Links
* ‘It was a set-up, we were fooled’: the coal mine that ate an Indian village * Stanford hates fun * Concrete Built The Modern World. Now It’s Destroying It. * I Don’t Want to Be an Internet Person * Has the UN climate change conference gotten too big to work? * Inside the
Scicomm
One particle in the big zoo of subatomic particles is the B meson. It has a very short lifetime once it's created. In rare instances it decays to three lighter particles: a kaon, a lepton and an anti-lepton. There are many types of leptons and anti-leptons. Two are
Analysis
My explainer/analysis of the US nuclear fusion breakthrough was published today. Some stuff didn't make it to the final draft for space and tone constraints; I'm publishing that below. 1. While most US government officials present at the announcement of the NIF's results,
Analysis
This is welcome news: … even if it's curious that three of the four officially stated reasons for designating this 'dark sky reserve' aren't directly related to the telescopes, and that telescopes had to come up in the area for the local government, the Indian
Op-eds
Nuclear fusion? Yay! Climate finance? Shh!
Analysis
"Science benefits all of humanity," they say.
Links
* Artist Feeds Her Childhood Diary Into an AI Chatbot -- And Has a Moving Conversation With Her Younger Self * Giant satellite outshines stars, sparking fresh concerns for astronomers * Does the Peer Review Process Need Blockchain? * The Ants Have Not Read Kant: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid – opening line: "Though
Analysis
What does it mean to say that the speed of light is 1? We know the speed of light in the vacuum of space to be 299,792,458 m/s – or about 300,000 km/s. It's a quantity of speed that's very hard to
Uncategorized
An investigation by Science has found that, today, just 3% of “PhD programs in eight disciplines at 50 top-ranked US universities” require applicants’ GRE scores, “compared with 84% four years ago”. This is good news about a test whose purpose I could never understand: first as a student who had
Scicomm
As you go downward, inward, smaller and smaller, you get more vast conscious experience. This is the idea in Indian knowledge systems. At the bottom of it, or the very base of it, at the source, is Brahman. My point is that this is actually very consistent with what we&
Culture
From an unusual ice cream colour to quantum mechanics to ecology to semiconductors to gastroporn.
Life notes
November 30, 2022, is my last day.