To understand Spivak
It is quite bizarre to read Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and be able to understand anything. It is even more bizarre to agree with her views about mundane things like the news or being a little anxious…
VM
1664 posts
Groundwater extinction
2 min read
In a report published on June 14, 2018, NITI Aayog, a policy think-tank established by the Government of India, claimed that 21 Indian cities would run out of their supply of groundwater by 2020. The…
Assuming you speak Hindi…
2 min read
I can't use the terms 'Gaganyaan' and 'Vyomanaut' or 'Gaganaut' in place of 'Indian human spaceflight mission' and 'Indian astronauts' because of the bad ta…
To be a depressed person reading about research on depression
3 min read
It’s a strangely unsettling experience to read about research on an affliction that one has, to understand how scientists are obtaining insights into it using a variety of techniques that allow them t…
Can gravitational waves be waylaid by gravity?
5 min read
Yesterday, I learnt the answer is 'yes'. Gravitational waves can be gravitationally lensed. It seems obvious once you think about it, but not something that strikes you (assuming you're no…
Solutions looking for problems
3 min read
There’s been a glut of ‘science projects’ that seem to be divorced from their non-technical aspects even when the latter are equally, if not more, important – or maybe it is just a case of these probl…
The 'could've, should've, would've' of R&D
2 min read
ISRO's Moon rover, which will move around the lunar surface come September (if all goes well), will live and and die in a span of 14 days because that's how long the lithium-ion cells it's…
Alt-M.O.M.
1 min read
Posters for a new TV show called M.O.M. – The Women Behind Mission Mangal, produced by Ekta Kapoor and distributed by AltBalaji, look strange. One poster shows four women, presumably the show's pr…
Making history at the speed of light
4 min read
Last week, Sophia Gad-Nasr, an astroparticle physicist and PhD student at University of California, Irvine, tweeted this question: https://twitter.com/Astropartigirl/status/1135533079852773376 To wh…
A religious environmentalism
5 min read
June 5 was World Environment Day, which is presumably why an article entitled 'Hindu roots of modern 'ecology'' was doing the rounds on Twitter, despite having been published in 2016.…
Justifying organic chemistry
1 min read
Johanna Miller writes in Physics Today about how she was able to enjoy learning organic chemistry in her senior year of undergraduate study: by understanding that science is a collection of concepts,…
A Q&A with blinders
2 min read
The following comment grates on multiple levels: https://twitter.com/ainvvy/status/1135155570309120000 Here's Mohandas Pai, a Hindutva fanatic known to have a pH of 1, issuing a ridiculous comme…