11 posts
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…
I'm not sure what to make of Bill Gates as he features in the New York Times's report on his divorce with Melinda French Gates, although it's tempting to see hints of that attitude so ofte…
The Life of Science team uploaded the video of their webinar on July 10, about the construct of the genius in science, on YouTube on July 14. Please watch it if you haven't already. I had also blo…
Recently, someone shared the cover of a soon to be released book, entitled The Physics of Climate Change, authored by Lawrence M. Krauss and expressed excitement about the book's impending publica…
David Michaels, an epidemiologist and a former US assistant secretary of labour for occupational safety and health under Barack Obama, writes in the Boston Review: [Product defence] operations have o…
With apologies for recalling horrible people early in the day: I chanced upon this article quoting Lawrence Krauss talking about his friend Jeffrey Epstein from April 2011, and updated in July 2019. E…
Peter Woit's review of a new book about Jim Simons, the mathematician and capitalist who set up the Simons Foundation, which funds math and physics research around the world but principally in the…
While there have been no other high-profile exits from the MIT Media Lab after Ethan Zuckerman and J. Nathan Matias submitted their resignations, the lab’s students had been demanding its director Joi…
J. Nathan Matias, a newly minted faculty member at Cornell University and a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab, has announced that he will cut all ties with the latter at the end of the academic ye…
On August 15, Joi Ito, the director of MIT's famed Media Lab, published a post apologising for fraternising with Jeffrey Epstein. His wording mimics a bit of George Church's as well, in that I…
Note: Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell on August 10, 2019. The following post was written before news of his death emerged. In 2016, I attended a talk by a not-unknown environmental activis…