Freeman Dyson's PhD
The physicist, thinker and writer Freeman Dyson passed away on February 28, 2020, at the age of 96. I wrote his obituary for The Wire Science; excerpt: The 1965 Nobel Prize for the development of [qu…
VM
1664 posts
Mad Mike: Foolish Road
1 min read
On Sunday, an American thrill-seeker named Mike Hughes died after attempting to launch himself to an altitude of 5,000 feet on a homemade steam-powered rocket. A video of the accident is available bec…
Distracting from the peer-review problem
2 min read
From an article entitled ‘The risks of swiftly spreading coronavirus research‘ published by Reuters: A Reuters analysis found that at least 153 studies – including epidemiological papers, genetic ana…
Peter Higgs, self-promoter
2 min read
Culture
Science
C.R. Hagen
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Englert
Francois Englert
Gerald Guralnik
Gerardus t Hooft
Greenpeace
Higgs
Higgs boson
Higgs mechanism
Large Hadron Collider
particle physics
Peter Higgs
Philip Warren Anderson
Robert Brout
Sheldon Cooper
The Big Bang Theory
Tom Kibble
Wolf Prize
I was randomly rewatching The Big Bang Theory on Netflix today when I spotted this gem: Okay, maybe less a gem and more a shiny stone, but still. The screenshot, taken from the third episode of the s…
Review: 'Parasite' (2019)
5 min read
In 2011, the Dalit rights scholar and activist Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd (then only Kancha Ilaiah) addressed a room of 150 or so students of the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. In the first 20 minu…
The potential energy of being entertained
4 min read
Netflix just published a report drafted by its Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, estimating – among other things – its environmental footprint for operations during the year 2019. According t…
The fascist's trap
2 min read
The following lines appear in the opening portion of G.S. Mudur's report in The Telegraph about government opposition to student protests: “The people protecting our democracy are the people in J…
The difficulty of option 'c'
3 min read
Can any journalist become a science journalist? More specifically, can any journalist become a science journalist without understanding the methods of scientific practice and administration? This is n…
A trumpet for Ramdev
3 min read
The Print published an article entitled 'Ramdev’s Patanjali does a ‘first’, its Sanskrit paper makes it to international journal' on February 5, 2020. Excerpt: In a first, international scien…
The scientist as inadvertent loser
4 min read
Analysis
Science
Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics journal
citation
citation racket
H-index
impact factor
Journal of Theoretical Biology
Kuo-Chen Chou
Lorenz attractor
peer review
post-publication peer-review
preprint papers
preprint repositories
reviewer coercion
scientific research
transparency
trustlessness
Twice this week, I'd had occasion to write about how science is an immutably human enterprise and therefore some of its loftier ideals are aspirational at best, and about how transparency is one o…
The chrysalis that isn't there
3 min read
I wrote the following post while listening to this track. Perhaps you will enjoy reading it to the same sounds. Otherwise, please consider it a whimsical recommendation. :) I should really start keep…
A science for the non-1%
4 min read
David Michaels, an epidemiologist and a former US assistant secretary of labour for occupational safety and health under Barack Obama, writes in the Boston Review: [Product defence] operations have o…