Culture
Streaming now: the 24/7 human centipede
Have you heard of 'Bigg Boss Ultimate'?
VM
Tech
If WordPress supports NFTs, should I boycott it?
"I make use of the tools available to me. That doesn't mean I have to applaud every advance in the field."
Analysis
Marie Curie: An icon or 'in the way'?
Who would have been the most iconic woman physicist of all time if the Nobel Prizes didn't exist?
Life notes
A nominal milestone
In 2018, I discovered that my blog posts since mid-2014 had taken on a somewhat different character than those before, becoming more critical and paralleling my increasing, and increasingly nagging, questions about what it means to be a journalist – particularly a science journalist – in India at this time. So I
Analysis
PTI, celebrating scientists, and class/caste
PTI's decision to stick Anna Menon's name in a headline about the new SpaceX crew makes no sense.
Culture
'Steps in the right direction' are not enough
To laud "steps in the right direction" is to flout an intentional ignorance of the government's track record.
Analysis
Crypto: Climate change means new tech has less time today to prove itself
I spent this weekend reading about permissioned and permissionless blockchain systems. If you want to get in on it, I can’t recommend this post by David Rosenthal enough. Much of the complexity of executing transactions of the major extant cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin and ether, arises from the need for
Analysis
The persistence of NFTs
NFTs freak me out. One of the ways in which my grandmother lost touch with her daughter – my mother – was my mother's generation's access to and use of computers, smartphones and the internet. And one of the ways in which my mother and father are out
Analysis
Review of a review: 'Rocket Boys' (2022)
Tanul Thakur has reviewed a series on SonyLIV called Rocket Boys for The Wire. I haven't watched the show and don't plan to, for want of time as well as because, reading Thakur's review, I think I know enough about how the series depicts
Analysis
The new JNU VC’s statement has bad grammar. So?
I strongly disagree with some criticism that has emerged on Twitter against the new JNU vice-chancellor Santishree Pandit. The object of criticism is a statement that Pandit has apparently drafted and in which she states, broadly, what she considers to be her mandate. In response, BJP MP Varun Gandhi wrote:
Scicomm
News coverage in India of open access papers
In a study published in November 2021, Teresa Schultz, of the University of Nevada, Reno, reported that gold, green and hybrid open-access (OA) modes of publishing of scientific papers were correlated with more mentions in the news. Gold OA refers to scientists publishing their paper in an OA journal, and
Analysis
The BJP's fake news (fake?) meeting
Reuters published a very interesting report on February 2, entitled 'Exclusive-In heated meeting, India seeks tougher action from U.S. tech giants on fake news'. Excerpt: Indian officials have held heated discussions with Google, Twitter and Facebook for not proactively removing what they described as fake news on