The three times intermediate-mass black holes were first discovered
There's a report in Science dated June 8 with the headline 'Middleweight black holes found at last'. The abstract describes an effort by an "international team" of astronomers to…
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The Higgs boson and the top quark
2 min read
There were two developments in the news last week that were very important but at the same time didn't get mainstream attention: Microsoft acquiring GitHub and the LHC collaboration's measurem…
'DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN'
3 min read
Until a few hours ago, I thought Harry S. Truman had been one of the worst-performing American presidents of all time. I was wrong. I'd spotted an infographic on Twitter, drawn up by FiveThirtyEig…
In defence of world-building, from Ikea
3 min read
Whenever I think of world-building – as in the fantasy exercise where you build out the lay of the land, and then the land itself where you're going to situate your story – the first thing that co…
The proximity rule
3 min read
In the morning, I had managed to read a few pages of Karunanidhi: A Life in Politics, a new book by Sandhya Ravishankar about the DMK supremo, and noticed that even though it's a journalist's…
One big thing v. many small things
1 min read
On average, people don't read as many books as they used to before because what we want to read has become available in more forms. We read articles on the web, tweets and posts on the social medi…
A community-driven scicomm effort
3 min read
The National Council of Science and Technology Communication, under the Department of Science and Technology (DST), has floated a new initiative to promote science communication by researchers, partic…
Meta-design: An invisible bias
2 min read
Puja Mehra wrote an excellent breakdown of the Narendra Modi government's economic performance of the last four years, the duration for which it has been in office. You should read it if you'r…
Nicking the notch
2 min read
I got myself a new phone today – the iPhone 6S. Before the purchase, I had spent hours on Amazon looking for the right phone within my budget, and quite possibly went through at least two score models…
Are celebs responsible for their troll-followers?
2 min read
I've got two things to say about my Elon Musk piece from yesterday. The piece was well-received, insofar as I was expecting it to be: there were a few bouquets, many brickbats. One troll called me…
The institution called Elon Musk
4 min read
Jean-Paul Sartre famously refused a Nobel Prize for literature (in 1964) because, he said, he didn’t want to be “institutionalised”. His eagerness to prevent this transformation wasn’t misguided. Perh…
The stupidest six
2 min read
After the IPL 2018 concluded last night, Star Sports TV has been doing reruns of the tournament, showing highlights from all the 60 matches as well as compilations of the performances by category. One…