Something worse than a flat-Earth society
Read two interesting articles this morning: An editorial in the Indian Express about how India is the "land of the gullible", where even the "mere trappings of science suffice to tanta…
Myth of harmful cell phone radiation is good business for IndiGo
When I fly, I always fly IndiGo. They’re not perfect but they and their services have become familiar, from their website (where I book my tickets) to when I exit the airport at my destination. The ef…
The case for preprints
Daniel Mansur, the principal investigator of a lab at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina that studies how cells respond to viruses, had this to say about why preprints are useful in an intervi…
How cut-throat competition forces scientists to act against the collective
Brian Keating, an astrophysicist who led the infamous cosmic inflation announcement in 2014, thinks this is how science works: “… you put out a result, and other scientists work to test the result”. H…
Cognitive flexibility and nationalism 2.0
Remember that paper about cognitive flexibility and nationalism? The one that said people who are more nationalistic in their politics tend to have lower cognitive flexibility? I’d blogged about it he…
Performing with and without an audience
My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. … The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing. – Isaac Asimov (source) Be it far…
View from the beanstalk
In early 2015, I developed an unlikely hobby: tinkering around with hosting solutions on the web, specifically providers of infrastructure as a service (IaaS). It's unlikely because it's not s…
Who we will always be
I found this evocative image on Twitter today. It’s by a Russian artist named Yuri Shwedoff and the image is part of his ‘Space Series’, available to view and appreciate on Behance. I don’t know the p…
The March for Science, ed. 2018
K. VijayRaghavan, India’s new principal scientific advisor to the Government of India, has brought a lot of hope with him into the role as a result of his illustrious career as a biologist and former…
Cognitive flexibility and nationalism
There's something off about a new study that attempts to map the cognitive flexibility of people to their ideological preferences. To quote from the study's 'Significance' section: We…
A peek behind the curtain of the most infamous cosmic blunder of our time
I was once stupid too, and still am in many ways. One of the instances when I was more stupid than usual was when I wrote an article about the now-infamous BICEP2 'discovery' of evidence of co…
From comfortable summer wear to advanced geometry
A friend of mine got harem pants and was talking about how much more comfortable they were than a lungi in Chennai's current weather. A lungi is a long cylinder made of cloth (open at both ends of…