Analysis
Tech solutions to household labour are also problems
Access to leisure is crucial in the climate crisis era, and technological solutions bereft of social change won't help.
Latest
Scicomm
A giant leap closer to the continuous atom laser
Physicists have created a steady-state Bose-Einstein condensate – a long-sought feat that opens the door to a variety of applications, including in holography and quantum computing.
Analysis
What arguments against the 'next LHC' say about funding Big Physics
A few days ago, a physicist (and PhD holder) named Thomas Hartsfield published a strange article in Big Think about why building a $100-billion particle physics machine like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a bad idea. The article was so replete with errors things that even I – a not-physicist
Scicomm
What is a supersolid?
Not more solid than solid.
Culture
Review: 'Love, Death & Robots' 3 (2022)
"Embrace the suck."
Tech
Hosting a Ghost blog on Fly.io
A noob's guide
Life notes
Thoughts on the WordPress.com 'Starter' plan
WordPress.com announced a new ‘Starter’ plan for its users on May 25 after significant backlash from many members of its community of users that a previous price revision had completely disregarded the interests of bloggers – by which I mean those writing to be read and discussed, and not primarily
Analysis
A tale of two myopias, climate change and the present participle
The Assam floods are going on. One day, they will stop. The water will subside in many parts of the state but the things that caused the floods will continue to work, ceaselessly, and will cause them to occur again next year, and the year after and so on for
Op-eds
With Gyanvapi article, Abhinav Prakash Singh does logic wapsi
The national vice-president of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, Abhinav Prakash Singh, published an article on May 22 on the Gyanvapi mosque issue that is from start to finish an exercise in verbal sophistry. But while we have come to expect such nonsense from functionaries of the Bharatiya Janata Party,
Tech
Nothing cryptic about another 'crypto' disaster
Earlier this month, a cryptocurrency token called Luna crashed in price – an event that also brought down the value of bitcoin, became the biggest crash in cryptocurrency history thus far, earned the person or persons who (probably) orchestrated this fall nearly a billion dollars, and stuck a big-ass wrench in
Scicomm
Press releases and public duty
From 'Science vs Marketing', published on In The Dark, on May 20, 2022: … there is an increasing tendency for university press offices to see themselves entirely as marketing agencies instead of informing and/or educating the public. Press releases about scientific research nowadays rarely make any attempt at
Culture
Hail the Royal Society
The Royal Society's appointment of its first Brazilian member since 1871 brings an underappreciated form of our colonial hangover to the fore.