Science
A friend of mine got harem pants and was talking about how much more comfortable they were than a lungi in Chennai's current weather. A lungi is a long cylinder made of cloth (open at both ends of course) commonly worn by men in South India. Five minutes
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
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
Science
Titaaaaan! Here we go again. 😄 As has been reported, NASA has been interested in sending a robotic submarine to Saturn's moon Titan to explore the hydrocarbon lakes near its north pole. Various dates have been mentioned and in all it seems likely the mission will be able to
Life notes
Though I've never met the guy, I don't hold Pallava Bagla in very high regard because his stories – particularly of the Indian space programme – for NDTV have often reeked of simplistic concerns, pettiness and, increasingly of late, a nationalistic pride. The most recent instance all these
Science
I watched The Cloverfield Paradox last night, the horror film that Paramount pictures had dumped with Netflix and which was then released by Netflix on February 4. It's a dumb production: unlike H.R. Giger's existential, visceral horrors that I so admire, The Cloverfield Paradox is
Science
Lexus has an ad on the jacket of today's The Hindu for its new premium hybrid electric vehicle, the LS 500h. The product description states that the car "extends relentless innovation to environmentally conscious engineering with a performance-centric Multi Stage Hybrid System. Crafted with luxury in mind
Scicomm
Climate change has for long been my go-to example to illustrate how absolute objectivity can sometimes be detrimental to the reliability of a news report. Stating that A said "Climate change is real" and that B replied "No, it isn't" isn't helping
Life notes
The Washington Post has a review, and introduction therewith, of a curious new book called Ka, authored by John Crowley (acclaimed author of Great Work of Time). It is narrated from the POV of a crow named Dar Oakley, who journeys repeatedly into the realm of the dead with a
Science
The conversion of one form of energy into another is more efficient at higher temperatures.1 For example, one of the most widely used components of any system that involves the transfer of heat from one part of the system to another is a device called a heat exchanger. When
Science
Pictures of Jupiter's moon Europa taken by the Galileo space probe between 1995 and 2003 support the possibility that Europa's surface has plate tectonics. In fact, scientists think it could be one of only two bodies in the Solar System – the other being Earth – to display
Science
Titaaaaan! How much I've missed writing these posts since Cassini passed away. Unsurprisingly, it's after the probe's demise that we've really begun to realise how much of Cassini's images and data we were consuming on a daily basis, all of