Culture
A well-meaning manel is not a good panel
It's time the good intentions of the organisers cease to matter.
Latest
Analysis
What 'The Kerala Story' and 'The Old Guard' share
I was rewatching The Old Guard last week; the film is a bit of a favourite because a) Charlize Theron and b) it explores, even if in passing, the sometimes horrific terms on which science feels free to progress. But last week, a study published in the New England Journal
Analysis
Can we 'redistribute' prestige?
Pudding.cool has a good visual essay on the yard-sale model of economics, which shows that wealth has a tendency to accumulate more in the hands of people who are already wealthier. This is because a richer person has more opportunities to regain lost wealth than a poorer person.
Analysis
Gender equity in retractions
From the abstract of a fascinating study published in PLoS ONE on May 3, 2023: … this study investigated gender differences in authorship of retracted papers in biomedical sciences available on RetractionWatch. Among 35,635 biomedical articles retracted between 1970 and 2022, including 20,849 first authors and 20,413 last
Analysis
Marginalia: Romila on textbooks, Rapido ad, Nobel nonsense
We may go on deleting sections of our history but in the world outside where there are multiple centres of research into the Indian past, and many scholars, there these expunged sections from books used in India will continue to be studied. They will be subjected to new methods of
Analysis
What about the celebrities in food ads?
The row over Bournvita last month was spurred by a social-media influencer’s viral video of the product’s allegedly unhealthy sugar content. Following a legal threat from Mondelez International India, which makes Bournvita, the influencer deleted his video and apologised. But on April 26, the National Commission on
Science
Another reason to point lights down
‘Skyward light, wayward light’, this blog, December 14, 2022: One of the simplest ways [to prevent light pollution] is in fact to have no public lighting installation that casts light upward, into the sky, but keeps it all facing down. Doing this will subtract the installation’s contribution to light
Analysis
The gap between language and quantum mechanics
Physics World has a fantastic article about the problem with using a language invented, in Terry Pratchett's words, "to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is", to describe the peculiar but very much real possibilities created by the rules of quantum mechanics. Excerpt: … despite the
Scicomm
Where do scientists communicate their work?
A group of Spanish researchers analysed the mentions of scientific papers authored by scientists (affiliated with Spain) on the social media, on Wikipedia, and on news outlets, blogs and policy documents to understand where the consumers of such scientific information were located. They selected 3,653 authors, and the following
Life notes
Games grimy and green
Every day, I spend an hour or three playing a game called Factorio, in which you mine and process natural resources with which to build and automate ever-larger factories that manufacture materials for research, transport, power, and weapons. Once your factories get big enough (say, when they consume 10
Analysis
Who's to blame for the American right's distrust of science?
This study unambiguously suggests that scientific journals do the institution of science no favor when they insert themselves so directly in the political debate, especially at a time when trust in the scientific community continues to decline on the right wing. This is the surprisingly misguided interpretation, in an article
Culture
Lord of the Rings Day
Happy Lord of the Rings Day. :) About a week ago, I began rereading book 7 of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. This followed my realisation earlier this year that I had somehow lost the ability to read fiction. I had neither the interest in the genre nor – unlike