Hope.
Every time I read Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel Prize citation lecture, ‘My Father’s Suitcase’, I am transported to a day I can’t now fully recall. Every growing child has that day, when, shielded from the vicissitudes…
August 2013
The Indecipherable Familiarity
I like writing in italics. Once every two or three months, she makes me feel weak in the knees. Catches me off guard, when I’m not ready, when I’m not looking, when I can’t see…
A leap forward in ‘flow’ batteries
Polymer-based separators in conventional batteries bring their share of structural and operational defects to the table, and reduce the efficiency and lifetime of the battery. To circumvent this issue, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of…
Where the Indian infiniteness?
I didn’t know Kenneth Wilson had died on June 15 until an obituary appeared in Nature on August 1. He was a Nobel Prize winning physicist and mathematician whose contribution to science was and is great. He…
The death of data
efskehfsfrhlrfkdrslfhrgrgwfwfsfrehfIDROPPEDMYHARDDRIVE! From a height of six feet. Now it makes a high-pitched noise every time I plug it in, and refuses to be read. I know this isn’t a big issue, one that’s easily fixed,…
Life, distilled.
Book review: A Ball of Fire, John Montague (Bloomsbury, Rs. 299) When Gwendolyn Brooks remarked that poetry was “life distilled”, she may have overlooked John Montague and his collection of short stories, A Ball of Fire,…
For intimacy, move apart.
A paper published last week in the Journal of Communication indicates that couples in long-distance relationships could be more intimate than those in geographically close ones. The researchers, Crystal Jiang and Jeffrey Hancock, think this is because…
Temper worsening? Could be the climate.
A study of studies by economists from Princeton and UCal, Berkeley, has found that as the climate worsens due to global warming, human violence is likely to get more frequent and intensified. The economists don’t…