Life notes
Someone asked me recently to name the thing I've been most grateful for in 2025. After giving it some thought, I realised it had to be the heat capacity of water. And not just for 2025. Tea is my warm beverage of choice, and my favourite version is
Analysis
All that thinking about Joel Mokyr and his prescription to support society’s intellectual elite in order to ensure technological progress took me back to a talk Gita Chadha delivered in 2020, and to a dilemma I’d had at the time involving Lawrence Krauss. Chadha’s proposed resolution to
Analysis
I don’t like Joel Mokyr’s history of progress and have written about that before. I also have a longer analysis and explanation of my issues coming soon in The Hindu. On December 8 I got more occasion to critique his thinking over his Nobel lecture in Stockholm, after
Scicomm
Once in a while, nature runs experiments that no human lab can match. Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are a good example. Cosmic rays are fast, high energy particles from space that strike Earth’s atmosphere with energies far beyond what even the most powerful particle accelerators can routinely create. Most particles
Culture
Daily writing promptHave you ever performed on stage or given a speech? View all responses I performed several times on stage in school, up to when I was 11 years old. I studies for around four years at a school in Tumkur where drama was part of the curriculum. Every
Culture
You're probably using AI to write. Both ChatGPT and Google AI Studio prefer to construct their sentences in specific and characteristic ways and anyone who’s been a commissioning editor for at least a few years will find the signs of its influence hard to miss, even if
Science
Here's an image from a paper that was published by Nature Scientific Reports on November 19 and retracted on December 5: This paper made it through peer review at the journal. Let that sink in for a moment. Perhaps the reviewers wanted to stick it to the editors.
Scicomm
Once Isaac Newton showed that a single gravitational law plus his rules of dynamics could reproduce the orbits of planets that Johannes Kepler had predicted, explain tides on Earth, and predict that a comet that had passed by once would return again, physicists considered Newtonian mechanics and gravitation to have
Analysis
A.K. Anil Kumar, the director of ISRO's Telemetry, Tracking, and Command Network (a.k.a. ISTRAC), has reportedly made some seriously misleading comments as part of his convocation address at a Maharishi University in Lucknow.* Kumar's speech begins at the 1:38:10 mark in
Scicomm
Consider a bunch of molecules that have been trapped between two mirrors facing each other very closely. In this 'box' the light can't move around freely; it can only exist in certain fixed patterns, somewhat like sound inside a finely tuned musical instrument. Even when all
Analysis
On November 21, the Union government said the four consolidated labour codes on wages, industrial relations, social security, and occupational safety and health had been brought into force, replacing 29 national labour laws, five years after Parliament had signed off on them and four years beyond the original 2021 deadline.
Life notes
Daily writing promptIf you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? View all responses I had a dream once, that I was sitting, resting in a cosy alcove of walls empanelled with wood, with wooden chairs and tables with comfortable cushions, smoke from an incense stick hanging