The real story of ‘The Old Guard’
Spoiler alert: Don’t read this post if you intend to watch The Old Guard but haven’t done so yet. The Old Guard, an action film starring Charlize Theron among others, released on Netflix on July…
July 2020
The weekly linklist – July 25, 2020
I’ve decided to publish this linklist via Substack. Next weekend onwards, it will only be available on https://linklist.substack.com. And this is why the list exists and what kind of articles you can find in it.…
To read or not a bad man’s book
The Life of Science team uploaded the video of their webinar on July 10, about the construct of the genius in science, on YouTube on July 14. Please watch it if you haven’t already. I…
Super-spreads exist, but do super-spreaders?
What does the term ‘super-spreader’ mean? According to an article in the MIT Tech Review on June 15, “The word is a generic term for an unusually contagious individual who’s been infected with disease. In the context…
The occasional linklist – July 19, 2020
I have been pondering creating a column on my blog where I share links to articles I read and liked. I perform this function on Twitter at the moment, but the attention some links attract…
Questions we should be asking more often
1. Okay, but where’s the money coming from? In a lecture at the Asian College of Journalism, where I was in the audience as a student, P. Sainath told us that if we needed one…
Caste, and science’s notability threshold
A webinar by The Life of Science on the construct of the ‘scientific genius’ just concluded, with Gita Chadha and Shalini Mahadev, a PhD scholar at HCU, as panellists. It was an hour long and…
A non-self-correcting science
While I’m all for a bit of triumphalism when some component of conventional publication vis-à-vis scientific research – like pre-publication anonymous peer review – fails, and fails publicly, I spotted an article in The Conversation…
Citations and media coverage
According to a press release accompanying a just-published study in PLOS ONE: Highly cited papers also tend to receive more media attention, although the cause of the association is unclear. One reason I can think…
The awesome limits of superconductors
On June 24, a press release from CERN said that scientists and engineers working on upgrading the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had “built and operated … the most powerful electrical transmission line … to date”.…
My heart of physics
Every July 4, I have occasion to remember two things: the discovery of the Higgs boson, and my first published byline for an article about the discovery of the Higgs boson. I have no trouble…