Sympathy for Rapido
From ‘Rapido draws flak for charging users extra for traffic delays, commuters term it ‘extortion’’, The Hindu, June 3, 2025: Ride-hailing platform Rapido is under fresh scrutiny from [Bengaluru] use…
VM
1664 posts
On the BDS movements against Russia and Israel
6 min read
Russia began its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. On March 8, a poll conducted by independent survey organisations in Russia among a randomly selected cohort of 1,640 people reported a…
Harken to the fish
1 min read
From 'Meghalaya’s new cave-dwelling fish adapts to streams overground', The Hindu, May 25, 2025: An underground cave in Meghalaya, in focus for a conflict over a Shivalinga-like stone formati…
The Berry phase of Kancha Gachibowli
4 min read
There's a concept in quantum mechanics, and also in parts of classical mechanics, called the Berry phase. Say you're walking around a mountain. You start off along a path and follow it all the…
Chasing solitons
7 min read
Scicomm
Science
Akhmediev breather
Bose-Einstein condensate
breather soliton
David Tong
Draupner wave
Erwin Schrodinger
fluid dynamics
Froude number
guitar string
Howell Peregrine
John Scott Russell
Kelvin wake
Korteweg-de Vries equation
Kuznetsov-Ma breather
nonlinearity
partial differential equations
Peregrine soliton
sine-Gordon breather
solitons
wave of translation
Every once in a while, I dive into a topic in science for no reason other than that I find it interesting. This is how I learnt about Titan, laser-cooling, and random walks. This post is about the fou…
Empathy for Donald Pettit
4 min read
There was an intriguing outpouring of concern worldwide when Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore returned to Earth after 280-something days in space. People were particularly concerned about Williams…
Right to safe work
4 min read
The maximum daytime temperatures in the Kalaburagi and Belagavi districts of Karnataka this week are expected to be 41º C and in the late 30sº C, respectively. Research has found that if the relative…
"Who are we?"
2 min read
From '‘The physics community has never split like this’: row erupts over plans for new Large Hadron Collider', The Guardian, March 29, 2025: However, if the FCC were given the go-ahead, it co…
Happy Lord of the Rings Day
4 min read
I recently started reading a book entitled The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay. It is historical fiction, immaculately detailed, with three excellent protagonists surrounded by a band of almost…
Williams's success is… ours?
3 min read
A day before NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore were to return onboard a SpaceX crew capsule, Prime Minister Narendra Modi published a letter in which he said he had inquired after her…
Who funds quantum research?
4 min read
Analysis
Science
artificial intelligence
Bruce Schneier
Drew Weissman
drug development
Katalin Karikó
Majorana 1
Microsoft Research
mRNA vaccines
Nathan Sanders
Normal Eisen
Physical Review B
Physics World
public AI
public quantum
quantum computing
quantum technologies
topological qubit
Winfried Hensinger
An odd little detail in a Physics World piece on Microsoft’s claim to have made a working topological qubit: Regardless of the debate about the results and how they have been announced, researchers a…
On the US FAA's response to Falcon 9 debris
5 min read
Analysis
Commercial Spaceflight Federation
deorbiting
Donald Trump
end of launch
exercise of control
expendable launch vehicle
Falcon 9
NASA
orbital launch
space debris
SpaceX
Starlink 11-4 mission
uncontrolled reentry
US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act 2015
US Federal Aviation Administration
On February 1, SpaceX launched its Starlink 11-4 mission onboard a Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket's reusable first stage returned safely to the ground and the second stage remained in orbit after dep…