Life notes
Chennai is my favourite city to land in an airplane over. The runway at its Meenambakkam Airport is oriented such that planes often have to land after manoeuvring themselves over the Bay of Bengal, approaching the city over the Marina beach. As a result, especially at night, it becomes evident
Life notes
I just got to Delhi from Bangalore. The sendoff in the latter city was great: the skies were overcast, with a darker, wetter layer of clouds looming at the zenith, set at snail's pace by a strong wind. Delhi wasn't too bad either. If there was
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(Re)Stumbled upon this article, by Ed Yong in The Atlantic, July 2016, this morning. As usual, it is rivetingly packaged. The strapline in particular caught my eye: Biology textbooks tell us that lichens are alliances between two organisms—a fungus and an alga. They are wrong. Makes you go
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I got into fantasy because my reality growing up was no good. The first videogame I played and really enjoyed, almost to the point of obsessing over it every available second, was Command & Conquer's Red Alert 2. I believe many players of the game will agree it
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A lightning storm rages outside. The large window panes going from floor to ceiling in the living room rattle as the wind whips around, gathering dust off the ground right outside my building, spinning it up into little, but no less terrifying, tornadoes (maybe it's the tornado-like
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This post is a breakdown of the Pew study titled The Science People See on Social Media, published March 21, 2018. Without further ado… In an effort to better understand the science information that social media users encounter on these platforms, Pew Research Center systematically analyzed six months’ worth of
Life notes
The Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy series exhibited a rabid yet desirable iconoclasm, through which its author Steven Erikson elucidated every trope of epic fantasy and then shit on it. I came out of reading the series feeling like nothing could surprise me anymore except some other Erikson fare.
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Just the other day, I’d mentioned to a friend that Steven Pinker was one of those rare people whose ideas couldn’t be appreciated by proxy, such as through the opinions of other authority figures, but had to be processed individually. This is because Pinker has found as much
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Response to Mark Johnson, Article about free images 'contradicts everything I hold true about journalism', Poynter, February 9, 2018. ∞ Let's get the caveats out of the way: * The article to which Johnson is responding did get some of its messaging wrong. As Johnson wrote, it suggested
Life notes
Though I've never met the guy, I don't hold Pallava Bagla in very high regard because his stories – particularly of the Indian space programme – for NDTV have often reeked of simplistic concerns, pettiness and, increasingly of late, a nationalistic pride. The most recent instance all these
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How much do we not know about what Indian researchers are doing simply because Western scientists haven't written to some of them?
Life notes
Four doctors affiliated with Kathmandu University (KU) in Nepal are going to be fired because they plagiarised data in two papers. The papers were retracted last year from the Bali Medical Journal, where they had been published. A dean at the university, Dipak Shrestha, told a media outlet that the