Political activation
… all forms of knowledge are implicated in political structures in one way or another. If the people who actually have expertise in that form of knowledge are not the ones activating it politically, t…
Board games II
My second visit to Tabletop Thursday on September 20 was super-fun again. This time I played four games: Colouretto, The Lady and the Tiger, Coup and Secret Hitler. I'm pretty sure one of the peop…
I don't want your ideas
Tommaso Dorigo published a blog post on the Science 2.0 platform, where he's been publishing his writing, that I would have liked to read. It was about whether neural networks could help design pa…
'Gardens of the Moon'
I – and all my friends who have read the Malazan Book of the Fallen series – have wondered why the first book in the series is titled Gardens of the Moon. The only Moon-related entity in the book is M…
The sounds of science
Do you remember the sound of a telephone ringing in the early 1990s? That polyphonic ringtone so reminiscent of the life of that decade… Do you remember the sound of using a telephone in the 1990s? T…
Fact-checking in science journalism
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has helped produce a report on fact-checking in science journalism, and it is an eye-opening read. It was drafted by Deborah Blum and Brooke Borel; there is a nic…
Will an Indian win an Ig Nobel by 2035?
The 28th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony concluded yesterday, handing out 10 prizes to 38 recipients with institutional affiliations in 26 countries. There is one recipient with an affiliation in…
Board games
Every Thursday, a Bangalore-based community called ReRoll organises an evening of boardgames open to all at Lahe Lahe, a café in Indira Nagar. According to the organisers, about 40 people come each ti…
Appeasement v. truth
Late last year, Facebook inducted The Weekly Standard (TWS), an American news outlet, as one of its only five fact-checkers and the sole conservative voice in the group. Earlier this week, TWS raised…
US court settles bitter gene editing patent case
On September 10, a US court settled an increasingly churlish patent dispute between two research institutions in the country, the University of California (UC) in Berkeley and the Broad Institute, Mas…
Idea of a country
The short excerpt below from Patriots and Partisans by Ram Guha caught my attention because it offers a simple definition of the idea of India (at the risk of oversimplification). One may have encount…
Criticism of ISRO
The Statesman‘s editorial on India’s human spaceflight programme ends with the following line: Only after placing the seventh and the last satellite in the NavIC system costing Rs 1,400 crore did ISR…