Op-eds
Donald Trump When you criticise a person, you naturally take into account their office and assess whether you know all that you need to to come to your conclusions. For a long time, this 'stop and assess' step prevented mediapersons, who generally like to be careful, from calling
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
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The ISRO homepage has been hijacked by an almost-full-page banner soliciting readers' comments about Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Independence Day speech. A friend was understandably irked by this and wanted to know if it could be discussed in an article. This is annoying for sure. The '
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We are convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role nationally, and in the community of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society. Normally this kind of comment would be a platitude. In fact,
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TL;DR – Journalists are already more accountable than the publishers of scientific journals are. If scientists find journalistic review of the scientific literature to be lacking, help them improve instead of completely disabling them from doing it. *** The recent conversation about preprints, motivated by Tom Sheldon's article in
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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The new content editor in the Ghost CMS, named Koenig, is quite good, a much smoother use than WordPress's new Gutenberg. Ghost's latest iteration in v1.25.3 (as of today) has a full-screen minimal layout and bold serif text type brought together with the Markdown
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I just spent the weekend at Sunti koppa, a small village to the northwest of Mysore, in Kodagu, a.k.a. Coorg, district. I was there with my relatives – six of us in all – and we were put up at a homestay in the middle of a coffee and pepper
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After I published my rebuttal to the Nature anti-preprints article, a scientist in the US wrote to me saying he was on the journal's side and that he expects preprints to be done away with in the future. It was dispiriting to hear. But in the last five
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Ergodicity is the condition wherein a sample is representative of the whole vis-a-vis some statistical parameter. An ergodic system is one that visits all possible states of its existence as it evolves. Axiomatically, a non-ergodic system is one that does not. Stuart A. Kauffman, a scientist at the University of
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An article in KurzweilAI begins, Plants could soon provide our electricity. Why would anyone take this seriously? More than excitement, this line rouses a discerning reader to suspicion. It is bound to be centred on the word "soon", implying in the near-future, imminently. You're not sure
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In response to my Twitter thread against Tom Sheldon's anti-preprints article in Nature, I received more responses in support of Sheldon's view than I expected. So I wrote an extended takedown for my blog and, of course, The Wire, pasted below. In 1969, Franz J. Ingelfinger