Culture
June 5 was World Environment Day, which is presumably why an article entitled 'Hindu roots of modern 'ecology'' was doing the rounds on Twitter, despite having been published in 2016. In the article, its author Viva Kermani writes, Centuries before the appearance of the likes of
Life notes
Johanna Miller writes in Physics Today about how she was able to enjoy learning organic chemistry in her senior year of undergraduate study: by understanding that science is a collection of concepts, not a collection of facts. She also argues that this is in fact the key to enjoying organic
Op-eds
The following comment grates on multiple levels: https://twitter.com/ainvvy/status/1135155570309120000 Here's Mohandas Pai, a Hindutva fanatic known to have a pH of 1, issuing a ridiculous comment against The Hindu, which was simply reporting a statement issued by a Hindu organisation. And then there'
Life notes
Today, I complete seven years as a journalist. Scratch that. Today, I complete seven years in the journalism industry. Wait, scratch that too. Today, I complete 6.58 years in the journalism industry. Is that entirely accurate? Today, I complete two years as a blogger and 4.58 years as
Op-eds
Laurie Penny writes on Longreads: Remember the U.S. presidential debates of 2016? Remember how the entire liberal establishment thought Hillary Clinton had won, mainly because she made actual points, rather than shambling around the stage shouting about Muslims? What's the one line from those debates that everyone
Scicomm
Simplicity is a deceptively simple thing. Recently, a scientist who was trying to explain something in general relativity to me did so in the following way: One simple way to understand … is as follows. Imagine that one sets up spherical polar coordinates, so that space is described by r, theta,
Op-eds
As the world burns, is anyone paying attention to the New York Times? Because if you're not, you should: it's catching fire as well. On May 23, the grand old newspaper published a report by Maggie Haberman about how former Trump aide Hope Hicks has an
Science
In 2018, scientists from IISc announced they'd found a room-temperature superconductor, an exotic material that has zero resistance to electric current in ambient conditions – considered the holy grail of materials science. But in the little data the authors were willing to share with the world, something seemed off.
Scicomm
I have an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering but I've always struggled with thermodynamics. To the uninitiated, this means most of the knowledge specific to mechanical engineering over other branches remains out of my reach. I would struggle even with the simpler concepts, and perhaps one of the
Scicomm
In 1907, a New Zealander named Ernest Rutherford moved from McGill University in Canada to the University of Manchester. There, he conducted a series of experiments where he fired alpha particles1at different materials. When he found that the beams deviated by about 2º when fired through air, he figured that
Op-eds
The following tweet has been doing the rounds the last few days: https://twitter.com/churumuri/status/1062680702066388992 It carries an important message from India's recent past, that a time of free-as-in-free speech actually did exist only half a century ago. It stands in stark contrast to the
Culture
Alanna Mitchell reports in the New York Times that boreal forests in the world's north are being invaded by worms of the species Dendrobaena octaedra. They're decomposing the leaf litter and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, transforming these carbon-negative forests into carbon-positives. In the process,