A flood as an opportunity
Our preparedness for the effects of climate change is both mitigating global avg. surface temperature rise and better planning public spaces and improving the distribution/accessibility of resources.…
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767 posts
A measure of media trustworthiness
A publication online that makes its money by displaying ads can be profitable even by publishing a slew of bad or offensive articles. That will drive the traffic too; people will share its content eve…
Breaking the bargain
A nasty review of P.V. Sindhu's performance at the World Badminton Championships by Sandip Sarkar for the Hindustan Times: Take Spain’s Carolina Marin for example. Just two years older than Sindh…
The unclosed clause and other things about commas
The Baffler carried a fantastic critique of The New Yorker's use of commas by Kyle Paoletta on August 23. Excerpt: The magazine’s paper subscription slips have long carried a tagline: “The best w…
Talking scicomm at NCBS – II
I was invited to speak to the students of the annual science writing workshop conducted at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, for the second year (first year talk's notes here…
False equivalency
Margaret Sullivan in the Washington Post on August 16: “The whole doctrine of objectivity in journalism has become part of the [media’s] problem,” Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York Univer…
Good service shouldn't necessitate support
There's a difference between a service coming with excellent support and a service with excellent support that you rarely have to access. The latter would be any service where issues can be resolv…
A for-publishers stack and the symmetry of globalisation
Journalism as the fourth estate has been noticeably empowered in the Information Age, with technologies like the WWW, broadband connectivity and smartphones in (almost) everyone's pockets. However…
A blogging problem, contd.
Over the last three days, I'd been having a strange issue with WordPress. If you read a post I published yesterday that briefly discussed WordPress's pros and cons, you might remember I mentio…
ASI's note to Financial Exp. over eclipse article is naïve
The public outreach arm of the Astronomical Society of India has written to the Financial Express expressing concern over their August 7 article, which advised people to fast during a lunar eclipse. T…
A blogging problem
Since June 2017, I've amassed 14 domains, accounts on four VPS providers, provisioned scores of servers, initiated a zillion sites and moved my own blog around from one domain and platform to the…
A misremembering
Two Indian scientists who passed away recently – Yash Pal and Pushpa Mittra Bhargava – spent a large part of their lives ensuring that lay people had access to bona fide scientific material and that o…