Anything but our Vedic heritage
The Union culture ministry had announced in November last year that it would develop a 'Vedic Heritage' portal to promote the Vedas, and hoped to inaugurate it by March 2019. It would seem the…
VM
1664 posts
Of awards and women
3 min read
The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was founded in 2012 by Yuri Milner to recognise those individuals who have made profound contributions to human knowledge. It is open to all physicists –…
Discovering Vikram Sarabhai
2 min read
I just read through a collection of Vikram Sarabhai's important speeches and papers compiled by members of the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Ahmedabad, to pick a suitable portion to excerpt…
Would you take Epstein's money to fund your research?
7 min read
Note: Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell on August 10, 2019. The following post was written before news of his death emerged. In 2016, I attended a talk by a not-unknown environmental activis…
Scientists make video of molecule rotating
4 min read
A research group in Germany has captured images of what a rotating molecule looks like. This is a significant feat because it is very difficult to observe individual atoms and molecules, which are ver…
Preference for OA research by income group
4 min read
Two researchers from Rwanda performed a “systematic computational analysis of the biomedical literature” and concluded in their paper that: … papers with authors based in sub-Saharan Africa, papers w…
When deGrasse Tyson pulled a Pinker
6 min read
Since this post was published, an upward-edited version has been republished on The Wire. Twitter is, among other things, that place on the internet where people fight over the tips of icebergs. Ther…
Being understood
2 min read
Before the definitive version of Blade Runner was due to be released in April 2015, Michael Newton re-reviewed the film for The Guardian, where he wrote: If the film suggests a connection here that D…
Review: Oblivion (2013)
2 min read
Spoilers ahead Just watched Oblivion (2013), starring Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman and Jamie Lannister. It was a collection of tropes strung together. Sweeping, desolate landscapes intercalated with s…
Anil Ananthaswamy in conversation with Anita Nair
5 min read
I attended an event at the Bangalore International Centre yesterday, Anita Nair in conversation with Anil Ananthaswamy about narrative non-fiction. Anil spoke for 45-55 minutes about what it was like…
Epstein's friends from the 'Reality Club'
1 min read
New York magazine has published an alphabetised list of the names of people that find mention in Jeffrey Epstein's 'black book', a log book of sorts in which he kept track of the people he…
A journey through Twitter and time, with the laws of physics
6 min read
Say you're in a dark room and there's a flash. The light travels outward in all directions from the source, and the illumination seems to expand in a sphere. This is a visualisation of how the…