Roundup – March 6, 2016
Developments I’d have liked to cover but haven’t been able to for lack of time.…
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My Foldscope
That there's now a magical device in my pocket that lets me look at a universe folded away in millionths of a meter is amazing.…
What's the universe telling us post-LIGO?
Since the LIGO Scientific Collaboration announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves on February 11, 2016, there have been at least 51 scientific papers written up on the topic discussi…
If AI is among us, would we know?
Our machines could become self-aware without our knowing it. We need a better way to define and test for consciousness. The first aliens that human beings encounter will probably not be from some oth…
Inventors of public-key cryptography win 2016 Turing Award
Cryptography pioneers receive ACM A.M. Turing award In "New Directions in Cryptography," Diffie and Hellman presented an algorithm that showed that asymmetric or public-key cryptography was…
Getting a haircut
How I know I’ve moved and settled into a new place is if I get a haircut in that place. A haircut, to me, is a form of acceptance, of allowing that pithy activity to take precedence over bigger proble…
The bad, avoidable and useless forms of journalism
Bad journalism: A Hindustan Times report on March 2 claims a high-schooler from West Bengal won a "prestigious" scholarship sponsored by NASA to study at Oxford University, having been selec…
The Black Hole Theory – baloney?
An updated version of this article was published in The Wire, March 3, 2016. I smell bullshit. Ref: The Times of India report. High-school girl from West Bengal. Claims she bumped into NASA scientis…
A return to Umberto Eco
The unwavering intensity of his writing, and of his commitment to seem to be chronicling something as opposed to be vainly conjecturing something, is what made his fiction worth committing to.…
Roundup of missed stories – February 14, 2016
Developments I’d have liked to cover but haven’t been able to for lack of time.…
Roundup of missed stories – February 8, 2016
Developments I'd have liked to cover but haven't been able to for lack of time.…
'Don't Move Away'
AR Rahman is masterful at combining lyrical traditions with those forms of music in which they've seldom existed, and achieves that seamless weave with subtle, well-crafted interventions.…