Category Archives: Culture

Lord of the Rings Day

Posted on March 25, 2020 by VM

A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you! (Previous editions: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014) Every year I pen a commemorative piece about Lord of the Rings, and share something about the books and films that I think about … Continue reading →

Posted in Culture, Life notes | Tagged Black Leopard Red Wolf, Deepanjana Pal, Denethor, Discworld, ergodic, fantasy, fantasy fiction, Faramir, Gautam Shenoy, inventiveness, JRR Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, Malazan Book of the Fallen, Steven Erikson, Supriya Nair, Ted Chiang, Terry Pratchett, Thomas Manuel | Leave a comment

‘Hunters’, sci-fi and pseudoscience

Posted on March 8, 2020 by VM

One of the ways in which pseudoscience is connected to authoritarian governments is through its newfound purpose and duty to supply an alternate intellectual tradition that subsumes science as well as culminates in the identitarian superiority of a race, culture … Continue reading →

Posted in Culture, Scicomm, Science | Tagged Adolf Hitler, Bharatiya Janata Party, civil aviation, Delhi riots, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, electricity, ethnic cleansing, Hindutva, Hunters, identity politics, John Forster, Nazism, occult, provincialism, pseudoscience, sci-fi, science fiction, technology, The Coming Race, Vril | Leave a comment

Review: ‘Hunters’ (2020)

Posted on March 8, 2020 by VM

Just binge-watched the first season of Hunters, the bizarre Amazon Prime original about a covert group of Jews in 1970s’ New York city tracking down and killing Nazis who were integrated by the US government into American society under Operation … Continue reading →

Posted in Culture | Tagged Al Pacino, Amazon Prime, conspiracy theories, Hunters, moral dilemma, Nazism, Operation Paperclip | Leave a comment

Writing itself is fantasy

Posted on March 3, 2020 by VM

The symbols may have been laid down on paper or the screen in whatever order but when we read, we read the words one at a time, one after another – linearly. Writing, especially of fiction, is an act of … Continue reading →

Posted in Culture | Tagged Ariekei, Arrival, China Miéville, Dune, Embassytown, Flatland, Frank Herbert, Harry Potter, heptapods, Higgs boson, higher dimensions, hypersphere, language, linguistics, nonlinear storytelling, nonlinearity, Orson Scott Card, sphericity, three dimensions, time, varelse | Leave a comment

Peter Higgs, self-promoter

Posted on February 19, 2020 by VM

I was randomly rewatching The Big Bang Theory on Netflix today when I spotted this gem: Okay, maybe less a gem and more a shiny stone, but still. The screenshot, taken from the third episode of the sixth season, shows … Continue reading →

Posted in Culture, Science | Tagged C.R. Hagen, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Englert, Francois Englert, Gerald Guralnik, Gerardus t Hooft, Greenpeace, Higgs, Higgs boson, Higgs mechanism, Large Hadron Collider, particle physics, Peter Higgs, Philip Warren Anderson, Robert Brout, Sheldon Cooper, The Big Bang Theory, Tom Kibble, Wolf Prize | Leave a comment

Review: ‘Parasite’ (2019)

Posted on February 17, 2020 by VM

In 2011, the Dalit rights scholar and activist Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd (then only Kancha Ilaiah) addressed a room of 150 or so students of the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. In the first 20 minutes of his speech, he spoke … Continue reading →

Posted in Culture | Tagged Bong Joon-ho, caste guilt, class conflict, cognitive function, Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, Parasite, Parasite film, Poverty, Sendhil Mullainathan, Shaheen Bagh | Leave a comment

The potential energy of being entertained

Posted on February 13, 2020 by VM

Netflix just published a report drafted by its Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, estimating – among other things – its environmental footprint for operations during the year 2019. According to the report, as The Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi writes: Binge-watching Netflix doesn’t just fry your brain; … Continue reading →

Posted in Culture, Science | Tagged cable, carbon accounting, climate change, climate change journalism, doomsday scenario, DVD, hope, neoliberalism, Netflix, positive news, social isolation | Leave a comment

The fascist’s trap

Posted on February 10, 2020 by VM

The following lines appear in the opening portion of G.S. Mudur’s report in The Telegraph about government opposition to student protests: “The people protecting our democracy are the people in JNU. They’re taking beatings on our behalf,” K.S. Venkatesh [a … Continue reading →

Posted in Culture | Tagged anti-national, army, body politik, fascism, fascist body, homogeneity, IIT Kanpur, martyrdom, soldiers, The Telegraph | Leave a comment

The chrysalis that isn’t there

Posted on February 5, 2020 by VM

I wrote the following post while listening to this track. Perhaps you will enjoy reading it to the same sounds. Otherwise, please consider it a whimsical recommendation. 🙂 I should really start keeping a log of different stories in the … Continue reading →

Posted in Culture, Science | Tagged British Medical Journal, chrysalis, experiments, gender discrimination, industry of science, modern science, patriarchy, publish or perish, science and society, scientific enterprise, scientific literature, scientific method, scientific research | Leave a comment

Science v. tech, à la Cixin Liu

Posted on January 16, 2020 by VM

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 were so many technologies, so … Continue reading →

Posted in Culture, Science | Tagged Bernhard Riemann, Cixin Liu, glass ceiling, Large Hadron Collider, mathematics, non-Euclidean geometry, particle physics, Riemannian geometry, technology, Three Body Problem | Leave a comment