Scicomm
About 300 million years ago, something happened. And the Moon was hit by meteorites twice to thrice as often after this period than before. The Solar System has always been a dangerous place for careless travellers. Out there are large clouds of dust, millions of rocks dislodged from ancient collisions,
Scicomm
On January 15, Harsh Vardhan, the Union science and technology minister, mulled renaming India's Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) as "Bharat Mata Mantralaya". (In Hindi, the ministry is currently called the 'Prithvi Vigyan Mantralaya'.) Vardhan was speaking at a function to mark the 144th
Scicomm
The world's largest particle physics laboratory has unveiled its design options for the Large Hadron Collider's successor – what is expected to be a 100-km long next generation 'supercollider'. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) submitted the conceptual design report for what it is
Uncategorized
Writing on analytic philosophy is apparently very complex. One essay published on 3QD argues that it actually needs to be that way, and quotes a linguist quoting a philosopher to make its case. The quotation goes thus: In arguing for his analysis of non-natural meaning, Grice made the mistake of
Life notes
There's a really yucky scene in the really yucky movie based on the half-yucky book Atlas Shrugged. A copper-mining tycoon who blew up his own mines says in a conversation with his railroad-tycoon friend, "They say money is the root of all evil. So I wanted to
Uncategorized
Load Twitter on the browser. Scroll down, scroll down further, keep going, stop… What’s that?
Op-eds
The following notes are specifically about VijayRaghavan's post. My overall reaction to the stupidity on display at the ISC is recorded here. At a conference at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in August 2018, K. VijayRaghavan said that the media pays disproportionate attention to the pseudoscience that goes
Culture
Instead of dismissing it with a gracious modesty, I'm going to shamelessly record for posterity that The Master quoted in Anand Venkateswaran's essay on J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hindu Literary Review is yours truly. The full text of my quote to Anand, who is
Scicomm
There are many kinds of materials that become superconductors at low temperatures. One famous kind is the cuprates, compounds of copper and oxygen. Some cuprates have been known to become superconductors at temperatures higher than most other materials (although they’re still pretty low temperatures). Scientists are interested in them
Science
A member of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has confirmed it has made progress on its plan to test a new class of reusable rockets. B.N. Suresh, an honorary distinguished professor at ISRO, discussed some details of the ADMIRE project at a meeting of the Indian National Science
Life notes
It was recently my birthday. I turned 30. The celebrations were muted – if at all – because there's something of a moment when you exit the tweens, and the first digit of your age changes from 2 to 3. On that day, it seemed more pertinent than ever to
Op-eds
The Print should not have published its list of "intellectuals pick their successors" at all. Its editors knew that it had no women and were aware of how that was a problem. They also had to have known that the list was predominantly Hindu and upper-caste. But by