A sudden spike in meteor influx 290 Mya
About 300 million years ago, something happened. And the Moon was hit by meteorites twice to thrice as often after this period than before. The Solar System has always been a dangerous place for care…
An Earth sciences ministry
On January 15, Harsh Vardhan, the Union science and technology minister, mulled renaming India's Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) as "Bharat Mata Mantralaya". (In Hindi, the ministry is…
CERN's next collider looks a bit like China's
The world's largest particle physics laboratory has unveiled its design options for the Large Hadron Collider's successor – what is expected to be a 100-km long next generation 'supercolli…
A very big sentence
Writing on analytic philosophy is apparently very complex. One essay published on 3QD argues that it actually needs to be that way, and quotes a linguist quoting a philosopher to make its case. The qu…
Driving down the moderated way
There's a really yucky scene in the really yucky movie based on the half-yucky book Atlas Shrugged. A copper-mining tycoon who blew up his own mines says in a conversation with his railroad-tycoon…
Stupidity at the science congress
Load Twitter on the browser. Scroll down, scroll down further, keep going, stop… What’s that? Meh, keep scrolling. Correlation is not causation – but it’s really hard to set aside the fact that In…
Beating pseudoscience at the ISC
The following notes are specifically about VijayRaghavan's post. My overall reaction to the stupidity on display at the ISC is recorded here. At a conference at the Institute of Mathematical Scie…
A tribute to Tolkien
Instead of dismissing it with a gracious modesty, I'm going to shamelessly record for posterity that The Master quoted in Anand Venkateswaran's essay on J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hindu Literary Re…
Charge-ordering and Cooper pairs
There are many kinds of materials that become superconductors at low temperatures. One famous kind is the cuprates, compounds of copper and oxygen. Some cuprates have been known to become superconduct…
ISRO's Project ADMIRE
A member of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has confirmed it has made progress on its plan to test a new class of reusable rockets. B.N. Suresh, an honorary distinguished professor at I…
On time, and turning 30
It was recently my birthday. I turned 30. The celebrations were muted – if at all – because there's something of a moment when you exit the tweens, and the first digit of your age changes from 2 t…
The Print's list
The Print should not have published its list of "intellectuals pick their successors" at all. Its editors knew that it had no women and were aware of how that was a problem. They also had to…