For all the ways in which the Indian people are divided these days, they’re seemingly united in their desire to set records. rootprivileges.net/2026/01/23/t...

Delhi has always been a palimpsest of settlement, agriculture, invasion, courtly buildings, colonial planning, and postcolonial expansion. That in turn means we must restore, but not come at the expense of believing the past is the farthest we can go. www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/ene...

India has made a habit of using ad hoc mechanisms to resolve conflicts between its economic and climate commitments, leaving environmental law to absorb the political pressure. The Aravalli issue is the latest example. My analysis: www.thehindu.com/opinion/arav...

A tremendous piece by Anita Ratnam www.thehindu.com/entertainmen...

Someone asked me recently to name the thing I've been most grateful for in 2025. After giving it some thought, I realised it had to be the heat capacity of water. rootprivileges.net/2025/12/26/h...

The instruments at Jantar Mantar make measurement inspectable. Protests, in their best form, have a similar demand. www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/sci...

While the laureate has done well to force economists to take technology, culture seriously as historical forces, the picture he offers of a competitive market for knowledge yielding sustained improvements in welfare isn't borne out by history. My piece: www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/sci...

Vijay's alpha-male roles aren't just fictions: they’re part of the public persona he has deliberately converted into his newfound political authority rootprivileges.net/2025/12/15/j...

Joel Mokyr lauds the Nobel Prizes as an incentive today's intellectual elite deserve to have, yet they're part of the same system of social relations he underplays in his theory of progress rootprivileges.net/2025/12/14/m...

"Prison rules and oversight mechanisms have repeatedly normalised the idea that the discomfort faced by some bodies is part of the sentence rather than something the state has a duty to prevent." www.thehindu.com/opinion/edit...

If you want to censor something, you must show it crosses a legal line. But in the new culture of "we don’t know if…", the artist needs to prove the unprovable: that no unknown hurt sentiment will ever surface. This is the story of Arundhati Roy's beedi. www.thehindu.com/society/arun...

You’re probably using AI to write. You’re probably going to continue using AI to write. And there’s nothing I can do about that. farfromeq.wordpress.com/2025/12/06/s...

There are many ideas in particle physics that, even as they are derived from other theoretical constructs that have been tested to extreme precision, physicists insist on testing them anew as well. Why do they go to this trouble? farfromeq.wordpress.com/2025/12/06/w...

On Tom Stoppard's play 'Arcadia' and what it says about the life of scientific ideas, plus an attempted use of the play's staging and characters to critique CP Snow's "gulf of mutual incomprehension" between science and the arts www.thehindu.com/entertainmen...

Geneticist here. Anyone telling you that they can just change intelligence (which isn't what IQ measures well anyways) by fiddling with a few genes is just straight-up grifting, it doesn't work like that. And yes it's basically definitionally eugenics.

China has finished building its Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), a somewhat bittersweet development given that the India-based Neutrino Observatory has been in limbo for years. www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-e...

Poetry Comics Month, Day 14

"The higher turnout of women … brings into focus the ECI's silence on a fundamental question: how did Bihar's electoral rolls end up with a gender ratio significantly lower than what surveys indicate for the State's population?" www.thehindu.com/opinion/edit...

An ad signalling a state administration's willingness to accept floods will cause more and more damage and that it expects to be judged on the speed and size of compensation rather than on the damage it has managed to avoid rootprivileges.net/2025/11/11/f...

Individuals can't master the mathematics of cryptography or the molecular biology of vaccines, yet they still trust these fields of science to make their own decisions. Why? rootprivileges.net/2025/11/09/w...

Bill Gates's actions show that sounding the highest alarm on climate change and later leaping back from that position can both cause harm www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-e...

Are we mistaking the idea of knowledge for the object of policy? www.randomwalking.org/2025/11/02/i...

I've come to dislike the word 'impact'. Climate writing has become rife with it and I'm not sure if all writers appreciate the consequences, especially its contribution to dull and flattened communication. www.randomwalking.org/2025/10/31/t...

On Jane Goodall www.randomwalking.org/2025/10/18/o...

According to Matthew Brown, to fully appreciate the value and scope of the scientific endeavour, we must recognise that science serves a "pragmatic function" as well as its equally significant "religious function" www.randomwalking.org/2025/10/18/t...

While it's heartening to tout the virtues of doing science led only by the guiding light of curiosity, it's important to remember that there's a bigger world out there and that science is a part of it. www.thehindu.com/newsletter/n...

Europe's industrial leadership wasn't the result of cultural superiority, as Joel Mokyr would have it, but because of specific material advantages, including those accruing from its colonial exploits and its global trade networks www.randomwalking.org/2025/10/14/a...

Linklist: October 12, 2025 linklist.substack.com/p/linklist-o...

The end of the world, whenever it comes, will look and feel exactly like the world we already know www.randomwalking.org/2025/10/09/r...

"They call it a war on science. It may indeed be a war, but science is not the target. The reorganization of the conventions of research fulfills a different aim: to disenfranchise marginalized communities. So let us call this what it has always been: class war." thebaffler.com/latest/scien...

The double-slit experiment, even in a sophisticated avatar, continues to reinforce the notion that the universe resists any single-sided description www.randomwalking.org/2025/10/01/u...

India's Ig Nobel wins are indicators of a culture of inquiry that deserves more institutional support www.randomwalking.org/2025/09/20/c...

Maxwell's demon forces us to ask what it means to know something about a system and whether that knowledge can be used without consequence www.randomwalking.org/2025/09/19/d...

To cancel an India-Pakistan cricket match is to concede that no space can remain where ordinary citizens of India and Pakistan might encounter each other beyond the logic of hostility rootprivileges.net/2025/09/13/a...

The Higgs boson's discovery in 2012 confirmed the Higgs field is real. But discovery alone doesn’t prove the mechanism is doing everything the theory demands. To test that, physicists need to look at situations where the Higgs boson's balancing act is crucial. rootprivileges.net/2025/09/12/i...

Rubidium rebukes dogma rootprivileges.net/2025/09/09/a...

Lighting the way with Parrondo’s paradox rootprivileges.net/2025/09/07/l...

Making sense of the MicroBooNE findings rootprivileges.net/2025/09/06/c...

[email protected] recently asked other physics teachers on X how much time they spend teaching the interpretations of quantum physics. His question inspired me to write this post rootprivileges.net/2025/09/03/w...

Our everyday world looks predictable only because decoherence hides the fuzziness. But under carefully controlled conditions, that fuzziness comes back into view. www.argumentative.co/2025/08/23/w...

Fusing commercial messaging with nationalist symbolism capitalises on the prevailing political mood and presents companies as partners in the nationalist project. A Zomato advertisement on August 15 is a good example. www.argumentative.co/2025/08/16/z...

A new kind of quantum engine with ultracold atoms rootprivileges.net/2025/08/07/a...

Trump's trade war is reminiscent of US-India relations in the early 1990s, when the US denied Russia's transfer of cryogenic engine technology to ISRO rootprivileges.net/2025/08/07/t...

What keeps the red queen running? rootprivileges.net/2025/08/06/w...

The ECI's increasingly diminished reputation lends a soft credence to Rahul Gandhi’s claims, i.e. that they are not all implausible, and that is precisely why the evidence needs to be available to all electors right away rootprivileges.net/2025/08/02/t...

Frugality is a toxic chalice rootprivileges.net/2025/07/28/f...

Ft. tellurium crystals and Vijay Shenoy www.rootprivileges.net/2025/07/19/q...

If you’re not interested in particle physics, that’s fine. But remember that you can be. :) rootprivileges.net/2025/07/17/f...

Even if the statement "sharks employ advanced mathematical concepts" doesn’t feature a metaphor, the risk it represents hews close to one that stalks the use of metaphors in science journalism: the creation of false knowledge rootprivileges.net/2025/07/13/s...

The state's strictly meteorological definition of a heatwave doesn't account for the way class differences create heatwave-like conditions even on 'normal' days rootprivileges.net/2025/07/13/t...