VM

1664 posts

Seven years

4 min read
Life notes

Today, I complete seven years as a journalist. Scratch that. Today, I complete seven years in the journalism industry. Wait, scratch that too. Today, I complete 6.58 years in the journalism indust…

Of reason and realism

3 min read
Op-eds

Laurie Penny writes on Longreads: Remember the U.S. presidential debates of 2016? Remember how the entire liberal establishment thought Hillary Clinton had won, mainly because she made actual points,…

To explain the world

2 min read
Scicomm

Simplicity is a deceptively simple thing. Recently, a scientist who was trying to explain something in general relativity to me did so in the following way: One simple way to understand … is as follo…

NYT on fire

1 min read
Op-eds

As the world burns, is anyone paying attention to the New York Times? Because if you're not, you should: it's catching fire as well. On May 23, the grand old newspaper published a report by Ma…

The wind and the wall

3 min read
Scicomm

I have an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering but I've always struggled with thermodynamics. To the uninitiated, this means most of the knowledge specific to mechanical engineering over…

A century of the proton

5 min read
Scicomm

In 1907, a New Zealander named Ernest Rutherford moved from McGill University in Canada to the University of Manchester. There, he conducted a series of experiments where he fired alpha particles1at d…

The Nehru-Gandhis' old clothes

2 min read
Op-eds

The following tweet has been doing the rounds the last few days: https://twitter.com/churumuri/status/1062680702066388992 It carries an important message from India's recent past, that a time of…

The worm and the world

1 min read
Culture

Alanna Mitchell reports in the New York Times that boreal forests in the world's north are being invaded by worms of the species Dendrobaena octaedra. They're decomposing the leaf litter and r…

The dance of the diamonds

6 min read
Scicomm

You probably haven't heard of the Chladni effect but you've likely seen it in action. Sprinkle some grains of sand on a thin metal plate and play a violin bow across it, and you'll notice…

The symmetry incarnations

10 min read
Scicomm anastomosis asymptote Banach-Tarski paradox Big Bang Theory cellular automata degrees of freedom electro-weak symmetry breaking fractals Gilbreath's conjecture hypercube Large Hadron Collider Mandelbrot sets Mulliken symbols Nambu-Goldstone bosons prime numbers surface tension symmetry thermodynamics V.S. Ramachandran

This post was originally published on October 6, 2012. I recently rediscovered it and decided to republish it with a few updates. Geometric symmetry in nature is often a sign of unperturbedness, as i…