The Meta Ray-Ban glasses and Indian law
1. India is not likely to find success by regulating hardware because (i) such regulations will be hard to enforce in practice and in principle, (ii) the regulatory regime could set up a new license…
Office hours
Dear Chief Justice Surya Kant: I commend you for your discovery this week that time is finite. On Wednesday, when a petitioner confronted you with video evidence of police brutality on July 20 against the…
Why launch costs dropped but may not keep dropping
In a study published in PNAS Nexus on July 14, two researchers affiliated with institutes in France, Italy, and the UK analysed more than 4,400 launches in 16 geographical entities and with 330 rocket configurations…
A thought for emergence
The physicist Carlo Rovelli makes a strong case in this essay that consciousness is “of the same nature” as everything else in the universe, but in the course of doing that, he often writes as…
How Indonesian cos. coopted the state’s win
From ‘Zero-deforestation commitments in Indonesia’s palm oil sector achieve high compliance but no additionality’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 13, 2026: … we evaluate the compliance and additionality of zero-deforestation commitments (ZDCs)…
What Hannibal’s crossing cost
That thermodynamics has so very many applications is as fascinating as what it so often illuminates. Its tools and methods can be brought to bear on everything from celestial bodies and industrial machines to cellular…
Walk through chaos
I’m just going to invert that question a little and ask: Is a little order good for us? I’m doing this because the question “Is a little chaos good for us?” assumes that chaos can…
Gyroscopes
As silly as it sounds, as a student of mechanical engineering, I am partial to technologies that make use of mechanical forces. Today they are harder to come by because the solutions to the problems…
Orphan blocks on bitcoin network waste 16 GW
A new PNAS Nexus paper has shed light on a major source of hidden energy waste on the bitcoin network. Here, miners compete to solve a complex mathematical puzzle. The miner that solves a puzzle…
Down with Vader, down with the empire
Even against his long career of deception, Sheev Palpatine announcing an open election for the seat of galactic emperor sounds particularly cynical. In response to this farce, I nominate Mon Mothma of Chandrila. However, I…
Enjoying ‘Friends’ again
This has to be the TV show Friends. I feel like I know too much these days. The show hasn’t aged well. Its attitudes towards fatness, sexual relations, science, and mental health are at best…
Against the idea of building loyal subscribers
I’ve always found that a somewhat strange thing to aim for. I understand there are several thousand people worldwide working to build a loyal subscriber base (“building loyal subscribers” makes one sound like Dr. Frankenstein).…