Lord of the Rings Day
A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you. This year I almost didn’t write this post because I don’t have anything to say about The Lord of the Rings itself. Chiefly, I have tired…
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A laser worthy of a nuclear clock
The nucleus of the thorium-229 isotope has a special property: it has an excited state that’s incredibly close in energy to its ground state. The existence of such an isomer is remarkable because when nuclei…
Savouring playtime
I work in an office with many lovely and smart people and I find engaging them in conversation is playtime. It’s a social activity, almost always enlivening, and I (and hopefully we all) get to…
Curiosity as a public good
India has won 22 Ig Nobel prizes to date. These awards, given annually at Harvard University by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, honour studies that “first make people laugh, and then make them think”…
A cricket beyond politics
On September 11, the Supreme Court was asked to urgently hear a petition that sought to cancel the Asia Cup T20 match between India and Pakistan scheduled for September 14 in the UAE. The petition,…
The news exists to inform, not to educate
I’d like to highlight a letter published in Science on January 2. I have many points of disagreement with it but I’d also like others to read and reflect on it, especially if they’re (you’re) also going…
Getting rid of the GRE
An investigation by Science has found that, today, just 3% of “PhD programs in eight disciplines at 50 top-ranked US universities” require applicants’ GRE scores, “compared with 84% four years ago”. This is good news about a test…
A question about India’s new science prizes
really deserving candidates In a meeting chaired by Union home secretary Ajay Bhalla on September 16 and attended by senior members of the various science departments of the national government (DST, DBT, etc.), the Union…
The Merge
Earlier this month, a major event happened in the cryptocurrency space called the ‘Merge’. In this event, the ethereum blockchain changed the way it achieves consensus – from using a proof-of-work mechanism to a proof-of-stake…
Awaiting more info on WP.com’s new pricing
After my last blog post on WordPress.com’s bizarre paid-plans rejig, which stayed on top of Hacker News for a few hours and eventually caught the attention of the CEOs of WordPress.com and Automattic, the former, Dave Martin, said the company was listening to…