On crypto-art, racism and outcome fantasies

9 min read
Analysis Op-eds Tech art criticism art patronage Beeple Big Tech Bitcoin bitcoin mining blockchain capitalism consensus algorithms crypto-art cryptocurrencies Ethereum Everydays financial transactions Metakovan Metapurse NFT non-fungible tokens power consumption proof of stake proof of work racism settlement finality Silicon Valley Sybil attack The First 5000 Days Tim Swanson Twobadour Christie's

If you want to find mistakes with something, you’ll be able to find them if you tried long enough. That doesn’t inherently make the thing worthless. The only exception I’ve encountered to this truism…

COVID-19, due process and an SNR problem

8 min read
Scicomm adverse events following immunization AstraZeneca COVID-19 pandemic COVID-19 vaccines Covishield European Medicines Agency mRNA vaccines Omelas public health risk communication signal-to-noise ratio T Jacob John Ursula Le Guin

At a press conference streamed live on March 18, the head of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) announced that the body – which serves as the European Union’s drug and vaccine regulator – had conclud…

A tale of vortices, skyrmions, paths and shapes

9 min read
Scicomm Science anyons BCS theory chiral magnets condensed matter physics David Thouless Kosterlitz-Thouless transition materials science Nanyang Technical University orbital angular momentum p-wave superconductor path dependency phase transition quantum computers quasiparticles Rashba-Edelstein effect s-wave superconductor skyrmion-vortex coupling skyrmions solid state physics superconductors supercurrent topological excitations topology Vijay Shenoy

There are many types of superconductors. Some of them can be explained by an early theory of superconductivity called Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory. In these materials, vibrations in the ato…

Physicists produce video of time crystal in action 😱

7 min read
Scicomm BESSY II Bose-Einstein condensates energy conservation Frank Wilczek Joachim Gräfe magnons MAXYMUS Pauli's exclusion principle phonons quasiparticles space crystals space time crystals spin waves superfluidity synchrotron light source thermodynamic ground state time crystals

Have you heard of time crystals? A crystal is any object whose atoms are arranged in a fixed pattern in space, with the pattern repeating itself. So what we typically know to be crystals are really s…

Anti-softening science for the state

6 min read
Op-eds Scicomm Science Bharatiya Janata Party COVID-19 pandemic free press Gautam Adani government communication report Group of Ministers report independent media Mukesh Ambani neglected tropical diseases Patanjali Ayurved Principal Scientific Adviser research and development S.S. Bhatnagar Award science journalism soft topics tigers vaccine apartheid vaccine nationalism yoga

The group of ministers (GoM) report on "government communication" has recommended that the government promote “soft topics” in the media like “yoga” and “tigers”. We can only speculate what…

What is academic freedom?

6 min read
Analysis academic freedom academic freedom index Ashis Nandy deliberative democracy freedom of cultural expression gender identity marketplace of ideas right to science Scholars At Risk Network UN ICESCR University of Erlangen-Nuremberg University of Gothenburg V-Dem Project

Note: I originally wrote two versions of this article for The Wire; one, a 'newsier' version, was published in June 2020. I'd intended to publish the version below, which is more of a disc…