Diffuse sunlight and pleasure
I just got to Delhi from Bangalore. The sendoff in the latter city was great: the skies were overcast, with a darker, wetter layer of clouds looming at the zenith, set at snail's pace by a strong…
Ghost's Koenig editor
The new content editor in the Ghost CMS, named Koenig, is quite good, a much smoother use than WordPress's new Gutenberg. Ghost's latest iteration in v1.25.3 (as of today) has a full-screen mi…
Weekend getaway
I just spent the weekend at Sunti koppa, a small village to the northwest of Mysore, in Kodagu, a.k.a. Coorg, district. I was there with my relatives – six of us in all – and we were put up at a homes…
Pro-preprints around the world
After I published my rebuttal to the Nature anti-preprints article, a scientist in the US wrote to me saying he was on the journal's side and that he expects preprints to be done away with in the…
Non-ergodicity and diversity
Ergodicity is the condition wherein a sample is representative of the whole vis-a-vis some statistical parameter. An ergodic system is one that visits all possible states of its existence as it evolve…
A new discrimination
An article in KurzweilAI begins, Plants could soon provide our electricity. Why would anyone take this seriously? More than excitement, this line rouses a discerning reader to suspicion. It is bound…
Preprints don't promote confusion – so taking them away won't fix anything
In response to my Twitter thread against Tom Sheldon's anti-preprints article in Nature, I received more responses in support of Sheldon's view than I expected. So I wrote an extended takedown…
A detector for electron ptychography
Anyone who writes about physics research must have a part of their headspace currently taken up by assessing a new and potentially groundbreaking claim out of the IISc: the discovery of superconductiv…
Redshift and eclipse
I am thoroughly dispirited. I had wanted to write today about how it is fascinating that we have validated Einstein's theory of general relativity for the first time in an extreme environment: in…
Silly arguments to restrict access to preprints
Tom Sheldon, a senior press manager at the Science Media Centre (SMC), London, had an interesting proposition – at least at first – published in Nature on July 24. The journal's Twitter handle had…
The Tooth
I went to the most terrifying place in the world today: the dental clinic. I'd woken up this morning with a sharp pain under my right lower jaw and, soon enough, I realised it was time to get rid…
The surprises
https://twitter.com/notrueindian/status/1021302944992407553 "Nature is Lovecraftian" … is it? The literature of H.P. Lovecraft in freaky, at odds with the more conventional, less morally de…