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September 2014

The dignity of human labor

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My Twitter friend and compatriot @zeusisdead made a good, bristling case for why we shouldn’t celebrate India’s Mars Orbiter mission’s frugality. Here’s a telling excerpt from his piece as it appeared in Times of India: ISRO… 

A “Dear ISRO” moment

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Even if ISRO has launched a spacecraft to Mars, the payload limit still stands in the way of taking full advantage of scientific interest on the ground. But apparently now isn’t the time to think… 

Slideshow: Mission Mars

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The Americans had the skycrane and their seven minutes of hell. This is India’s ultimate so-near-yet-so-far moment. The Mars Orbiter mission better work out.

Back to work

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When I decided to quit The Hindu and leave for grad studies at New York University, my parents, relatives, their friends, my father’s boss at work, his family and their friends all said that I’d… 

Science journalism as an institutional undertaking

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“The paper has been through many financial crises and Science Times has not been affected.” These were the words of David Corcoran, Editor, NYT Science Times, who’d dropped by my NYU SHERP class today for… 

New York winters

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No patterns that I can see. O New York, how cold will you be this winter? Because I come from Chennai and 22 deg. C is cold enough. Full data here.

The trouble ‘measuring’ geomagnetic events

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The Richter scale describes the strength of earthquakes, and enough quakes have occurred across the spectrum of strengths for it to be well calibrated. On the Kp index scale, however, more occurrences of stronger and… 

Being a science journalist with dignity

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Classes at NYU have started! On day one, Michael Balter, who is a senior correspondent for Science, kicked off the program with an introduction to interviewing by, simply enough, interviewing each one of us, having…