How science is presented and consumed on Facebook
This post is a breakdown of the Pew study titled The Science People See on Social Media, published March 21, 2018. Without further ado… or Is popularity the best way to judge if a Facebook page coun…
Life notes
113 posts
Happy Lord of the Rings Day!
The Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy series exhibited a rabid yet desirable iconoclasm, through which its author Steven Erikson elucidated every trope of epic fantasy and then shit on it. I came out…
Looking for gemstones in the gutter
Just the other day, I’d mentioned to a friend that Steven Pinker was one of those rare people whose ideas couldn’t be appreciated by proxy, such as through the opinions of other authority figures, but…
On that Poynter debate about stock images and ethical visual journalism
Response to Mark Johnson, Article about free images 'contradicts everything I hold true about journalism', Poynter, February 9, 2018. ∞ Let's get the caveats out of the way: * The artic…
ISRO v. SpaceX doesn't make sense
Though I've never met the guy, I don't hold Pallava Bagla in very high regard because his stories – particularly of the Indian space programme – for NDTV have often reeked of simplistic concer…
We don't have a problem with the West, we're just obsessed with it
How much do we not know about what Indian researchers are doing simply because Western scientists haven't written to some of them?…
Dealing with plagiarism? Look at thy neighbour
Four doctors affiliated with Kathmandu University (KU) in Nepal are going to be fired because they plagiarised data in two papers. The papers were retracted last year from the Bali Medical Journal, wh…
To watch 'The Post'
I read a few reviews of The Post. Based on what the critics are saying, it seems the film has at least the potential to raise the spirits of many journalists today who could use a leg up. That said, I…
Limitations of the Finkbeiner test
This post was republished on The Wire on January 8, 2018. The Finkbeiner test, named for science writer Ann Finkbeiner, was created to check whether a profile of a female scientist published by a mai…
WordPress's ineptitude
As some of you might know, I've been having some issues with WordPress.com in terms of their UX, their service as well as a few outages. I've been on the platform for almost a decade now, duri…
Happy new year!
2017 was a blast. Lots of things happened. The world became a shittier place in many ways and better in a few. Mostly, Earth just went around the Sun once more, and from what we know, it's going t…
A shorter article about short gamma ray bursts lights up little
* Identify a simple and well-defined question * Describe the question and answer it * Get the fuck out Writing with these three rules in mind makes for a good science article. You stick to the poi…