Uncategorized
Jean-Paul Sartre famously refused a Nobel Prize for literature (in 1964) because, he said, he didn’t want to be “institutionalised”. His eagerness to prevent this transformation wasn’t misguided. Perhaps more famously, at least among science journalists, many Nobel laureates in the sciences have turned into institutions after winning
Uncategorized
After the IPL 2018 concluded last night, Star Sports TV has been doing reruns of the tournament, showing highlights from all the 60 matches as well as compilations of the performances by category. One of these categories is "longest sixes". Hitting a six is a combination of strength
Uncategorized
Kamaljit Bawa is the first Indian to receive the Linnaean Medal in the 140-year old history of the Society awarding the medal. This line is from a press release I received this morning from a PR person at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, where Bawa
Uncategorized
I watched a Tamil film today, Romba Nallavan Da Nee (You're a Very Good Man; 2015). The story's antagonist appears to have dissociative identity disorder. This disorder used to be called 'multiple personality' disorder (MPD). However, in the film all the "doctors"
Uncategorized
Elon Musk tweeted this week that he plans to setup an online platform called 'Pravda', where people can "rate the core truth of any article and track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor and publication." This isn't a joke. Bloomberg reported
Uncategorized
I read a blog post on Coding Horror this morning, where Jeff Atwood, its author, writes about how he inculcated his blogging habit to the extent that it has come to change his life, net him book deals and speaking opportunities, and makes him some money. While the last bit
Op-eds
Working from home (WFH) is not for everyone or for every company. It works mostly when individual employees of an organisation don't need to work together often, or are embedded in workflows where tasks move quickly from one stage to the next. On a personal level, WFH isn&
Science
Various dark matter detectors around the world, massive particle accelerators and colliders, powerful telescopes on the ground and in space all have their distinct agendas but ultimately what unites them is humankind's quest to understand what the hell this universe is on about. There are unanswered questions in
Op-eds
The name of Sadanand Menon had found mention in Raya Sarkar's list last year. Since then, a journalist and former student of the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ) had published an article in The News Minute about how a noted scholar and culture critic had sexually harassed her.
Life notes
(Re)Stumbled upon this article, by Ed Yong in The Atlantic, July 2016, this morning. As usual, it is rivetingly packaged. The strapline in particular caught my eye: Biology textbooks tell us that lichens are alliances between two organisms—a fungus and an alga. They are wrong. Makes you go
Life notes
I got into fantasy because my reality growing up was no good. The first videogame I played and really enjoyed, almost to the point of obsessing over it every available second, was Command & Conquer's Red Alert 2. I believe many players of the game will agree it
Scicomm
Read two interesting articles this morning: An editorial in the Indian Express about how India is the "land of the gullible", where even the "mere trappings of science suffice to tantalise" people into believing BS and coughing up fortunes for snake oil. An article in The