Arup Dasgupta’s incisive article about ISRO’s human spaceflight mission, published on The Wire Science yesterday, is drawing a lot of civil, critical engagement from our readers. While this is good news from the newsroom’s perspective – civil engagement is always golden – I’d like to highlight two parts of it. First: Dasgupta’s article is a […]
Category: Analysis
The Baffler carried a fantastic critique of The New Yorker‘s use of commas by Kyle Paoletta on August 23. Excerpt: The magazine’s paper subscription slips have long carried a tagline: “The best writing, anywhere.” It follows that the source of the best writing, anywhere, must also be the finest available authority on grammar, usage, and […]
Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop, a wellness brand that has recently come under fire for advertising almost-certainly pseudoscientific “lifestyle” products like $66 jade eggs for women to insert into their vaginas to strengthen their pelvic floors, put up three notes in their defence: two by doctors and one by ‘Team goop’. The ‘Team goop’ note was the usual […]
The armour is not actually accompanied by the male gaze in the film, and may not even have been meant as armour at all.
The extent of Euclidean geometry’s imperfections only really came to light when physicists used Riemann’s geometry to set up the theories of relativity.
If the BJP/Congress have been offended by Prashant Bhushan’s tweet, it could only be because they have interpreted his tweet offensively.
if you don’t force designers to follow best practices when making an infographic, you’ll be setting a lower bar that will soon turn around and assault you with all kinds of charts conceived to hide what the numbers are really saying.
By Anuj Srivas and Vasudevan Mukunth What’s the deal with everyone getting worried about artificial intelligence? It’s all the Silicon Valley elite seem willing to be apprehensive about, and Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom seems to be the patron saint along with his book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014). Even if Big Data seems like it could […]
Quantum mechanics can sometimes be very hard to understand, so much so that even thinking about it becomes difficult. This could be because its foundations lay in the action-centric depiction of reality that slowly rejected its origins and assumed a thought-centric one garb. In his 1925 paper on the topic, physicist Werner Heisenberg used only observable quantities […]
Today, I bought The Last Temptation by Nikos Kazantzakis. When I handed the Rs. 450 it cost over at the counter, it was a significant moment for me because for the last three years, after my reading habit had fallen off but before I had realized that it had, I was rejecting books that “wouldn’t […]