Savouring playtime
Writing prompt: Do you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you? I work in an office with many lovely and smart people and I find engaging them in conversation is playtime. It’s a social…
My political views
Writing prompt: How have your political views changed over time? 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-wing…
Heat capacity
Someone asked me recently to name the thing I’ve been most grateful for in 2025. After giving it some thought, I realised it had to be the heat capacity of water. And not just for 2025. Tea is my wa…
Joel Mokyr, Gita Chadha, Lawrence Krauss, Joseph Vijay
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…
Mokyr hearts Nobel Prizes
I don’t like Joel Mokyr’s history of progress and have written about that before. I also have a longer analysis and explanation of my issues coming soon in The Hindu. On December 8 I got more occasion…
Tracking down energetic cosmic rays
Once in a while, nature runs experiments that no human lab can match. Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are a good example. Cosmic rays are fast, high energy particles from space that strike Earth’s atmo…
Acting and speaking
Writing prompt: Have you ever performed on stage or given a speech? 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…
So you use AI to write…
You're probably using AI to write. Both ChatGPT and Google AI Studio prefer to construct their sentences in specific and characteristic ways and anyone who’s been a commissioning editor for at lea…
AI slop clears peer-review
Here's an image from a paper that was published by Nature Scientific Reports on November 19 and retracted on December 5: This paper made it through peer review at the journal. Let that sink in fo…
Worlds between theory and experiment
Once Isaac Newton showed that a single gravitational law plus his rules of dynamics could reproduce the orbits of planets that Johannes Kepler had predicted, explain tides on Earth, and predict that a…
Robbing NISAR to pay ISRO
A.K. Anil Kumar, the director of ISRO's Telemetry, Tracking, and Command Network (a.k.a. ISTRAC), has reportedly made some seriously misleading comments as part of his convocation address at a Mah…
Part light, part matter
Consider a bunch of molecules that have been trapped between two mirrors facing each other very closely. In this 'box' the light can't move around freely; it can only exist in certain fixe…