'Gardens of the Moon'
I – and all my friends who have read the Malazan Book of the Fallen series – have wondered why the first book in the series is titled Gardens of the Moon. The only Moon-related entity in the book is M…
VM
1664 posts
The sounds of science
1 min read
Do you remember the sound of a telephone ringing in the early 1990s? That polyphonic ringtone so reminiscent of the life of that decade… Do you remember the sound of using a telephone in the 1990s? T…
Fact-checking in science journalism
3 min read
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has helped produce a report on fact-checking in science journalism, and it is an eye-opening read. It was drafted by Deborah Blum and Brooke Borel; there is a nic…
Will an Indian win an Ig Nobel by 2035?
2 min read
The 28th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony concluded yesterday, handing out 10 prizes to 38 recipients with institutional affiliations in 26 countries. There is one recipient with an affiliation in…
Board games
Every Thursday, a Bangalore-based community called ReRoll organises an evening of boardgames open to all at Lahe Lahe, a café in Indira Nagar. According to the organisers, about 40 people come each ti…
Appeasement v. truth
5 min read
Late last year, Facebook inducted The Weekly Standard (TWS), an American news outlet, as one of its only five fact-checkers and the sole conservative voice in the group. Earlier this week, TWS raised…
US court settles bitter gene editing patent case
7 min read
On September 10, a US court settled an increasingly churlish patent dispute between two research institutions in the country, the University of California (UC) in Berkeley and the Broad Institute, Mas…
Idea of a country
1 min read
The short excerpt below from Patriots and Partisans by Ram Guha caught my attention because it offers a simple definition of the idea of India (at the risk of oversimplification). One may have encount…
Criticism of ISRO
2 min read
The Statesman‘s editorial on India’s human spaceflight programme ends with the following line: Only after placing the seventh and the last satellite in the NavIC system costing Rs 1,400 crore did ISR…
How do you determine the naturalness of homosexuality?
3 min read
“Homosexual carnal intercourse between two consenting adults” is legal in India now. It wasn’t for lack of reason or scientific data that the item of legislation that rendered sodomy illegal – Section…
DotA redux – AI loses
7 min read
What happened An artificially intelligent (AI) gaming system built by a company co-led by Elon Musk took on some of the best human players at a game more complex than chess or Go last week – and lost…
Two books
1 min read
When thoughts turn stale, read a book. I'm reading two at the moment, which is telling. Patriots and Partisans by historian Ram Guha, an accessible narration of the historical roots of modern Ind…