Bitcoin
One of the definitive downsides of cryptocurrencies raised its head this week when the nosediving price of bitcoin – brought on by the Luna/Terra crash and subsequent cascading effects – rendered bitcoin mining less profitable. One bitcoin today costs $19,410, so it’s hard to imagine this state of affairs
anti-CAA protests
The study was conceived by Australian technology entrepreneur Steve Killelea [in 2007], and is endorsed by individuals such as former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the Dalai Lama, archbishop Desmond Tutu, former President of Finland and 2008 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari, Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, economist Jeffrey Sachs, former
care work
Just to be clear, the term ‘family’ in this post refers to a cis-het nuclear family unit. Tanvi Deshpande writing for Indiaspend, June 12, 2022: The Union government’s ambitious Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) aims to provide tap water to every household in rural India by 2024. Until now, 50%
atom laser
One of the most exotic phases of matter is called the Bose-Einstein condensate. As its name indicates, this type of matter is one whose constituents are bosons – which are basically all subatomic particles whose behaviour is dictated by the rules of Bose-Einstein statistics. These particles are also called force particles.
Big Science
A few days ago, a physicist (and PhD holder) named Thomas Hartsfield published a strange article in Big Think about why building a $100-billion particle physics machine like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a bad idea. The article was so replete with errors things that even I – a not-physicist
The names that scientists, especially physicists, give to things has been a source of humour or irritation, depending on your point of view. Despite observatories named the Very Large Telescope, succeeded by the Extremely Large Telescope, and in spite of Murray Gell-Mann naming the quarks after a word that appears
Alberto Mielgo
Spoilers abound. Two overarching impressions. 1) The Telegraph wrote that LDR 3 is about the pitfalls of human greed. I came to a different conclusion. Almost all of the episodes in LDR 3 were about humans meeting the ancient, the mysterious or the new and coming away humbled or humiliated,
blogging
Fly.io is a platform as a service (PaaS) provider. I discovered it after the Heroku hack earlier this year precipitated many discussions on Hacker News about suitable alternatives. Among them, I found Render.com and Fly.io to be most suitable (no affiliate links). Railway.app didn’t make
blogging
WordPress.com announced a new ‘Starter’ plan for its users on May 25 after significant backlash from many members of its community of users that a previous price revision had completely disregarded the interests of bloggers – by which I mean those writing to be read and discussed, and not primarily
Assam floods
The Assam floods are going on. One day, they will stop. The water will subside in many parts of the state but the things that caused the floods will continue to work, ceaselessly, and will cause them to occur again next year, and the year after and so on for
Abhinav Prakash Singh
The national vice-president of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, Abhinav Prakash Singh, published an article on May 22 on the Gyanvapi mosque issue that is from start to finish an exercise in verbal sophistry. But while we have come to expect such nonsense from functionaries of the Bharatiya Janata Party,
bitcoins
Earlier this month, a cryptocurrency token called Luna crashed in price – an event that also brought down the value of bitcoin, became the biggest crash in cryptocurrency history thus far, earned the person or persons who (probably) orchestrated this fall nearly a billion dollars, and stuck a big-ass wrench in
