On time, and turning 30
It was recently my birthday. I turned 30. The celebrations were muted – if at all – because there’s something of a moment when you exit the tweens, and the first digit of your age…
December 2018
The Print’s list
The Print should not have published its list of “intellectuals pick their successors” at all. Its editors knew that it had no women and were aware of how that was a problem. They also had…
Journalism’s ‘stories’
I can think of at least four different words newsrooms use to describe the bundles of content they work with: story, piece, article and copy (‘content’ itself isn’t one of them). With a few exceptions,…
Character development in DnD
In all the DnD games I’ve played, I’ve felt there’s a tension between allowing the story to progress and the characters all helping each other participate in that progression. For example, we as players play…
Foundations of reality
I haven’t ever been more interested in anything than physics and epic fantasy. So I thought it might be interesting to think about whether they complement each other. Being a science writer writing about things…
White-opia
John Horgan asked 15 people – scientists, social psychologists, philosophers – one question, in a seemingly clever effort to mark the end of 2018: Unless you are too stoned or enlightened to care, you are…
A question for Modi
On December 18, Manmohan Singh took a jibe at Narendra Modi for not holding any press conferences in his term as PM. To get in on the action, 15 people at The Wire (including myself) pitched 15…
Nobel Prizes and traditionalism
James English had a wonderful piece in Public Books recently, discussing how the Nobel Prize for literature: Is a prize that has always struggled to be meaningful, given how its laureates are shortlisted, the capital that incentivises its…
Why physical networks aren’t like their on-paper counterparts
At first glance, this tweets appears to state something obvious: Of course the three-dimensional arrangement of links and nodes, and the space they occupy, influences the ultimate form of the network. But being a tweet,…
On cosmology’s scicomm disaster
Jamie Farnes, a theoretical physicist at Oxford University, recently had a paper published that claimed the effects of dark matter and dark energy could be explained by replacing them with a fluid-like substance that was created spontaneously,…
Using light to cool sound
Laser light has been used to cool atoms down to near absolute zero. The technique is simple, if versatile. (And includes some history involving a little-known Indian physicist.) Laser light is shined on an atom…
New binary black-hole mergers
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a post about how quickly the discovery of black-hole mergers through gravitational waves was becoming run o’ the mill. All of the gravitational wave detection announcements before this…