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A post published on the Last Word On Nothing blog yesterday has been creating quite the stir on Twitter. Excerpt: While I can appreciate that this is an important scientific discovery, I still have a hard time mustering excitement over gravitational waves. I would not have read these articles had
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I'm not a fan of cosmetic products whatsoever. The most I use is a bar of soap, a bottle of shampoo, a smaller bottle of coconut oil and the occasional earbud. Maybe a bottle of deodorant when I've been out in the sun overlong. But recently,
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Seventy! That's how many observatories around the world turned their antennae to study the neutron-star collision that LIGO first detected. So I don't know why the LIGO Collaboration, and Nature, bothered to embargo the announcement and, more importantly, the scientific papers of the LIGO-Virgo
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When the hype for the announcement of the previous GW detection was ramping up, I had a feeling LIGO was about to announce the detection of a neutron-star collision. It wasn't to be – but in my excitement, I'd written a small part of the article.
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TIL one reason some of us are so dejected and furious at the TV when in, a cricket match being telecast live, a fielder appears to miss catching the ball even though it looks like he easily could have. A.k.a. why my grandpa loses his shit when M.
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"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." (source) This is the principle of the Chekhov's gun: that all items within a narrative must contribute
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When May-Britt Moser, Edvard Moser and John O'Keefe were awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain", there was a noticeable uptick in the number of articles on similar subjects in
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Note: One of my editors thought this post would work for The Wire as well, so it's been republished there. "… for the greatest benefit of mankind" – these words are scrawled across a banner that adorns the Nobel Prize's homepage. They are the words of
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I don't believe in god, but if he/it/she/they existed, then his/its/her/their gift to science communication would've been the metaphor. Metaphors help make sense of truly unknowable things, get a grip on things so large that our minds boggle trying to
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A Huffington Post article purportedly published by the US bureau has flicked two quotes from a story first published by The Wire, on the influenza epidemics ravaging India. The story's original author and its editor (me) reached out to HuffPo India folks via Twitter to get them to
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One of my favourite essays of all time – insofar as that's a legitimate category – is one called 'How to do what you love' by Paul Graham, the startup guru. In it, he makes a case for the usefulness of a passion. Mine is writing; what kind
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The Nobel Prizes are too big to fail. Even if they've become beset by a host of problems, such as: 1. Long gap between invention/discovery and recognition, 2. A large cash component given to old scientists, 3. Limiting number of awardees to three, 4. Not awarding prizes