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The News Minute, July 6, 2018: Terracotta handicrafts and vessels, bamboo trinkets, organic grains, herbs and pulses up for sale. Children running around playing with natural stick and wheel toys made using Palmyra palm leaves. An array of fresh and dried herbs displayed along with lemon and betel leaves on
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Good fantasy fiction – rather simply fantasy fiction – is defined not by a freewheeling re-imagination of reality but one that is re-imagined as much as contained in a self-consistent, coherent and substantive framework that is logical, cultural, political, aesthetic or a combination of some/all of them. With that in mind,
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I've been in Delhi for three days, and for the last two of which I've been house-hunting and then buried in office work. While I was trawling through dozens of Facebook posts and items on Magicbricks and 99acres looking for advertisements of 1 or 2 BHK
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I've made two mistakes – both concerning Orson Scott Card's quadrology and both nominal – in today's post, and which I have now rectified. I ask that you revisit/refresh that post to read the updated text. The book I first quoted was Children of the
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I've missed writing my posts for three days straight. 🙈 I don't know about you but I've certainly let myself down. I have a trove of excuses but I'm sure none of them qualify. Today is Higgs Day. I'm not sure
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In the middle of a conversation this morning, my friend wondered aloud as to whether there were any advantages to teaching history forward in time (i.e. with causality) instead of backward. Neither of us being historians… rather, both of us being far too quantitative in our thinking to be
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I started writing this as today's post but at some point it morphed into an article for The Wire, to be published tomorrow morning. Sharing it here in full nonetheless. Earlier this week, a team of neural networking algorithms beat a team of five human players at a
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These days, I can't remember either the good news or the bad news. When someone talks about the good news – likely a centrist or someone who hasn't thought their political views through – I nod along, keen to counter them but just feeling so tired. When someone
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There's a new book by Alan Lightman out, titled Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine. Irrespective of others' appreciation of it, I expect to find the book preposterously dull if Michael Shermer's review in the Times is anything to go by. "Does
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Climate change is gradually turning the abundance of space into privilege, at least if it already wasn't before. In a warmer world, in which we will surely prize the efficient use of resources, physical isolation will be a luxury. Not everyone will forswear all the land they have
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Yesterday, I travelled first class in the Shatabdi Express, from Chennai to Bengaluru. I'd been looking forward to the journey because of the extra legspace in the offing, and the ability to sit in a train for five hours without having to manspread, curl up (to the extent
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xkcd does the best nerdy comic but oglaf is the comic I never knew I needed – and it's probably the best ever. It's wry humour + sex, often featuring erotic fungi and The Blind Gibberer, and even more oftenly situated in the sort of medieval setting that