Op-eds
Since news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke last month, many of us have expressed apprehension – often on Facebook itself – that the social networking platform has transformed since its juvenile beginnings into an ugly monster. Such moral panic is flawed and we ought to know that by now. After all,
Tech
In descending order of priority 1. Support This isn't just about receiving help when you need but also about when you don't. The hosting providers' support staff should be easily accessible at all times and you should be able to have a conversation with them
Op-eds
Just as there's no merit in writing a piece that is confused and incomplete, there's no merit in digging through a dumpster and complaining that there's trash. However, that doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt when The Quint publishes something
Scicomm
Reading a Nature report titled 'Step aside CERN: There’s a cheaper way to break open physics' (January 10, 2018) brought to mind something G. Rajasekaran, former head of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, told me once: that the future – as the Nature report also touts – belongs
Life notes
A lightning storm rages outside. The large window panes going from floor to ceiling in the living room rattle as the wind whips around, gathering dust off the ground right outside my building, spinning it up into little, but no less terrifying, tornadoes (maybe it's the tornado-like action
Life notes
This post is a breakdown of the Pew study titled The Science People See on Social Media, published March 21, 2018. Without further ado… or Is popularity the best way to judge if a Facebook page counts as a page about science? Popularity is an easy measure but it often
Life notes
The Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy series exhibited a rabid yet desirable iconoclasm, through which its author Steven Erikson elucidated every trope of epic fantasy and then shit on it. I came out of reading the series feeling like nothing could surprise me anymore except some other Erikson fare.
Op-eds
ISRO chairman K. Sivan is free to worship and worship any deity he bloody well wants ∞; that's his right. But it's not entirely comforting when you think back about all the chairpersons ISRO has had – all men, all Hindus – who have made offerings at temples to
Science
Did some back-of-the-envelope calculations about the Meerut mahayagya, where a bunch of Hindu priests are burning 50 tonnes of mango wood and approx. 10 million tablespoons of ghee in a mega-ritual to "purify the air", over nine days. Can't make this stuff up. So 50 tonnes
Life notes
Just the other day, I’d mentioned to a friend that Steven Pinker was one of those rare people whose ideas couldn’t be appreciated by proxy, such as through the opinions of other authority figures, but had to be processed individually. This is because Pinker has found as much
Uncategorized
Please ignore.
Op-eds
So, the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO's) Chandrayaan 2 mission to the Moon has been pushed to October from April. Delays of this sort are to be expected for missions of this scale, although I've also heard that ISRO often does a poor job