Get to the bottom of it
182 posts
I received a sharp reminder to better distinguish between activists and experts irrespective of how right the activists appear to be with the case of Ustad, that tiger shifted from its original habita…
"Don't politicise X" has become the defence of choice for a class of scientists and public intellectuals in India whose class and caste privilege utterly blinds them to various inequitie…
Since after September 7, when the Vikram lander of the Chandrayaan 2 mission failed to touchdown on the lunar surface, many writers and thinkers on the political left have been adopting a stance of th…
Last week in India: Two scientists who coauthored two papers, along with many others from India as well as abroad, have spoken out against the conclusions of those papers even as they refused to dista…
My report about ISRO's '90-95%' success claim vis-à-vis Chandrayaan 2 had precisely three kinds of response, split 49%, 49% and 2%. One 49% group went like this: The other 49% went like…
While there have been no other high-profile exits from the MIT Media Lab after Ethan Zuckerman and J. Nathan Matias submitted their resignations, the lab’s students had been demanding its director Joi…
This article has been republished on The Wire. When the Vikram lander's autonomous descent manoeuvre didn't go as planned, scientists of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) looked s…
https://twitter.com/BDUTT/status/1170243147626008576 I understand Dutt’s interpretation of the moment in question but with reservations about what it signals for the nation’s many oppressed. For star…
Should Prime Minister Narendra Modi not have been in the control room during the autonomous descent phase of Chandrayaan 2? Did his presence exert unnecessary pressure on the ISRO scientists? I don’t…
The Union culture ministry had announced in November last year that it would develop a 'Vedic Heritage' portal to promote the Vedas, and hoped to inaugurate it by March 2019. It would seem the…
The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was founded in 2012 by Yuri Milner to recognise those individuals who have made profound contributions to human knowledge. It is open to all physicists –…
Note: Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell on August 10, 2019. The following post was written before news of his death emerged. In 2016, I attended a talk by a not-unknown environmental activis…