Ending 2020
My blogging took a hit this year – as did everything for everyone. I couldn't publish nearly as much as I'd have liked. While the average post length was the highest it's ever been – 989 w…
VM
1664 posts
"Enough science."
2 min read
Edit, 6.04 pm, December 15, 2020: A reader pointed out to me that The Guardian may in fact have been joking, and it has been known to be flippant on occasion. If this is really the case, I pronounce m…
The overlay bias
3 min read
I'm not very fond of some highly popular pieces of writing (I won't name them because I'm nervous about backlash from authors and/or their supporters) because a part of their popularity is…
Science prizes, wealth location and social signals
4 min read
One count on which I almost always find myself to be an outlier in India is my opinion that the Nobel Prizes and their derivatives belong in the gutter. But while many people in other countries share…
The thing about π
4 min read
Consider the following setup, from the game 'Factorio', the game about factory management and automation: There are two factories visible in this image – the two rectangular, green-walled bui…
A Q&A about my job and science journalism
11 min read
A couple weeks ago, some students from a university in South India got in touch to ask a few questions about my job and about science communication. The correspondence was entirely over email, and I&#…
Tech bloggers and the poverty of style
3 min read
I created my writing habit by performing it over a decade (and still continuing). When I first started blogging in 2008, I told myself I would write at least 2,000 words a week. By some conspiracy of…
The forgotten first lives of India's fauna
2 min read
Prof. Biju said the Rohanixalus is the 20th recognised genus of the family Rhacophoridae that comprises 422 known Old World tree frog species found in Asia and Africa. He said there are eight frog spe…
Super-spreading, mobility and crowding
5 min read
I still see quite a few journalists in India refer to "super-spreaders" vis-à-vis the novel coronavirus – implying that some individuals might be to blame for ‘seeding’ lots of new infection…
On resource constraints and merit
6 min read
Analysis
Science
Big Science
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
Department of Science and Technology
India-based Neutrino Observatory
ISRO
Jadugoda
jugaad
let teachers teach
NASA
particle physics
R&D funding
resource constraint
Sabine Hossenfelder
Sean Carroll
Superconducting Super Collider
Swarnajayanti Fellowships
transparency
Vannevar Bush
In the face of complaints about how so few women have been awarded this year’s Swarnajayanti Fellowships in India, some scientists pushed back asking which of the male laureates who had been selected…
Trump, science denial and violence
2 min read
Science
anti-masker
anti-vaxxer
Ashis Nandy
Challakere
COVID-19
disease modelling
Donald Trump
history of science
India-based Neutrino Observatory
Joe Biden
Kudankulam nuclear power plant
medical care
medical ethics
political mathematics
public hospitals
reason of state
Science City
science denialism
scientism
social epidemiology
Sterlite
Thoothukudi
US presidential election
For a few days last week, before the mail-in votes had been counted in the US, the contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump seemed set for a nail-biting finish. In this time a lot of people expresse…
How do you study a laser firing for one-quadrillionth of a second?
7 min read
Scicomm
attophysics
attosecond laser
attosecond streaking
band gap
boxcar integrator
carrier wave
carrier-envelope phase
carrier-envelope phase offset
chirped pulse amplification
circular polarisation
conduction band
dielectrics
electric field
femtochemistry
femtosecond laser
magnetic field
Maxwell's equations
pulse train
time of flight spectroscopy
vacuum
valence band
I'm grateful to Mukund Thattai, at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, for explaining many of the basic concepts at work in the following article. An important application of…