A very big sentence
Writing on analytic philosophy is apparently very complex. One essay published on 3QD argues that it actually needs to be that way, and quotes a linguist quoting a philosopher to make its case. The qu…
VM
1664 posts
Driving down the moderated way
4 min read
There's a really yucky scene in the really yucky movie based on the half-yucky book Atlas Shrugged. A copper-mining tycoon who blew up his own mines says in a conversation with his railroad-tycoon…
Stupidity at the science congress
3 min read
Load Twitter on the browser. Scroll down, scroll down further, keep going, stop… What’s that? Meh, keep scrolling. Correlation is not causation – but it’s really hard to set aside the fact that In…
Beating pseudoscience at the ISC
4 min read
The following notes are specifically about VijayRaghavan's post. My overall reaction to the stupidity on display at the ISC is recorded here. At a conference at the Institute of Mathematical Scie…
A tribute to Tolkien
1 min read
Instead of dismissing it with a gracious modesty, I'm going to shamelessly record for posterity that The Master quoted in Anand Venkateswaran's essay on J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hindu Literary Re…
Charge-ordering and Cooper pairs
5 min read
There are many kinds of materials that become superconductors at low temperatures. One famous kind is the cuprates, compounds of copper and oxygen. Some cuprates have been known to become superconduct…
ISRO's Project ADMIRE
3 min read
A member of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has confirmed it has made progress on its plan to test a new class of reusable rockets. B.N. Suresh, an honorary distinguished professor at I…
On time, and turning 30
3 min read
It was recently my birthday. I turned 30. The celebrations were muted – if at all – because there's something of a moment when you exit the tweens, and the first digit of your age changes from 2 t…
The Print's list
1 min read
The Print should not have published its list of "intellectuals pick their successors" at all. Its editors knew that it had no women and were aware of how that was a problem. They also had to…
Journalism's 'stories'
4 min read
I can think of at least four different words newsrooms use to describe the bundles of content they work with: story, piece, article and copy (‘content’ itself isn’t one of them). With a few exceptions…
Character development in DnD
4 min read
In all the DnD games I’ve played, I’ve felt there’s a tension between allowing the story to progress and the characters all helping each other participate in that progression. For example, we as playe…
Foundations of reality
4 min read
I haven’t ever been more interested in anything than physics and epic fantasy. So I thought it might be interesting to think about whether they complement each other. Being a science writer writing a…