means that they did not know the danger! They were too trusting! That is being simple! Not dumb!

In fact a 2016 study using high-resolution CT scans of a skull from the American Museum of Natural History found the dodo’s brain was comparable in size and proportion to its closest living relative, the pigeon!

The dodo was actually well-adapted to its island environment. The only issue was that they evolved in the absence of predators, making them unafraid of humans!

Evidence also suggests the dodo had a large olfactory bulb (the brain region responsible for smelling), which is unusual for birds, suggesting they relied on a good sense of smell to find food!

By the way the last known stuffed DODO was burned by a super ‘intelligent’ dude who thought that the stuffing has become ‘musty’ in his own words!

The 1755 Bonfire was mentioned by Bryson when the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford burned its stuffed dodo, as it had become musty, only saving a head and limb!

Of course the DODO’s biggest issue was that it did not fear since it had no fear!

The dodo’s demise was swift (extinct by the late 17th century) because they did not fear humans, which Bryson highlights as a case of extreme vulnerability!
They would approach humans with trust and they were repaid by being DINNER or LUNCH! They never fought back and never ran away!

Another theory also is that the DODO laid their eggs on the ground with no security! That means that their most precious possessions were open to everyone! The Dutch which came later bought with them pigs which then snacked upon the remaining DODO eggs!

Sure enough within a few years; the whole pack of trusting and frankly Noble bird became extinct and to add to the insult became a DODO or fool!

In the novel the story of the dodo serves as a narrative bookend to discuss the broader impact of human activity on biodiversity.

If you want to see the only remaining DODO ‘specimen’ you can see the “soft tissue” of a dodo that was alive in Europe with a single head and leg!

This is why we do not trust everyone and lock our doors!

Trust doesn’t get you medals!
Which reminds me of Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore who became the first Indian post-independence to win an individual silver at the Olympics!

Now sleep like a dodo!

Shub ratri!

Spasm by Robin Cook

E Book

How do you do it Robin?

Writing faster that I can read!

Medical Examiner Laurie Montgomery and her husband Jack Stapleton head to ESSEX FALLS for a ‘quiet’ ‘break’ from their hectic life!

But adventure and Jack follow each other like a dog follows bone or a blog follows me!

Now there is a recent outbreak of sudden severe dementia in a small place far away from the city. The local doctor there is a friend of Jack and invites him for a look!

Then you have a couple of sudden and unexplained deaths and a missing body from the morgue!

The perfect scene for a mystery! Though sometimes I feel like I was reading Hardy Boys with another mystery!

Of course the danger is more real here and the autopsy adds to the maturity level! Add to it some bio weapon and some “RUSSIANS” on American soil and you have your “US will save the world” delusion getting fruition!

Of course since Robin is a doctor himself, he gets the medical stuff just right to keep me interested! But after reading deep and non fiction books, these fictional thrillers are a breeze to read and finish!

You will also read about the ‘medical zombies’ or Prions! At least that is what I remember! Or was it some other book!

You can pick it up if you wanna gloat like me that you have read all the books by Cook! It is your choice entirely! Just do not go into spasm deciding on it!

In the novel A Brief History of Intelligence by Max S Bennet; Max tells about the Catastrophic forgetting in AI!

Catastrophic forgetting in AI is the abrupt, drastic loss of previously learned information when a neural network is trained on new, subsequent data. It happens because new optimizations overwrite parameters crucial for older tasks, causing severe performance degradation in sequential learning scenarios!

Yeah; that ‘Official’ definition went over my head too which made me forget so many things!

Listening to the novel though you get to know what is cooking!

This is the issue; A machine was ‘trained’ for addition which is say adding one to each number! It did that perfectly! Later it was ‘trained’ for addition of another number! It did that also perfectly! You would think now that I am a ‘perfect’ idiot!

But (a blog without a but is not a blog!); what the researchers observed is that the machine now forgot the addition which it had learnt before! This was because it ‘learnt’ the new task by writing the ‘data’ over the old task!

It is like a kid forgetting the 3 table after he or she learns the 4 table!

This is actually a major problem in the AI system!

Also known as “catastrophic interference,” this phenomenon occurs when an AI system is trained sequentially, such as learning Task A and then Task B, leading to the failure of task A!

This issue is a major barrier to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), as models cannot learn continuously over time without retraining on everything, causing inefficiencies and high AI security risks!

Practically speaking you can understand that every AI which is ‘released’ can only get better with results but it cannot practically ‘learn’ anything new! Like if the new version of Chat GPT is released in 2026; although it can tell you new stuff, it is practically stuck forever in 2026!

Researchers are exploring several strategies to overcome this issue and this is how the book comes into play!

The solutions as mostly based on how the HUMAN BRAIN mitigates Catastrophic forgetting! Brain usually does not forget old memories when new memories are formed! Which is why the average human brain’s ability to consolidate memory is the solution to Catastrophic forgetting!

Some techniques are Elastic Weight Consolidation or the Replay Buffers.

Some other approaches beyond the scope of my brain and this blog includes methods  that involve adding new, specialized neurons for new tasks, rather than updating existing ones!

One interesting approach proposed by Google is the Nested Learning. This approach treats AI as a system of smaller, nested optimization problems with different learning speeds, mimicking biological memory! Like short and long term memory done by our brain!

In the end, the perfect solution is the HUMAN BRAIN! 

Which is why the average Indian Human Brain will never forget the contributions of Field Marshal Kodandera Madappa Cariappa!

Now give some well deserved break to the soft Hard Drive of your body aka Sleep!

Shubh ratri!

In the novel A Brief History of Intelligence by Max S Bennet; Max Mentions how far the AI has come!

In one such example he tells us about a site!

I checked it out today! Shocking beyond words!

I am placing the site address for your shock!

ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com

As the site says, the person you click on DOES NOT exist! Every time you click on the link you get a different person!

Now I know you are intrigued but still you think what is so great about that! Well. each image generated when you click on the link is a person who is not real! He or she does not exist!

It is simply mind blowing!

So “This Person Does Not Exist” refers to a viral web project that uses artificial intelligence to generate hyper-realistic portraits of human beings who have never actually lived!

The core technology is called the StyleGAN! This is a generative adversarial network (GAN), developed by researchers at Nvidia in late 2018!

Yes! The Nvidia which makes your graphics cards for your very hyperrealist gaming experience!


The Process involves two neural networks—a “generator” that tries to create images and a “discriminator” that tries to detect if they are fake. They “train” against each other until the generator can produce images indistinguishable from real photos!

The most amazing thing here is that there is no human involved in the Generation of the random image of a HUMAN!

The model was trained on the Flickr-Faces-HQ (FFHQ) dataset, which contains 70,000 high-quality images of real human faces!

The site itself was created by software engineer Phillip Wang in 2019 to raise public awareness about the capabilities of AI!

Each time you refresh the page, the site generates a brand-new, unique 1024×1024 pixel portrait from scratch using a random 512-dimensional vector!

Of course it is a gold mine of images now!

Artists use it to generate unique characters for games, novels, or graphic designs.

It also provides “worry-free” faces for company websites, diverse profile pictures, or advertisements without the need for model releases or actor fees!

Users have even converted these AI portraits into 3D models using tools like Character Creator!

Then again where there is USE, there is ABUSE! (I am going to copyright this one!)

The technology can be used to create realistic fake social media profiles (sock puppets) to push propaganda or commit scams!

While many faces look real, some contain “artifacts”—glitches like distorted backgrounds, strangely shaped earrings, or “ghost” teeth—that can appear unsettling.

Researchers have also found that some generated faces bear a striking resemblance to real people from the original training data, raising potential privacy concerns! The evil twin is not that far away!

Then again success leads to copycats! (another copyright quote!)

The site has inspired copy cats such as well; This Cat Does Not Exist! which Generates realistic feline images! Followed by This Waifu Does Not Exist which is for anime fans! or This Rental Does Not Exist which generates fake Airbnb-style listing!

In summary; there is a very high probability that nothing in the digital world is real! If you want to see real people then put the phone down and turn to one side!

Or catch up some old movie like Jewel thief which also had a twin story who does not exist! Directed by Vijay Anand!

Do check out the site though! Since we do exist!

Shubh ratri!

Republic day!

Growing up this was a fun day! The best part was the Republic day was the Parade which we always used to miss ( at least the initial part!); the other cool thing was HALF DAY!

Nowadays though many kids generally have a holiday which is actually sad since then the would miss the celebrations that is Republic day! Read and weep Gen Z and Gen Alpha!

We used to get up in the morning but this time with joy!

That is because there was no need to carry the heavy school bag!!

No need to carry the lunch box and no need to be there till 3!

Republic day celebration was an event of it’s own!

We would rush to the extended assembly in our super clean uniform just in time for the prayer to start!

After that there will be cool programs (cool only if you are watching! Sometimes though we would be told to perform a skit or narrate a speech then it would seem like any other school day!!)

Then there will be a speech by our principal and the good point is that we would be sitting when all this would be going on!!

This of course was secondary to the falling kid phenomenon!

Apparently most of the time some kid would fall down so they made this rule for any extended assembly!!

We would see our friends dressed up as Gandhi, Nehru and many other leaders! The best of course would be Subhash Chandra Bose!! There was always a demand for playing Bose ji!

Coming up in his get up and saying “You give me blood and I will give you freedom!”

That would raise both our morale and adrenaline!

Then everyone would sing those national integration songs!

There would be some speeches and then some ‘free life lessons as the Gen Z would call it now!’; we of course would listen to all of them with rapt attention since the punishment for speaking is to stand!

Now when the whole school is sitting; you do not like to stand with your bottoms completely brown! That was dirt of course since we would be sitting on the ground spoiling our very nice uniforms pants and trousers! The real irritation for our moms would be to wash those pants the next day! They would wonder how it could get so dirty!

Finally the next best part of the show would be the distribution of the laddus!!
I have never liked laddus (except Tirupati laddu of course!!)
But this laddu was special since we would be made to wait for it for hours together just like Tirupati laddu!! Sometimes though we all would get paper bags in the color of the Indian flags and in that there would be pieces of laddus and some other snacks thrown in for good measure!

After waiting for so long; getting that small paper bag would be a great achievement! Many would finish it off as soon as possible! I would eat a little and store it to give a little to my mother who of course refuse to eat it and tell me to finish them myself!

Rest would be munching on this and may be some other snack which some kid would have bought forgetting that you do not have to get lunch today!

We would then then rush to the ground to play until we get tired or our bus comes!
Sometimes we would be told that the bus will be late so we all would simply walk home!

Something you cannot even think of doing now! With the little flags and the little laddu bags we would munch and talk and walk!

Since there was no OTT or any Cable; the only channel that would be on at home at that time would be the DD!

We all would then watch the republic day parade! We of course would be waiting for our ‘State’ parade and cheer for it!

Then again; if you are from Army background you will be perpetually confused on which state to support since you belong to all! So we would support most of them! Including the North east since Assam and Arunachal were some of the best and most beautiful postings dad had and we loved those pristine places!

Watching that on TV along with the commentary alternating between Hindi and English was like watching the academy award with a front view! I always used to wonder how our dear President would keep his hands as salute the whole time! We would be amazed to see that glass covering!

Occasionally you would catch the glimpse of some known personality in the audience and that would be fodder to the next day’s gossip! We would even have a ‘working’ lunch!

All that work used to call for a quick afternoon nap! A rarity of those days since lunch was done and it was too hot out!

Then mom would wake us up and we would feel so sad that it is morning and we have to go to school again! Then to our delight we would realize that it was only evening! Another round of ‘Republic day’ delight!

A quick glass of milk and if your mom is in a good mood some snacks which would usually be some pakoras or Bonda!

Another round of playing cricket or football with the neighbor kids or simply cycling or skating since there is so much time to ‘waste’!

Then you would have the special screening of the movie Gandhi! It is not republic day if you do not watch that movie! Later on when we had the DD Metro then special National Integration movies like Roja used to shown which we loved to watch again!

Slowly then Mom would remind us to pack the bags and finish any homework and go to bed! The afternoon nap would make sure that the sleep would take its own sweet time to come! Then my brother would take his carefully preserved bag of Laddu and we would have a late night treat!

The night would be done but the whole day would be etched in our memories forever!

Today’s sketch needs no description! If you know you know!

Well deserved Padma for Maddy!

Happy republic day folks!!

proud to be an Indian!!!

Jai Hind!🙏🙏🙏

Do you know what is Montezuma’s Revenge?

It is a game and also a type of infection!

We will stick to the former for now!

The relevance of this game is in the development of the AI!

A Brief History of Intelligence by Max S Bennet traces the development of intelligence and how it applies to the development of the AI!

Since it is a novel written by a non medical person with a tech background, for a medico it is a very refreshing new outlook on the development of intelligence!

Now how it develops into the Artificial Intelligence is the key point here!

Now Montezuma’s Revenge is a classic platform-adventure video game originally released in 1984.

Designed by Robert Jaeger and published by Parker Brothers, it is often cited as an early precursor to the “Metroidvania” genre due to its open-exploration and backtracking mechanics.

The objective of the game is to Navigate multiple floors to reach a central Treasure Chamber, collecting jewels while avoiding hazards!

The issue here is that for humans this is a routine game but for AI with no scope of a right or a wrong way, the game is difficult to say the least!

The game in fact serves as a primary benchmark for testing “hard-exploration” in Artificial Intelligence, particularly in reinforcement learning (RL).

Because the game requires a long sequence of non-obvious actions to gain any points (sparse rewards), it exposed critical failures in early AI models, leading to significant advancements in how AI explores and learns!

Most AI agents (like DQN) failed completely on this game because they rely on immediate feedback (points) to learn! Which means that there is a right way and wrong in simple games! But in this game the reward is in the end so there is no wrong or right way!

Montezuma’s Revenge is a puzzle-platformer that requires navigating complex, trap-filled, multi-room, and multi-level, requiring agents to climb, jump, and collect items (keys/swords) in a specific order before receiving a single reward!

Early attempts to fix this involved giving AI “curiosity” (intrinsic motivation) to explore new areas. However, agents became obsessed with unpredictable, high-entropy, or “noisy” areas (like flickering screens) rather than useful gameplay, a failure known as the “noisy TV” problem!

Then key AI advancements were developed specifically to conquer Montezuma’s Revenge!

One algorithm called the Go-Explore (Uber AI) successfully solved the game by prioritizing “exploring from promising states” rather than relying on random exploration. It memorized “visited” game states, allowing it to revisit them and continue exploring from there, rather than starting over!

Finally an AI system called Agent57 or the DeepMind was the first to achieve superhuman performance across all 57 Atari games, including Montezuma’s Revenge, by combining advanced exploration strategies with a meta-controller to balance short- and long-term behavior!

The key techniques used was called the Reinforcement Learning (RL) where the agent plays by trial-and-error, receiving rewards or penalties!

Mastering Montezuma’s Revenge is considered a milestone because the techniques developed—specifically, intelligent, curiosity-driven, and memory-based exploration—are directly applicable to real-world AI challenges, such as robotic navigation in unknown, complex environments (e.g., search and rescue, home automation etc.!)

So how does an AI demonstrate intelligence? By defeating a Video game released more than 30 years back!

Then again Kavita Krishnamurthy who has been active for more than 40 years now!

That is real natural talent!

Now stop playing Montezuma’s Revenge and sleep!

SHubh Ratri!