Stream of nothing
I decided to go out this evening. First I went to Bookworm's new setup on Church Street. There, I started skimming the shelves from the first one on the right, moving from right to left, front to…
VM
1664 posts
They're trying to build a telescope
7 min read
If a telescope like the TMT and a big physics experiment like the INO are being stalled for failing to account for the interests and sensibilities of the people already living at or near their planned…
PeerJ's peer-review problem
7 min read
Of all the scientific journals in the wild, there are a few I keep a closer eye on: they publish interesting results but more importantly they have been forward-thinking on matters of scientific publi…
Engels, Weinberg
4 min read
Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engels, 1883 (ed. 1976): … an acquaintance with the historical course of evolution of human thought, with the views on the general inter-connections in the external wo…
Cooperative distrust
2 min read
Is there a doctrine or manifesto of cooperative distrust? Because I think that’s what we need today, in the face of reams of government data — almost all of it, in fact — that is untrustworthy, and th…
The problem with rooting for science
10 min read
The idea that trusting in science involves a lot of faith, instead of reason, is lost on most people. More often than not, as a science journalist, I encounter faith through extreme examples – such as…
Boron nitride, tougher than it looks
5 min read
During World War I, a British aeronautical engineer named A.A. Griffith noticed something odd about glass. He found that the atomic bonds in glass needed 10,000 megapascals of stress to break apart –…
On tabletop accelerators
2 min read
Tabletop accelerators are an exciting new field of research in which physicists use devices the size of a shoe box, or something just a bit bigger, to accelerate electrons to high energies. The ‘conve…
NCBS fracas: In defence of celebrating retractions
6 min read
Continuing from here… Irrespective of Arati Ramesh's words and actions, I find every retraction worth celebrating because how hard-won retractions in general have been, in India and abroad. I don…
NCBS retraction – addenda
2 min read
My take on the NCBS paper being retracted, and the polarised conversation that has erupted around the incident, is here. The following are some points I'd like to add. a. Why didn't the edito…
Pseudoscientific materials and thermoeconomics
6 min read
The Shycocan Corp. took out a full-page jacket ad in the Times of India on June 22 – the same day The Telegraph (UK) had a story about GBP 2,900 handbags by Gucci that exist only online, in some video…
Scicommers as knowledge producers
3 min read
Reading the latest edition of Raghavendra Gadagkar's column in The Wire Science, 'More Fun Than Fun', about how scientists should become communicators and communicators should be treated a…