A future obscured by exponential growth
A couple months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I think most of us realised how hard it is to comprehend the phenomenon of exponential growth. Mathematically, it's trivial – a geometric progression –…
technology
5 posts
'Hunters', sci-fi and pseudoscience
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…
Science v. tech, à la Cixin Liu
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…
No country for new journalism
Through an oped in Nieman Lab, Ken Doctor makes a timely case for explanatory - or explainer - journalism being far from a passing fad. Across the many factors that he argues contribute to its rise and persistence in western markets, there is evidence that he believes explainer journalism's historic…
The cost of solutions
Hereby, a new metric: Solution cost (SC) SC = Cost of finding the solution to a particular problem - (Rate at which the applications of the solution become cheaper * t), t = No. of years across whic…