Root Privileges

Balram Bhargava

The biopolitics of Covaxin

In a new investigation, STAT has reported fresh problems with Covaxin’s approval process in India, including the phase 2 trial dropping its placebo arm in favour of one preordained to make Covaxin look good and Bharat Biotech – the maker – commencing phase 3 trials based on results from animal studies.

animal rights

A story of dogs

This article in The Wire, while entirely compelling, also contains an unarticulated tension. Headline: ‘How a Missing Stray Dog Led to the Withdrawal of a Caribbean High Commissioner to India’. Excerpt: Uploaded on social media, a grainy dimly-lit video apparently shows the night-time confrontation. A man, speaking English with an

COP27

COP talks as ambition police

Part of what makes Greta Thunberg such a powerful voice in climate activism is her no-nonsense communication. Yesterday, for example, she called the impending COP27 climate talks, to be held in Egypt on November 6-18, an opportunity for “people in power” to “greenwash”, “lie” and “cheat”. Her words are presumably

artificial neural networks

Neuromorphic hype

We all know there’s a difference between operating an Indica Diesel car and a WDP 4 diesel locomotive. The former has two cylinders and the latter 16. But that doesn’t mean the WDP 4 simply has eight times more components as the Indica. This is what comes to

Aksai Chin

A masculine build-up to the Ind-Pak cricket match

This post benefited from feedback from Thomas Manuel. Every time I watch an ad about the upcoming India-Pakistan men’s cricket match, as part of the ongoing T20 World Cup in Australia, I’m reminded of Cutler Beckett’s line in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series: “It’s

carbon footprint

Climate crisis first, physics crisis next

From ‘CERN slashes experiment time next year by 20% as energy costs bite’, Physics World, October 12, 2022: To avoid blackouts over the winter, France has launched a national plan to cut energy consumption by 10%. … Mike Lamont, CERN’s director for accelerators and technology, told Physics World that as

Andy Stone

Bad responses to The Wire's Meta reports

Note, September 18, 2023, 6:40 am: I’ve often returned to this post since The Wire retracted its ‘Meta’ reports, to see if I still stand by its contents. I do with the portions that I haven’t struck through. That said, I believe in hindsight that holding these

double-blind peer-review

A Kuhnian gap between research publishing and academic success

There is a gap in research publishing and how it relates to academic success. On the one hand, there are scientists complaining of low funds, being short-staffed, low-quality or absent equipment, disoptimal employment/tenure terms, bureaucratic incompetence and political interference. On the other, there are scientists who describe their success

Bruno Latour (1947-2022) and critiquing science

The French philosopher Bruno Latour passed away on October 9, at the age of 75. I don’t know if many people in India have noticed but people abroad, especially in Europe, have. His passing leaves a considerable vacuum in the field of science and technology studies, but I’d

Ajay Bhalla

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 government eliminated hundreds of awards given to the country’s scientists for achievements on various

employment contracts

Assorted comments: MOM, IIT Mandi, scientists' wishes

These are some remarks that have been fermenting in my mind and for which I don’t have the time or the inclination to supply a beginning-middle-end structure to publish as individual posts. I’m just packing them into this one post so I can say what I’d like

active voice

The passive voice is political

Eric Martinez, Francis Mollica and Edward Gibson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Edinburgh won an Ig Nobel Prize for literature this year for their work on what makes legal documents so hard to read. Ironically, the abstract of their paper, published in July 2022, is

cryptocurrencies

The Frida Kahlo NFT

Like a Phoenix rising from its ashes, Art is reborn into Eternity. fridanft.org In July this year, a Mexican businessman named Martin Mobarak allegedly destroyed a painting by Frida Kahlo in order to liberate it from its physical shackles and unto its “eternal” existence henceforth as an NFT that

7 Pot Barrackpore

Tales of two peppers

The 7 Pot Barrackpore starts at the same Scoville Heat Unit (SHU) as the regular ones, but its highest level has frequently approached 1.3M SHU, which can easily set your face on fire. How the name Barrackpore came about, though, is quite intriguing. This is the third tweet in

blockchain

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 mechanism. A blockchain is a spreadsheet that maintains a record of all the transactions between users

Alan Turing

Ramanujan, Nash, Turing, Mirzakhani

From a short review of a new documentary about the life and work of the Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, September 9, 2022: While there are other movies about real-life mathematicians such as Nash, Ramanujan and Turing, the special abilities of these individuals are often depicted as making them eccentric in

Abdus Salam

A physics story of infinities, goats and colours

When I was writing in August about physicist Sheldon Glashow’s objection to Abdus Salam being awarded a share of the 1979 physics Nobel Prize, I learnt that it was because Salam had derived a theory that Glashow had derived as well, taking a different route, but ultimately the final

constructive interference

How do you make a mode-locked laser?

Given Mode-locked lasers are lasers that are capable of producing intense ultra-short pulses of light at a very high rate. Concepts Set 1 Take a bunch of atoms, excite them and place them in a box covered with mirrors in all directions. Send in one photon, a particle of light,

animal ethics

The strange NYT article on taming minks

I’m probably waking up late to this but the New York Times has published yet another article in which it creates a false balance by first focusing on the problematic side of a story for an inordinately long time, without any of the requisite qualifications and arguments, before jumping,

AI ethics

Why everyone should pay attention to Stable Diffusion

Many of the people in my circles hadn’t heard of Stable Diffusion until I told them, and I was already two days late. Heralds of new technologies have a tendency to play up every new thing, however incremental, as the dawn of a new revolution – but in this case,

animal products

When a teenager wants to solve poaching with machine-learning…

We always need more feel-good stories, but we need those feel-good stories more that withstand closer scrutiny instead of falling apart, and framed the right way. For example, Smithsonian magazine published an article with the headline ‘This Teenager Invented a Low-Cost Tool to Spot Elephant Poachers in Real Time’ on

cosmic ray knee

The search for a powerful natural particle accelerator

Earth is almost constantly beset by a stream of particles from space called cosmic rays. These particles consist of protons, bundles of two protons and two neutrons each (alpha particles), a small number of heavier atomic nuclei and a smaller fraction of anti-electrons and anti-protons. Cosmic rays often have high

Anthony Fauci

Yes, scientific journals should publish political rebuttals

(The headline is partly click-bait, as I admit below, because some context is required.) From ‘Should scientific journals publish political debunkings?’, Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie, August 27, 2022: Earlier this week, the “news and analysis” section of the journal Science … published … a point-by-point rebuttal of a monologue a few

aventurine

In search of sandastros

About a week ago, I wrote to ICANN asking for a list of all the .com domains that were still available. After I received the file a few days later, I used two pieces of code to extract all the single-word entries on the list and subsequently all the words

ESL

What makes 'good science journalism'?

From ‘Your Doppelgänger Is Out There and You Probably Share DNA With Them’, The New York Times, August 23, 2022: Dr. Esteller also suggested that there could be links between facial features and behavioral patterns, and that the study’s findings might one day aid forensic science by providing a