Category: Life notes
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A difficulty celebrating Chandrayaan 3
I’m grateful to Avijit Pathak for his article in Indian Express on August 29. After the Chandrayaan 3 mission achieved its primary objective, to soft-land a robotic lander on the moon’s south polar region, there was widespread jubilation, but I couldn’t celebrate. I felt guilty and distressed, actually, with the thought that my well-rewarded scepticism…
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Irritating Google Docs is irritating
The backdrop of the shenanigans of ChatGPT, Bard and other artificial intelligence (AI) systems these days has only served to accentuate how increasingly frustrating working with Google Docs is. I use Docs every day to write my articles and edit those that the freelancers I’m working with have filed. I don’t use tools like Grammarly…
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Refusing battles
“Pick your battles” is probably the most important thing I’ve learnt as a journalist. A lot of it is probably due to my firm belief that science has always been political, and getting people to see this has often left me grappling with difficult questions in a variety of areas, which in turn required my…
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Rob McKenna
Anyone who reads Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and doesn’t come away thinking it belongs on the list of the best books they’ve read has to get themselves checked. I don’t think this about many things but if I had to think it about just one thing, it’d have to be Hitchhiker’s. I’ve also had…
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Games grimy and green
Every day, I spend an hour or three playing a game called Factorio, in which you mine and process natural resources with which to build and automate ever-larger factories that manufacture materials for research, transport, power, and weapons. Once your factories get big enough (say, when they consume 10 MW), Factorio is less like a…
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Lord of the Rings Day
Happy Lord of the Rings Day. 🙂 About a week ago, I began rereading book 7 of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. This followed my realisation earlier this year that I had somehow lost the ability to read fiction. I had neither the interest in the genre nor – unlike in the pre-pandemic…
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Books – 2022
Even as I whined about losing my reading habit, I managed to read a surprising (to me) number of books through 2022. One reason I think I didn’t notice is because very few of them started out being books I actually wanted to read. Looking back, there’s a clear fiction-nonfiction divide and a marked preference…
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2022 in retrospect
2022 has been my worst on the record on several fronts. I had COVID-19 in the first month, which did a freaky number on my heart. My unexplained weight loss from 2021 continued its run into six months of 2022 before stopping suddenly, although all test reports came back normal and doctors were stumped. Bharat…
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A salvage
Why do you write? is a very difficult question to answer, so when an answer presents itself, you treasure it.