Culture
This article has been republished on The Wire. When the Vikram lander's autonomous descent manoeuvre didn't go as planned, scientists of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) looked surprised and dejected at once in the mission control room in Bengaluru. There was the gentle, thoughtful reminder
Op-eds
https://twitter.com/BDUTT/status/1170243147626008576 I understand Dutt’s interpretation of the moment in question but with reservations about what it signals for the nation’s many oppressed. For starters, how many people actually gave a damn? A few hundred people – many of them mainstream journalists – have been saying
Op-eds
Should Prime Minister Narendra Modi not have been in the control room during the autonomous descent phase of Chandrayaan 2? Did his presence exert unnecessary pressure on the ISRO scientists? I don’t know if the pressure was unnecessary. Irrespective of who was present where, a decade-long, Rs-1,000-crore effort
Scicomm
Ahead of Chandrayaan 2’s date with the lunar surface on September 7, the following line has been bandied about in the Indian as well as foreign media: Only three countries – the US, Russia and China – have attempted and succeeded in soft-landing a payload on the Moon. If Chandrayaan 2’
Science
J. Nathan Matias, a newly minted faculty member at Cornell University and a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab, has announced that he will cut all ties with the latter at the end of the academic year over the lab director's, i.e. Joi Ito's,
Science
On August 15, Joi Ito, the director of MIT's famed Media Lab, published a post apologising for fraternising with Jeffrey Epstein. His wording mimics a bit of George Church's as well, in that Ito says he "was never involved in, never heard him talk about,
Scicomm
On August 15, AFP reported that the BBC plans to expand its shortwave radio coverage in Kashmir “to ease the impact of a communications blackout imposed by the Centre”. The report added that “short wave transmissions travel thousands of miles and are able to bounce over mountains that dominate the
Culture
This review assumes Tanul Thakur’s review as a preamble. There's the argument that ISRO isn't doing much by way of public outreach and trust in the media is at a low, and for many people – more than the most reliable sections of the media can
Op-eds
The Union culture ministry had announced in November last year that it would develop a 'Vedic Heritage' portal to promote the Vedas, and hoped to inaugurate it by March 2019. It would seem the portal is finally online (with the last update posted on July 29, 2019). Though
Op-eds
The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was founded in 2012 by Yuri Milner to recognise those individuals who have made profound contributions to human knowledge. It is open to all physicists – theoretical, mathematical, experimental – working on the deepest mysteries of the Universe. (Source) When these prizes were first awarded seven
Science
I just read through a collection of Vikram Sarabhai's important speeches and papers compiled by members of the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Ahmedabad, to pick a suitable portion to excerpt on the occasion of Sarabhai's birth centenary tomorrow. There was one portion I would have loved
Op-eds
Note: Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell on August 10, 2019. The following post was written before news of his death emerged. In 2016, I attended a talk by a not-unknown environmental activist in Chennai (not Nityanand Jayaraman, before you ask) who had spent many years stitching together