Maybe there’s no way to give out a ‘scarce’ prize without replicating the inequalities that produced the discovery in the first place. Or maybe the prize itself is the problem. www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/sci...
Would a quantum battery charge faster than a classical one? rootprivileges.net/2026/02/18/w...
When I sleep with stress, I have stressful dreams. On Monday night, I found myself having to explain the BSD conjecture without knowing what it was. So I wanted to make sure I got it when I woke up in case the dream recurred. rootprivileges.net/2026/02/11/t...
"How money can do the most good while exacting the least social cost" versus "money has no inherent morality, only its application does" versus "certain actions are fundamentally wrong, regardless of the consequences" www.thehindu.com/opinion/is-i...
For all the ways in which the Indian people are divided these days, they’re seemingly united in their desire to set records. rootprivileges.net/2026/01/23/t...
Delhi has always been a palimpsest of settlement, agriculture, invasion, courtly buildings, colonial planning, and postcolonial expansion. That in turn means we must restore, but not come at the expense of believing the past is the farthest we can go. www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/ene...
India has made a habit of using ad hoc mechanisms to resolve conflicts between its economic and climate commitments, leaving environmental law to absorb the political pressure. The Aravalli issue is the latest example. My analysis: www.thehindu.com/opinion/arav...
A tremendous piece by Anita Ratnam www.thehindu.com/entertainmen...
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. rootprivileges.net/2025/12/26/h...
The instruments at Jantar Mantar make measurement inspectable. Protests, in their best form, have a similar demand. www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/sci...
While the laureate has done well to force economists to take technology, culture seriously as historical forces, the picture he offers of a competitive market for knowledge yielding sustained improvements in welfare isn't borne out by history. My piece: www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/sci...
Vijay's alpha-male roles aren't just fictions: they’re part of the public persona he has deliberately converted into his newfound political authority rootprivileges.net/2025/12/15/j...
Joel Mokyr lauds the Nobel Prizes as an incentive today's intellectual elite deserve to have, yet they're part of the same system of social relations he underplays in his theory of progress rootprivileges.net/2025/12/14/m...
"Prison rules and oversight mechanisms have repeatedly normalised the idea that the discomfort faced by some bodies is part of the sentence rather than something the state has a duty to prevent." www.thehindu.com/opinion/edit...
If you want to censor something, you must show it crosses a legal line. But in the new culture of "we don’t know if…", the artist needs to prove the unprovable: that no unknown hurt sentiment will ever surface. This is the story of Arundhati Roy's beedi. www.thehindu.com/society/arun...
Thanks
You’re probably using AI to write. You’re probably going to continue using AI to write. And there’s nothing I can do about that. farfromeq.wordpress.com/2025/12/06/s...
There are many ideas in particle physics that, even as they are derived from other theoretical constructs that have been tested to extreme precision, physicists insist on testing them anew as well. Why do they go to this trouble? farfromeq.wordpress.com/2025/12/06/w...
On Tom Stoppard's play 'Arcadia' and what it says about the life of scientific ideas, plus an attempted use of the play's staging and characters to critique CP Snow's "gulf of mutual incomprehension" between science and the arts www.thehindu.com/entertainmen...
Geneticist here. Anyone telling you that they can just change intelligence (which isn't what IQ measures well anyways) by fiddling with a few genes is just straight-up grifting, it doesn't work like that. And yes it's basically definitionally eugenics.
China has finished building its Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), a somewhat bittersweet development given that the India-based Neutrino Observatory has been in limbo for years. www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-e...
Something strange about the image on top, can't tell if it's twisting to the right or to the left
Poetry Comics Month, Day 14
"The higher turnout of women … brings into focus the ECI's silence on a fundamental question: how did Bihar's electoral rolls end up with a gender ratio significantly lower than what surveys indicate for the State's population?" www.thehindu.com/opinion/edit...
An ad signalling a state administration's willingness to accept floods will cause more and more damage and that it expects to be judged on the speed and size of compensation rather than on the damage it has managed to avoid rootprivileges.net/2025/11/11/f...
Individuals can't master the mathematics of cryptography or the molecular biology of vaccines, yet they still trust these fields of science to make their own decisions. Why? rootprivileges.net/2025/11/09/w...
Bill Gates's actions show that sounding the highest alarm on climate change and later leaping back from that position can both cause harm www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-e...
Are we mistaking the idea of knowledge for the object of policy? www.randomwalking.org/2025/11/02/i...
I've come to dislike the word 'impact'. Climate writing has become rife with it and I'm not sure if all writers appreciate the consequences, especially its contribution to dull and flattened communication. www.randomwalking.org/2025/10/31/t...
