Life notes
A trip to Jebel Jais
A peak of the Al Hajar mountains in the UAE and an important part of the country's future.
Latest
Analysis
The importance of sensible politics to good science
Stuart Ritchie writes a newsletter-blog that I quite like, called Science Fictions. On May 30, he published a post on this blog entitled 'Science is political - and that's a bad thing'. I thought the post missed some important points, which I want to set out
Culture
On referring to female officers as 'madam sir'
ET Lifestyle published a Twitter thread this morning about police officers referring to female superior officers as “sir” or as “madam sir”. I do find the practice offensive, because it signals an inability to imagine anyone but a (cis)man in the position currently occupied by a woman. That calcification
Analysis
How much of a milestone is AzaadiSAT?
At 9.18 am today, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched the first developmental flight of its new Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV), a three-stage modular launch vehicle designed to carry a payload of up to 500 kg to the low-Earth orbit and to go from assembly to launch
Scicomm
How do you trap an electron?
I've always found the concept of two forces on an object cancelling themselves out strange. We say they cancel if the changes they exert completely offset each other, leaving the object unaffected. But is the object really unaffected? If the two forces act in absolute opposition and at
Analysis
The physics of Spain's controversial air-con decree
The Government of Spain published a decree earlier this week that prevents air-conditioners from being set at a temperature lower than 27º C in the summer in an effort to lower energy consumption and wean the country off of natural gas pumped from Russia. A Twitter thread by Euronews compared
Analysis
The question of Abdus Salam 'deserving' his Nobel
Peter Woit has blogged about an oral history interview with theoretical physicist Sheldon Glashow published in 2020 by the American Institute of Physics. (They have a great oral history of physics series you should check out if you're interested.) Woit zeroed in on a portion in which Glashow
Analysis
Immunity for scientists? Err…
On the sidelines of a screening of the semi-fictional biopic of beleaguered ISRO scientist Nambi Narayanan, the Madhavan-starrer Rocketry: The Nambi Effect, Narayanan told journalists on August 1 that "scientists should" receive immunity against "arbitrary police action" (source). "It is not just ISRO… scientists working
Scicomm
65 years of the BCS theory
Thanks to an arithmetic mistake, I thought 2022 was the 75th anniversary of the invention (or discovery?) of the BCS theory of superconductivity. It's really the 65th anniversary, but since I'd worked myself up to write about it, I'm going to. 🤷🏽♂️ It also helps
Science
A 'bold' vision
'Support Europe's bold vision for responsible research assessment', Nature editorial, July 27, 2022: The Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, announced on 20 July and open for signatures on 28 September, is perhaps the most hopeful sign yet of real change. More than 350 organizations have pooled
Op-eds
WordPress.com rolls back its botched 'experiment'
So, WordPress.com has restored the family of premium plans that it had until April this year, and has done away with the controversial 'Starter' and 'Pro' plans. The announcement on the WordPress.com blog yesterday has already garnered a high 65 comments, even as the
Analysis
Should 'geniuses' be paid extra?
A newsletter named Ideas Sleep Furiously had an essay propounding a "genius basic income" on May 28. Here are the first two paragraphs that capture a not-insignificant portion of the essay's message: Professor Martin Hairer is one of the world’s most gifted mathematicians. An Austrian-Brit