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A flood as an opportunity
Our preparedness for the effects of climate change is both mitigating global avg. surface temperature rise and better planning public spaces and improving the distribution/accessibility of resources.
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A measure of media trustworthiness
A publication online that makes its money by displaying ads can be profitable even by publishing a slew of bad or offensive articles. That will drive the traffic too; people will share its content even if it's to complain about it. It will also be trustworthy in that
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Breaking the bargain
A nasty review of P.V. Sindhu's performance at the World Badminton Championships by Sandip Sarkar for the Hindustan Times: Take Spain’s Carolina Marin for example. Just two years older than Sindhu, Marin comes from a country with no recognisable heritage in badminton. But she won gold
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The unclosed clause and other things about commas
The Baffler carried a fantastic critique of The New Yorker's use of commas by Kyle Paoletta on August 23. Excerpt: The magazine’s paper subscription slips have long carried a tagline: “The best writing, anywhere.” It follows that the source of the best writing, anywhere, must also be
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Talking scicomm at NCBS – II
I was invited to speak to the students of the annual science writing workshop conducted at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, for the second year (first year talk's notes here). Some interesting things we discussed: 1. Business of journalism: There were more questions from this year&
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False equivalency
Margaret Sullivan in the Washington Post on August 16: “The whole doctrine of objectivity in journalism has become part of the [media’s] problem,” Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, said this week in a talk at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York. He believes that
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Good service shouldn't necessitate support
There's a difference between a service coming with excellent support and a service with excellent support that you rarely have to access. The latter would be any service where issues can be resolved by the user's own agency when they do arise. The former would be
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A for-publishers stack and the symmetry of globalisation
Journalism as the fourth estate has been noticeably empowered in the Information Age, with technologies like the WWW, broadband connectivity and smartphones in (almost) everyone's pockets. However, the opportunities to responsibly exercise the resulting power have been coming at a disproportionately greater cost: to be constantly fast, constantly
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A blogging problem, contd.
Over the last three days, I'd been having a strange issue with WordPress. If you read a post I published yesterday that briefly discussed WordPress's pros and cons, you might remember I mentioned that WordPress 4.x seems to be having an identity problem. WordPress'
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ASI's note to Financial Exp. over eclipse article is naïve
The public outreach arm of the Astronomical Society of India has written to the Financial Express expressing concern over their August 7 article, which advised people to fast during a lunar eclipse. The ASI called the article "anti-science", requested that FE print a clarification and finally give them
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A blogging problem
Since June 2017, I've amassed 14 domains, accounts on four VPS providers, provisioned scores of servers, initiated a zillion sites and moved my own blog around from one domain and platform to the next at least half-dozen times. I rationalised each of these decisions in different ways: * "
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A misremembering
Two Indian scientists who passed away recently – Yash Pal and Pushpa Mittra Bhargava – spent a large part of their lives ensuring that lay people had access to bona fide scientific material and that our appreciation of science, and nature, stemmed from a realistic understanding of its inherent beauty. When they