Pseudoscientific materials and thermoeconomics
The Shycocan Corp. took out a full-page jacket ad in the Times of India on June 22 – the same day The Telegraph (UK) had a story about GBP 2,900 handbags by Gucci that exist only online, in some video…
Scicommers as knowledge producers
Reading the latest edition of Raghavendra Gadagkar's column in The Wire Science, 'More Fun Than Fun', about how scientists should become communicators and communicators should be treated a…
Looking for ghost particles in a frustrated world
In some of the many types of objects and events involving electrons, it is helpful to think that these particles are made up of three smaller particles, called spinons, holons and orbitons. Physicists…
Homo medicatis
With Covishield in my body, I feel like there is a capillary tube erupting from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, and its panoply of attendant bodies vis-à-vis India's COVID-19 response,…
Bharat Biotech gets 1/10 for tweet
If I had been Bharat Biotech's teacher and "Where is your data?" had been an examination question, Bharat Biotech would have received 1 out of 10 marks. The correct answer to where is…
'Science people'
Two of the most annoying kinds of 'science people' I've come across on social media of late: * Those who perform rationalism – These people seem to know a small subset of things well and…
Notes on mindful email use
Recently, Basecamp released an email service, called Hey, many of whose features essentially embody a technological approach to solving one of the biggest problems with email: its users. GMail is vers…
On the lab-leak hypothesis
One problem with the debate over the novel coronavirus's "lab leak" origin hypothesis is a problem I'm starting to see in quite a few other areas of pandemic-related analysis and dis…
Broken clocks during the pandemic
Proponents of conspiracy theories during the pandemic, at least in India, appear to be like broken clocks: they are right by coincidence, without the right body of evidence to back their claims. Two o…
The problems with one-shot Covishield
NDTV quoted unnamed sources in the Indian government saying it will be conducting a study to assess the feasibility of deploying the Covishield vaccine in a single-dose regimen instead of continuing t…
'Surface of last screaming'
This has nothing to do with anything in the news. I was reading up about the Big Bang for a blog post when I came across this lucid explanation – so good it's worth sharing for that reason alone –…
The political theatre of Vardhan v. Ramdev
Last week, Baba Ramdev made offensive remarks against allopathic medicine and against people desperately looking for oxygen for their loved ones hospitalised with COVID-19. On Sunday, Union health min…