2012 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: 4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 22,000 views in 2012. If each…
December 2012
The case of the red-haired kids
Seriously, shame on me for not noticing the release of a product named Correlate until December 2012. Correlate by Google was released in May last year and is a tool to see how two different search trends…
Dr. Stone on the Higgs search
On December 10, 2012, I spoke to a bunch of physicists attending the Frontiers of High-energy Physics symposium at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. They included Rahul Sinha, G. Rajasekaran, Tom Kibble, Sheldon Stone,…
Is there only one road to revolution?
Read this first. Some of this connects, some of it doesn’t. Most of all, I have discovered a fear in me that keeps me from from disagreeing with people like Meena Kandasamy – great orators,…
How big is your language?
This blog post first appeared, as written by me, on The Copernican science blog on December 20, 2012. — It all starts with Zipf’s law. Ever heard of it? It’s a devious little thing, especially…
NPPs in Japan
In the first general elections held since the phased shutdown of nuclear reactors across Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) scored a landslide victory. Incidentally, the LDP was also the party most vehemently opposed to…
How will nuclear fusion develop in a carbon-free world?
On December 5, Dr. Stephen. P. Obenschain was awarded the 2012 Fusion Power Associates’ (FPA) Leadership Award for his leadership qualities in accelerating the development of fusion. Dr. Obenschain is the branch-head of the U.S.…
The strong CP problem: We’re just lost
Unsolved problems in particle physics are just mind-boggling. They usually concern nature at either the smallest or the largest scales, and the smaller the particle whose properties you’re trying to decipher, the closer you are…
One of the hottest planets cold enough for ice
This article, as written by me, appeared in The Hindu on December 6, 2012. — Mercury, the innermost planet in the Solar System, is like a small rock orbiting the Sun, continuously assaulted by the…
Reaching for the… sky?
This article, as written by me, appeared in The Hindu on December 4, 2012. — The Aakash initiative of the Indian government is an attempt to bolster the academic experience of students in the country…