English as the currency of science's practice
K. VijayRaghavan, the secretary of India's Department of Biotechnology, has written a good piece in Hindustan Times about how India must shed its "intellectual colonialism" to excel at s…
VM
1664 posts
Why Titan is awesome #10
3 min read
Titaaaaan! How much I've missed writing these posts since Cassini passed away. Unsurprisingly, it's after the probe's demise that we've really begun to realise how much of Cassini'…
What it takes to wash a strainer: soap, water and some wave optics
2 min read
When I stay over at a friend's place whenever I come to Delhi, I try to help around the house. But more often than not, I just do the dishes – often a lot of dishes. One item I've always had t…
Onto drafting the gravitational history of the universe
5 min read
It's finally happening. As the world turns, as our little lives wear on, gravitational wave detectors quietly eavesdrop on secrets whispered by colliding blackholes and neutron stars in distant re…
The language and bullshitness of 'a nearly unreadable paper'
2 min read
Earlier today, the Retraction Watch mailing list highlighted a strange paper written by a V.M. Das disputing the widely accepted fact that our body clocks are regulated by the gene-level circadian rhy…
The language and bullshitness of 'a nearly unreadable paper'
2 min read
Earlier today, the Retraction Watch mailing list highlighted a strange paper written by a V.M. Das disputing the widely accepted fact that our body clocks are regulated by the gene-level circadian rhy…
The blog and the social media
2 min read
Because The Wire had signed up to be some kind of A-listed publisher with Facebook, The Wire's staff was required to create Facebook Pages under each writer/editor's name. So I created the …
Awk CZTI result from Crab pulsar
2 min read
An instrument onboard the ISRO Astrosat space-telescope has studied how X-rays being emitted by the Crab pulsar are being polarised, and how such polarisation varies from one pulse to the next. This i…
That astrology workshop at the IISc
5 min read
Couple caveats: 1. I wrote this post on the night of October 28, before the workshop was cancelled on the morning of October 29. I haven't bothered to change the tense because issuing this cavea…
Some empathy for Treebeard's privilege
5 min read
There's a line from The Two Towers (2002) that's really stayed with me: I'm on nobody's side because nobody is on my side. It's spoken by Treebeard, the Ent, to one of Meriadoc/P…
Appa Rao Podile made fellow of science academy that published his problem paper – some questions
5 min read
Appa Rao Podile, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Hyderabad, has been elected a fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) in spite of one of his three papers – which The Wire…
Gigernama / 'A man dressed in black with a tube under his arm'
5 min read
On May 12, 2014, about half a week before the Lok Sabha election votes were to be counted, ahead of the result that would catapult the BJP to power with an overwhelming majority in the lower house of…