BLR road-widening is a sham
While I'm told that discussions on a plan to widen Bengaluru's Sankey Road, between Bhashyam Circle and Malleshwaram 18th cross – a stretch that's one of the contributors to the city's…
VM
1664 posts
India's devious reason to not spend more on culture
3 min read
'Difficult to allocate public fund to art and culture: Centre', The Hindu, March 19, 2023: Given the high disparity it experiences in elementary rural infrastructure like health, education an…
Nature paper says bad news is good news
4 min read
'Negativity drives online news consumption', Claire E. Robertson et al., Nature Human Behaviour, March 16, 2023: Here we analyse the effect of negative words on news consumption using a massi…
What's the anomaly in a Nobel for Modi?
2 min read
I'm sure you've seen the reports doing the rounds today that some person on some Nobel Prize Committee said Prime Minister Narendra Modi was very deserving of the vaunted peace prize, followed…
The devil's lassi
2 min read
‘The Devil’s Milkshake’, Tarence Ray in The Baffler, February 23, 2023: You’ve seen it before. An industrial disaster poisons a town’s food or water supply. Residents get angry. Public officials try…
Who are you, chatbot AI?
3 min read
In case you haven’t been following, and to update my own personal records, here’s a list of notable {AI chatbot + gender}-related articles and commentary on the web over the last few weeks. (While I’v…
Some science prizes are only for men
3 min read
Say Someone has won the Nobel Prize for physics, perhaps the most prestigious honour (as awards go) for a physicist. What would it mean for all the future awards given to this Someone? One thing that…
Keep working. Don't get up.
2 min read
'Inside Meta’s Push to Solve the Noisy Office', WSJ, February 16, 2023: Coming to the campuses of Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. is a contraption that can block sound, shield workers fro…
A vortex in my bucket
1 min read
One of the taps in my bathroom at home issues water in laminar flow – without any turbulence. Sometimes the flow from the tap to the bucket looks like it's frozen: there are no disturbances on the…
Hype from Fermilab
1 min read
Where do you think the following bit of text is from? A wormhole, also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge, is a hypothetical tunnel connecting remote points in spacetime. While wormholes are allowed b…
On that anti-mRNA vaccines video
4 min read
The Times of India has published an irresponsible article today on a video by a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) claiming with dubious evidence that all mRNA vaccines are h…
Books – 2022
1 min read
Even as I whined about losing my reading habit, I managed to read a surprising (to me) number of books through 2022. One reason I think I didn't notice is because very few of them started out bein…