Culture - Catabatic (Page 10)

Review: 'Paatal Lok' (2020)

May 16, 2020 3 min read

I binge-watched Paatal Lok today, a show on Amazon Prime India about a cynical cop who is all too familiar with how the The System works and who gets a high profile case by chance – to investigate a c…

In defence of ignorance

Apr 29, 2020 5 min read

Analysis Culture conspiracy theories Dunning-Kruger effect expertise fear of missing out FOMO hot air human psychology ignorance information overload Jose Luis Borges social media The Souffle the thing itself Twitter

Wish I may, wish I might Have this wish, I wish tonight I want that star, I want it now I want it all and I don't care how Metallica, King Nothing I'm a news editor who frequently uses Twitt…

Lord of the Rings Day

Mar 25, 2020 3 min read

Culture Life notes Black Leopard Red Wolf Deepanjana Pal Denethor Discworld ergodic fantasy fantasy fiction Faramir Gautam Shenoy inventiveness JRR Tolkien Lord of the Rings Malazan Book of the Fallen Steven Erikson Supriya Nair Ted Chiang Terry Pratchett Thomas Manuel

A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you! (Previous editions: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014) Every year I pen a commemorative piece about Lord of the Rings, and share something about the books and films t…

'Hunters', sci-fi and pseudoscience

Mar 8, 2020 3 min read

Culture Scicomm Science Adolf Hitler Bharatiya Janata Party civil aviation Delhi riots Edward Bulwer-Lytton electricity ethnic cleansing Hindutva Hunters identity politics John Forster Nazism occult provincialism pseudoscience sci-fi science fiction technology The Coming Race Vril

One of the ways in which pseudoscience is connected to authoritarian governments is through its newfound purpose and duty to supply an alternate intellectual tradition that subsumes science as well as…

Review: 'Hunters' (2020)

Mar 8, 2020 1 min read

Culture Al Pacino Amazon Prime conspiracy theories Hunters moral dilemma Nazism Operation Paperclip

Just binge-watched the first season of Hunters, the bizarre Amazon Prime original about a covert group of Jews in 1970s' New York city tracking down and killing Nazis who were integrated by the US…

Writing itself is fantasy

Mar 3, 2020 3 min read

Culture Ariekei Arrival China Miéville Dune Embassytown Flatland Frank Herbert Harry Potter heptapods Higgs boson higher dimensions hypersphere language linguistics nonlinear storytelling nonlinearity Orson Scott Card sphericity three dimensions time varelse

The symbols may have been laid down on paper or the screen in whatever order but when we read, we read the words one at a time, one after another – linearly. Writing, especially of fiction, is an act…

Peter Higgs, self-promoter

Feb 20, 2020 2 min read

Culture Science C.R. Hagen Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Englert Francois Englert Gerald Guralnik Gerardus t Hooft Greenpeace Higgs Higgs boson Higgs mechanism Large Hadron Collider particle physics Peter Higgs Philip Warren Anderson Robert Brout Sheldon Cooper The Big Bang Theory Tom Kibble Wolf Prize

I was randomly rewatching The Big Bang Theory on Netflix today when I spotted this gem: Okay, maybe less a gem and more a shiny stone, but still. The screenshot, taken from the third episode of the s…

Review: 'Parasite' (2019)

Feb 18, 2020 5 min read

Culture Bong Joon-ho caste guilt class conflict cognitive function Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd Parasite Parasite film Poverty Sendhil Mullainathan Shaheen Bagh

In 2011, the Dalit rights scholar and activist Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd (then only Kancha Ilaiah) addressed a room of 150 or so students of the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. In the first 20 minu…

The potential energy of being entertained

Feb 13, 2020 4 min read

Culture Science cable carbon accounting climate change climate change journalism doomsday scenario DVD hope neoliberalism Netflix positive news social isolation

Netflix just published a report drafted by its Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, estimating – among other things – its environmental footprint for operations during the year 2019. According t…

The fascist's trap

Feb 10, 2020 2 min read

Culture anti-national army body politik fascism fascist body homogeneity IIT Kanpur martyrdom soldiers The Telegraph

The following lines appear in the opening portion of G.S. Mudur's report in The Telegraph about government opposition to student protests: “The people protecting our democracy are the people in J…

The chrysalis that isn't there

Feb 6, 2020 3 min read

Culture Science British Medical Journal chrysalis experiments gender discrimination industry of science modern science patriarchy publish or perish science and society scientific enterprise scientific literature scientific method scientific research

I wrote the following post while listening to this track. Perhaps you will enjoy reading it to the same sounds. Otherwise, please consider it a whimsical recommendation. :) I should really start keep…

Science v. tech, à la Cixin Liu

Jan 17, 2020 2 min read

Culture Science Bernhard Riemann Cixin Liu glass ceiling Large Hadron Collider mathematics non-Euclidean geometry particle physics Riemannian geometry technology Three Body Problem

A fascinating observation by Cixin Liu in an interview in Public Books, to John Plotz and translated by Pu Wang (numbers added): … technology precedes science. (1) Way before the rise of modern scien…