One-track mind on a flight
The air hostess I just paid 300 rupees to mistook the 100-rupee note for a 50, and realised her mistake only when I asked her for the change. She said she’d give it to me later because she didn’t have…
Chandrayaan 2 and the Left
Since after September 7, when the Vikram lander of the Chandrayaan 2 mission failed to touchdown on the lunar surface, many writers and thinkers on the political left have been adopting a stance of th…
Scientific fact? Not good enough to be true.
Last week in India: Two scientists who coauthored two papers, along with many others from India as well as abroad, have spoken out against the conclusions of those papers even as they refused to dista…
The fight over ISRO
My report about ISRO's '90-95%' success claim vis-à-vis Chandrayaan 2 had precisely three kinds of response, split 49%, 49% and 2%. One 49% group went like this: The other 49% went like…
Toppling Epstein's intellectuals network
While there have been no other high-profile exits from the MIT Media Lab after Ethan Zuckerman and J. Nathan Matias submitted their resignations, the lab’s students had been demanding its director Joi…
Fog of war
August 2019 was a crappy month. I’m just emerging from nasty fevers of the body and mind and haven’t fully recovered yet. I’ve become more cynical in the last few weeks – which I didn’t think was poss…
To fail with grace
This article has been republished on The Wire. When the Vikram lander's autonomous descent manoeuvre didn't go as planned, scientists of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) looked s…
The PM's Chandrayaan group-hug
https://twitter.com/BDUTT/status/1170243147626008576 I understand Dutt’s interpretation of the moment in question but with reservations about what it signals for the nation’s many oppressed. For star…
Moon, mission and Modi
Should Prime Minister Narendra Modi not have been in the control room during the autonomous descent phase of Chandrayaan 2? Did his presence exert unnecessary pressure on the ISRO scientists? I don’t…
Moon landings
Ahead of Chandrayaan 2’s date with the lunar surface on September 7, the following line has been bandied about in the Indian as well as foreign media: Only three countries – the US, Russia and China…
Another exit from MIT Media Lab
J. Nathan Matias, a newly minted faculty member at Cornell University and a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab, has announced that he will cut all ties with the latter at the end of the academic ye…
Joi Ito's nerd tunnel vision
On August 15, Joi Ito, the director of MIT's famed Media Lab, published a post apologising for fraternising with Jeffrey Epstein. His wording mimics a bit of George Church's as well, in that I…