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Category Archives: Culture
My political views
When I first had any views at all, I think I was in the second year of my engineering studies, in 2007, and decided I was a right-winger. Of course I understood very little of what that meant at the … Continue reading
Joel Mokyr, Gita Chadha, Lawrence Krauss, Joseph Vijay
All that thinking about Joel Mokyr and his prescription to support society’s intellectual elite in order to ensure technological progress took me back to a talk Gita Chadha delivered in 2020, and to a dilemma I’d had at the time … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Culture, Science
Tagged art and artist, genius, Gita Chadha, Jeffrey Epstein, Joseph Vijay, Karur crowd crush, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Feynman
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Acting and speaking
I performed several times on stage in school, up to when I was 11 years old. I studies for around four years at a school in Tumkur where drama was part of the curriculum. Every year we’d have a playwright … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Life notes
Tagged dailyprompt, dailyprompt-2150, theatre, Tumkur, Velu Saravanan
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So you use AI to write…
You’re probably using AI to write. Both ChatGPT and Google AI Studio prefer to construct their sentences in specific and characteristic ways and anyone who’s been a commissioning editor for at least a few years will find the signs of … Continue reading
Why do we trust scientists?
Individuals can’t master the mathematics of cryptography or the molecular biology of vaccines, yet they still trust these fields of science and the suggestions of their exponents to make decisions. Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Culture, Science
Tagged Brian Keating, Brian Wansink, communalism, contributory expertise, epistemic dependence, facts, Francesca Gino, Harry Collins, Indian knowledge systems, interactional expertise, John Hardwig, Max Weber, Mertonian norms, organised scepticism, p-hacking, rational-legal authority, Robert Evans, scientific expertise, social knowledge, social prestige
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Gentle yet final
A strange thing: a whale has washed up on a beach near Visakhapatnam. Not just any whale but a fully grown baleen, a hundred feet long and weighing about 40 tonnes (although I’m not clear how they were able to … Continue reading
The ‘religious’ function of science
We often understand science primarily in terms of its tangible successes, looking to it for advances in medicine, for the foundations of technologies, and for the tools with which to predict and manage our environment. This perspective views science as … Continue reading
Remembering ‘The Melancholy of Resistance’
Congratulations, László Krasznahorkai, for winning the Nobel Prize for literature. I still remember reading his The Melancholy of Resistance (1989). It was a mostly unnerving, somewhat frightening experience because I read it at a time of great uncertainty in my … Continue reading
A tribute to rubidium
And to Paul Feyerabend Continue reading
The Zomato ad and India’s hustle since 1947
In contemporary India, corporate branding has often aligned itself with nationalist sentiment, adopting imagery such as the tricolour, Sanskrit slogans or references to ancient achievements to evoke cultural pride. Marketing narratives frequently frame consumption as a patriotic act, linking the … Continue reading