Lord of the Rings Day
Happy Lord of the Rings Day. :) About a week ago, I began rereading book 7 of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. This followed my realisation earlier this year that I had somehow lost the ability…
AI v. our ability to build AI
A lot of this article, by Sean Ekins, Filippa Lentzos, Max Brackmann, and Cédric Invernizzi, published by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on March 24, makes good sense – except the following two sen…
BLR road-widening is a sham
While I'm told that discussions on a plan to widen Bengaluru's Sankey Road, between Bhashyam Circle and Malleshwaram 18th cross – a stretch that's one of the contributors to the city's…
India's devious reason to not spend more on culture
'Difficult to allocate public fund to art and culture: Centre', The Hindu, March 19, 2023: Given the high disparity it experiences in elementary rural infrastructure like health, education an…
Nature paper says bad news is good news
'Negativity drives online news consumption', Claire E. Robertson et al., Nature Human Behaviour, March 16, 2023: Here we analyse the effect of negative words on news consumption using a massi…
What's the anomaly in a Nobel for Modi?
I'm sure you've seen the reports doing the rounds today that some person on some Nobel Prize Committee said Prime Minister Narendra Modi was very deserving of the vaunted peace prize, followed…
The devil's lassi
‘The Devil’s Milkshake’, Tarence Ray in The Baffler, February 23, 2023: You’ve seen it before. An industrial disaster poisons a town’s food or water supply. Residents get angry. Public officials try…
Who are you, chatbot AI?
In case you haven’t been following, and to update my own personal records, here’s a list of notable {AI chatbot + gender}-related articles and commentary on the web over the last few weeks. (While I’v…
Some science prizes are only for men
Say Someone has won the Nobel Prize for physics, perhaps the most prestigious honour (as awards go) for a physicist. What would it mean for all the future awards given to this Someone? One thing that…
Keep working. Don't get up.
'Inside Meta’s Push to Solve the Noisy Office', WSJ, February 16, 2023: Coming to the campuses of Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. is a contraption that can block sound, shield workers fro…
A vortex in my bucket
One of the taps in my bathroom at home issues water in laminar flow – without any turbulence. Sometimes the flow from the tap to the bucket looks like it's frozen: there are no disturbances on the…
Hype from Fermilab
Where do you think the following bit of text is from? A wormhole, also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge, is a hypothetical tunnel connecting remote points in spacetime. While wormholes are allowed b…