Some comments on India's heat
Responses to a few questions from BBC World reporters about the temperature crisis in India's centre and north.…
Analysis
257 posts
The problem with giving “Mother Nature” rights and duties
Recently, the Madras high court passed a curiously worded order in which Justice S. Srimathy extended the Uttarakhand high court's 2017 order, granting the rights due to citizens to the Ganga and…
India – where repairing a bad road could make life worse
There is a long road that runs from Mantri Mall to Sankey Road, in Malleshwaram, Bengaluru, called Sampige Road. There are eighteen smaller roads that branch off from it on either side (straightforwar…
NFTs aren't thriving – they're often in the hospital
This is not a real anniversary but it's worth commemorating, if only to remember the pseudo-events propping up the NFT business-culture. One month and one year ago, a cryptocurrency user named Met…
On the NBDSA opinion against Zee News
On April 5, JNU PhD student Shehla Rashid tweeted that the National Broadcasting and Digital Standards Agency (NBDSA) had ordered Zee News to remove links to a show it had broadcast in November 2020,…
The paradoxical virtues of primacy in science
Primacy is a false virtue imposed by the structures of modern science – yet it is also necessary to right some wrongs.…
Must war have consequences for scientists?
The Journal of Molecular Structure has temporarily banned manuscript submissions from scientists working at state science institutes in Russia. The decision extends the consequences of war beyond the…
Art is something for cryptocurrencies to con
Cryptocurrencies have emerged as a way to fund art, and therefore supposedly support artists, using the Trojan horse of NFTs.…
Marie Curie: An icon or 'in the way'?
Who would have been the most iconic woman physicist of all time if the Nobel Prizes didn't exist?…
PTI, celebrating scientists, and class/caste
PTI's decision to stick Anna Menon's name in a headline about the new SpaceX crew makes no sense.…
Crypto: Climate change means new tech has less time today to prove itself
I spent this weekend reading about permissioned and permissionless blockchain systems. If you want to get in on it, I can’t recommend this post by David Rosenthal enough. Much of the complexity of exe…
The persistence of NFTs
NFTs freak me out. One of the ways in which my grandmother lost touch with her daughter – my mother – was my mother's generation's access to and use of computers, smartphones and the internet.…