Culture
A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you. This year I almost didn’t write this post because I don’t have anything to say about The Lord of the Rings itself. Chiefly, I have tired of the antics of men. It’s not about some good men and
Culture
Tungsten diboride (WB2) is extraordinarily stiff and resistant to deformation and scientists have long suspected it could be a superhard material, meaning it scores at least 40 gigapascal (GPa) on a hardness test. This is important because diamond, the hardest natural material on Earth, scores 70-100 GPa but because it
Culture
Daily writing promptWhat movies or TV series have you watched more than 5 times? View all responses I'm afraid the answer is F.R.I.E.N.D.S. My sister and I watched it growing up, then rewatched it, the re-rewatched it, and now then have it
Analysis
Everyone who knows me knows that my intellectual coordinates are defined by scientific ideas, even when they’re about sociology or the humanities. This is why I found a new book, Decolonial Keywords: South Asian Thoughts and Attitudes, edited by anthropologists Renny Thomas and Sasanka Perera, so compelling. The book
Analysis
The science writer Philip Ball has described “nerd tunnel vision” as the rationalisation scientists who maintained ties with Jeffrey Epstein after his 2008 conviction for soliciting underage sex offered, hinting at something more calculated than just oversight. “Nerd tunnel vision is a defining feature of much of the Edge discourse,
Culture
One of the advertisements during the ongoing T20 cricket World Cup on Star Sports India has been for Sprite, the carbonated beverage from the Coca-Cola Company. In the ad, it's a hot day, two people are irritated by the heat and humidity, and they beat it by taking
Culture
The following post was motivated by this exchange (on X.com), which prompted me to write out my understanding of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the part the Heisenberg cut plays in it. I haven’t gone into the variants of the interpretation that Maria Violaris brings up;
Analysis
From 'Cosmic dawn: the search for the primordial hydrogen signal', Physics World, November 18, 2025: The EDGES instrument is a dipole antenna, which resembles a ping-pong table with a gap in the middle. It is mounted on a large metal groundsheet, which is about 30 × 30 m. Its
Analysis
For all the ways in which the Indian people are divided these days, they're seemingly united in their desire to set records. On January 22, a tinkerer named Sohan Rai, a.k.a. “Zikiguy”, said on Instagram that he and his team “are planning to do India’s
Analysis
Daily writing promptHow have your political views changed over time? View all responses When I first had any views at all, I think I was in the second year of my engineering studies, in 2007, and decided I was a right-winger. Of course I understood very little of what that
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
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