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A Huffington Post article purportedly published by the US bureau has flicked two quotes from a story first published by The Wire, on the influenza epidemics ravaging India. The story's original author and its editor (me) reached out to HuffPo India folks via Twitter to get them to
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One of my favourite essays of all time – insofar as that's a legitimate category – is one called 'How to do what you love' by Paul Graham, the startup guru. In it, he makes a case for the usefulness of a passion. Mine is writing; what kind
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The Nobel Prizes are too big to fail. Even if they've become beset by a host of problems, such as: 1. Long gap between invention/discovery and recognition, 2. A large cash component given to old scientists, 3. Limiting number of awardees to three, 4. Not awarding prizes
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One of the more fascinating bits of high-energy physics is the branch of physics called quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Don’t let the big name throw you off: it deals with a bunch of elementary particles that have a property called colour charge. And one of these particles creates a mess
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because I wrote this on The Wire on September 15. I lied. Truth is, I don't care about Saturn. In fact, I'm fascinated with Cassini because of Saturn. We all are. Without Cassini, Saturn wouldn't have been what it is in our shared imagination
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Overheard three people in Delhi: When you feel the rain fall, you feel the dirt pouring down on you, muck streaking down your face and clothes. It washes down the haze from the skies and you can finally breathe clean air and the sky gets so blue. The dust settles.
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This is how Leonard Digges described a telescope in 1571: source While it's not clearly known who first invented the telescope – or if such an event even happened – Hans Lippershey is widely credited by historians for having installed two specially crafted lenses in a tube in 1608 "
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One of the tougher things about writing and reading about quantum mechanics is keeping up with how the meaning of some words change as they graduate from being used in the realm of classical mechanics – where things are what they look like – to that of the quantum – where we have
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The chances that I'll ever understand Hollywood filmmakers' appetite for films based on ancient mythology is low, and even lower that I'll find a way to explain the shittiness of what their admiration begets. I just watched Gods of Egypt, which released in 2016, on
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This is the age of the start-up, not megaliths. Remember T-Rex did not survive evolution. It is unlikely that religions organised like T-Rexes – most of the Abrahamic religions fit this description – will survive an era of fast change. The T-Rex did evolve in the first place because the evolutionary pathway
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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 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