Two books
When thoughts turn stale, read a book. I’m reading two at the moment, which is telling. Patriots and Partisans by historian Ram Guha, an accessible narration of the historical roots of modern Indian national politics.…
August 2018
Satire: Ducks in water could increase oxygen content
According to Biplab Deb, the chief minister of Tripura, the oxygen content of water will increase if ducks swim in it. [Satire begins here] This is a sensational new discovery that has drastic implications for…
The editor, the writer and the exclusivity
Do all editors share that excoriating sensation that carves through one’s gut when one sees one’s writer writing for another publication? Of course, “one’s writer” is unjust phrasing because writers don’t belong to editors and…
Absolute hot
There’s only one absolute zero but there are multiple absolute ‘hots’, depending on the temperature at which various theories of physics break down. This is an interesting conception because, while absolute zero is very well-defined…
War and peace
I asked a friend earlier today if he would be interested in explaining the observation of Lyman-alpha lines in anti-hydrogen to an audience of high-schoolers.But will high-schoolers ever be able to understand what Lyman-alpha lines…
The spades
Donald Trump When you criticise a person, you naturally take into account their office and assess whether you know all that you need to to come to your conclusions. For a long time, this ‘stop…
Landing over Chennai
Chennai is my favourite city to land in an airplane over. The runway at its Meenambakkam Airport is oriented such that planes often have to land after manoeuvring themselves over the Bay of Bengal, approaching…
On the banner on the ISRO homepage
The ISRO homepage has been hijacked by an almost-full-page banner soliciting readers’ comments about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Independence Day speech. A friend was understandably irked by this and wanted to know if it could…
Failing Sarabhai
We are convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role nationally, and in the community of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems…
High-temp. superconductivity, hype cycles and peer review
TL;DR – Journalists are already more accountable than the publishers of scientific journals are. If scientists find journalistic review of the scientific literature to be lacking, help them improve instead of completely disabling them from…
Diffuse sunlight and pleasure
I just got to Delhi from Bangalore. The sendoff in the latter city was great: the skies were overcast, with a darker, wetter layer of clouds looming at the zenith, set at snail’s pace by…
Ghost’s Koenig editor
The new content editor in the Ghost CMS, named Koenig, is quite good, a much smoother use than WordPress’s new Gutenberg. Ghost’s latest iteration in v1.25.3 (as of today) has a full-screen minimal layout and…