A 'bold' vision
'Support Europe's bold vision for responsible research assessment', Nature editorial, July 27, 2022: The Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, announced on 20 July and open for sign…
WordPress.com rolls back its botched 'experiment'
So, WordPress.com has restored the family of premium plans that it had until April this year, and has done away with the controversial 'Starter' and 'Pro' plans. The announcement on th…
Should 'geniuses' be paid extra?
A newsletter named Ideas Sleep Furiously had an essay propounding a "genius basic income" on May 28. Here are the first two paragraphs that capture a not-insignificant portion of the essay&#…
The 5ftf blunder
Automattic owner Matt Mullenweg recently made a scene on Twitter when he called out GoDaddy as a "parasitic" organisation for profiting off of WordPress without making a sufficient number of…
A quantum theory of consciousness
We seldom have occasion to think about science and religion at the same time, but the most interesting experience I have had doing that came in October 2018, when I attended a conference called 'S…
Unless the West copies us, we're irrelevant
We have become quite good at dismissing the more asinine utterances of our ministers and other learned people in terms of either a susceptibility to pseudoscience or, less commonly, a wilful deference…
JWST and the sorites paradox
Where does beauty end and ugliness begin?…
The Higgs boson and I
My first byline as a professional journalist (a.k.a. my first byline ever) was oddly for a tech story – about the advent of IPv6 internet addresses. I started writing it after 7 pm, had to wrap it up…
25 years of Maldacena's bridge
Twenty-five years go, in 1997, an Argentine physicist named Juan Martin Maldacena published what would become the most highly cited physics paper in history (more than 20,000 to date). In the paper, M…
The problem that 'crypto' actually solves
And why that makes cryptocurrencies hard to beat.…
What the bitcoin price drop reveals about 'crypto'
One of the definitive downsides of cryptocurrencies raised its head this week when the nosediving price of bitcoin – brought on by the Luna/Terra crash and subsequent cascading effects – rendered bitc…
How do you measure peacefulness?
The study was conceived by Australian technology entrepreneur Steve Killelea [in 2007], and is endorsed by individuals such as former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the Dalai Lama, archbishop Desmon…