The Merge
Earlier this month, a major event happened in the cryptocurrency space called the 'Merge'. In this event, the ethereum blockchain changed the way it achieves consensus – from using a proof-of-…
Ramanujan, Nash, Turing, Mirzakhani
From a short review of a new documentary about the life and work of the Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, September 9, 2022: While there are other movies about real-life mathematicians such as…
A physics story of infinities, goats and colours
When I was writing in August about physicist Sheldon Glashow’s objection to Abdus Salam being awarded a share of the 1979 physics Nobel Prize, I learnt that it was because Salam had derived a theory t…
How do you make a mode-locked laser?
Given Mode-locked lasers are lasers that are capable of producing intense ultra-short pulses of light at a very high rate. Concepts Set 1 Take a bunch of atoms, excite them and place them in a b…
The strange NYT article on taming minks
I'm probably waking up late to this but the New York Times has published yet another article in which it creates a false balance by first focusing on the problematic side of a story for an inordin…
Why everyone should pay attention to Stable Diffusion
Many of the people in my circles hadn’t heard of Stable Diffusion until I told them, and I was already two days late. Heralds of new technologies have a tendency to play up every new thing, however in…
When a teenager wants to solve poaching with machine-learning…
We always need more feel-good stories, but we need those feel-good stories more that withstand closer scrutiny instead of falling apart, and framed the right way. For example, Smithsonian magazine pu…
The search for a powerful natural particle accelerator
And the promise of one distant supernova remnant.…
Yes, scientific journals should publish political rebuttals
If they can.…
In search of sandastros
About a week ago, I wrote to ICANN asking for a list of all the .com domains that were still available. After I received the file a few days later, I used two pieces of code to extract all the single-…
What makes 'good science journalism'?
From 'Your Doppelgänger Is Out There and You Probably Share DNA With Them', The New York Times, August 23, 2022: Dr. Esteller also suggested that there could be links between facial features…
On the record about a source of irritation
I need to go on the record about a source of mild irritation that seems to resurface in periodic fashion: the recent Current Affairs article about the "dangerous populist science of Yuval Noah Ha…