The not-so-obvious obvious
If your job requires you to pore through a dozen or two scientific papers every month – as mine does – you’ll start to notice a few every now and then couching a somewhat well-known…
January 2020
A meeting with the PSA’s office
The Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) organised a meeting with science communicators from around India on January 27, in New Delhi. Some of my notes from the meeting are displayed below, published with…
Losing sight of the agricultural finish line
In The Guardian, Joanna Blythman pokes an important pin into the frustrating but unsurprisingly durable bubble of vegan cuisine and the low-hanging fruits of ethical eating: These days it’s fashionable to eulogise plant foods as…
Atoms within atoms
It’s a matter of some irony that forces that act across larger distances also give rise to lots of empty space – although the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. The…
Being on the NSI podcast
Narayan Prasad, the CEO of SatSearch, hosts a popular podcast called NewSpace India. Every episode, he hosts one person and they talk about something related to the Indian and international space programmes. I was the…
Science v. tech, à la Cixin Liu
A fascinating observation by Cixin Liu in an interview in Public Books, to John Plotz and translated by Pu Wang (numbers added): … technology precedes science. (1) Way before the rise of modern science, there…
The mad world
Kate Wagner writes in The Baffler: What makes industrial landscapes unique is that they fascinate regardless of whether they’re operating. The hellish Moloch of a petrochemical refinery is as captivating as one of the many…
Free speech at the outer limits
On January 12, Peter W. Wood, president of an American organisation called the National Association of Scholars (NAS), wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal against attempts by one individual to prevent NAS from…
Google Docs: A New Hope
I suspect the Google Docs grammar bot is the least useful bot there is. After hundreds of suggestions, I can think of only one instance in which it was right. Is its failure rate so…
Necessity and sufficiency
With apologies for recalling horrible people early in the day: I chanced upon this article quoting Lawrence Krauss talking about his friend Jeffrey Epstein from April 2011, and updated in July 2019. Excerpt (emphasis added):…
The Resistance of the Time
Let us visit the future – a suitable point of time located in one of the many tomorrows ahead of us, a tomorrow far enough to have left The Time behind. What do we see?…
The pocket-sized accelerator
The world’s largest machine is called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It’s in the shape of a ring with a circumference of 26 km, and cost $3.4 billion (Rs 24,262 crore) and 12 years to…