Exploring what it means to be big
Reading a Nature report titled 'Step aside CERN: There’s a cheaper way to break open physics' (January 10, 2018) brought to mind something G. Rajasekaran, former head of the Institute of Mathe…
VM
1664 posts
Lightning storm
1 min read
A lightning storm rages outside. The large window panes going from floor to ceiling in the living room rattle as the wind whips around, gathering dust off the ground right outside my building, spinnin…
How science is presented and consumed on Facebook
5 min read
This post is a breakdown of the Pew study titled The Science People See on Social Media, published March 21, 2018. Without further ado… or Is popularity the best way to judge if a Facebook page coun…
Happy Lord of the Rings Day!
3 min read
The Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy series exhibited a rabid yet desirable iconoclasm, through which its author Steven Erikson elucidated every trope of epic fantasy and then shit on it. I came out…
First temple, then launchpad?
2 min read
ISRO chairman K. Sivan is free to worship and worship any deity he bloody well wants ∞; that's his right. But it's not entirely comforting when you think back about all the chairpersons ISRO h…
The Meerut mahayagya
2 min read
Did some back-of-the-envelope calculations about the Meerut mahayagya, where a bunch of Hindu priests are burning 50 tonnes of mango wood and approx. 10 million tablespoons of ghee in a mega-ritual to…
Looking for gemstones in the gutter
6 min read
Just the other day, I’d mentioned to a friend that Steven Pinker was one of those rare people whose ideas couldn’t be appreciated by proxy, such as through the opinions of other authority figures, but…
This is a test post.
Please ignore.…
Moon mission pushed to October, so we wait
1 min read
So, the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO's) Chandrayaan 2 mission to the Moon has been pushed to October from April. Delays of this sort are to be expected for missions of this scale…
Jayant Narlikar's pseudo-defence of Darwin
4 min read
Jayant Narlikar, the noted astrophysicist and emeritus professor at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, recently wrote an op-ed in The Hindu titled 'Science should ha…
For space, frugality is a harmful aspiration
4 min read
Ref: 'ISRO's Chandrayaan-2 mission to cost lesser than Hollywood movie Interstellar - here's how they make it cost-effective', staff, Moneycontrol, February 20, 2018. ∞ 'Chandray…
On that Poynter debate about stock images and ethical visual journalism
4 min read
Response to Mark Johnson, Article about free images 'contradicts everything I hold true about journalism', Poynter, February 9, 2018. ∞ Let's get the caveats out of the way: * The artic…