From '‘The physics community has never split like this’: row erupts over plans for new Large Hadron Collider', The Guardian, March 29, 2025:
However, if the FCC were given the go-ahead, it could lock up funds for decades and end up dictating the direction that particle physics will have to take for much of the century, [DESY Hamburg researcher Jenny] List added. “We will be telling future generations exactly what to do scientifically, and so we need to ask ourselves today: who are we to decide what our grandchildren should research and not research?”
What a powerful argument. And it cuts both ways, too: just as much as we must acknowledge the risks of "locking in" scientists to the FCC while starving other avenues of particle physics research of funds, there is also a well-defined risk in missing a window to fund the FCC while it's open instead of waiting and losing a potentially one-time opportunity.
In an ideal world, physicists may like to pursue as many avenues as possible (towards developing a unified and complete description of the physical universe). Of course, more avenues will be possible if they give up on the FCC and split the money they save to hundreds more of smaller projects. But I think it's also possible to argue building the FCC will itself push physics research in many new directions, providing answers no other experiment can to inform and guide more research. The sword really does cut both ways.
Even in terms of funding: while giving up on the FCC will 'spare' funds that could serve many smaller experiments well, there's no telling if governments will make them just as available for the latter and, equally, if the political will among governments to fund an FCC-like machine will always exist. The language around the FCC's budgeting is also confusing: its $30 billion (Rs 2.56 lakh crore) cost will be spent over decades, not in one shot, and a not insignificant chunk of these expenses will be in the form of people's work-hours and components manufactured by industrial centres in various participating countries.
Which is why I think the question "who are we to decide?" sounds like a cop-out. Fundamentally, who else is going to decide? Physicists need to make decisions now. It's likely very difficult for anyone to say if the decision they make at this time will be the right one. All that's clear is that they need to decide. In fact, we need to decide, going by what IIT Mandi physicist Nirmalya Kajuri wrote in The Wire Science in 2019:
Irrespective of which way the debate swings, it has already shown that the few who communicate science can have a lopsided influence on the public perception of an entire field – even if they’re not from that field. The distinction between a particle physicist and, say, a condensed-matter physicist is not as meaningful to most people reading the New York Times or any other mainstream publication as it is to physicists. There’s no reason among readers to exclude [Sabine] Hossenfelder as an expert.
However, very few physicists engage in science communication. The extreme ‘publish or perish’ culture that prevails in sciences means that spending time in any activity other than research carries a large risk. In some places, in fact, junior scientists spending time popularising science are frowned upon because they’re seen to be spending time on something unproductive. But debates like this demonstrate the rewards of science communication.
I recently started reading a book entitled The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay. It is historical fiction, immaculately detailed, with three excellent protagonists surrounded by a band of almost as admirable allies navigating a middle-era Spain in which three powerful politico-religious factions are vying for greater power. The Lions is endlessly beautiful both for Kay’s writing and the stories he has decided to narrate as much as those he won’t. The time in which the book’s tales are set was no stranger to casual brutality, but The Lions rises above it by what women and men striving constantly to be their best selves are capable of even in the presence of profound injustice, and of course the price they must inevitably pay. But even so, The Lions makes for superb reading.
A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you. 🙂 As I’ve written in many past editions of posts marking this occasion, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series surpassed JRR Tolkien’s novels and stories of Middle Earth — which was until then the high-water mark of epic fantasy to my mind — when I started reading the former. However, the Malazan series also surpassed, in some cases by distances I’d never imagined possible, all other works of fantasy I’d read until then. I finished reading it just as I completed my engineering studies and shortly after began a career as a journalist. And just a couple more years on, I had a sobering epiphany: I seemed to have lost my book-reading habit. Of course I regularly read shorter written material, from brief news reports to extended essays, but somehow I wasn’t been able to bring myself to read books of fiction — even of epic fantasy fiction, a genre I love very much.
The Lions broke this spell. I’d recently visited a close friend’s home and asked him to recommend a good book of fiction. I half-expected to be told there was nothing left to read or, should my friend somehow be able to recommend a book, fully expected to not read it all. After rapidly going through a list of books he’d liked and which I’d already read, he dove into his bookshelf for a minute and returned with The Lions. Both he and another close friend recommended it highly, which was something special because these two people have high standards of fiction — as they should — as well as are ravenous consumers of creative work produced by others and published authors themselves. So I decided I’d give The Lions more of a shot than I’d given other books of late, and boy was I glad.
I don’t like the city of New Delhi in and of itself. But I have some great friends there and experiencing the city with them simply transforms the place. The world of The Lions is just like that: riven with the kind of cruelty and hardship that only small-minded, parochial power is capable of inflicting on those it deems lesser than themselves, yet brightened and enlivened by the story’s protagonists, the physician Jehane bet Ishak, the military leader Rodrigo Belmonte, and the counsellor of kings Ammar ibn Khairan. When I turn into a page that opens with even one of them, I become [gasp] hopeful. What a luxury!
Whereas The Lord of the Rings is constantly pitching forward, The Lions allows the reader to rest and dwell every now and then — which is remarkable considering The Lions moves faster than the trilogy of books every does. Swept along, I started to wonder just as I crossed the book’s midpoint if I was beginning to recover my reading habit after more than a decade. As The Lions gently but surely built up to its crescendo, I even asked myself if the habit really went away or if I’d just been picking the ‘wrong’ books to read all this time. But just as I got within 150 pages of the book’s finish, I was brought to a crashing halt: I found myself having an increasingly tough time keeping on. I discovered a mind within my mind intent on keeping me from accessing my interest in reading the book. Its purpose seemed to be to have me stop reading right now, so that the people in The Lions could continue to remain where they were in the narrative without being consumed by the impending climax, where at least war — and the attendant prospect of death — lay, and still lies, in wait. But I know I must keep trying: Jehane, Rodrigo, and Ammar have already lived their lives and they would have continued to do so on their own exacting terms. If I am to claim to know them, I must not be afraid of following their lives to the end.
Either it’s only a matter of time before fantasy fiction writers start featuring among the laureates of highfalutin literary awards or the literary world’s irrational prejudice towards stories of lived lives will continue to be laid bare for what it is. If only to me, The Lord of the Rings, the Malazan series, and The Lions of Al-Rassan are of a piece with any and all fiction, whether in prose or verse, in terms of humans or aliens, located somewhere or nowhere. There are differences, of course, but that is also a tautological statement. Differences abound between The Lions and The Lord of the Rings as much as they do between, say, Half of a Yellow Sun and Objects of Desire. Yet they all play on the same borderless field.
Even magic needn’t make a difference. I used to think that it did when I first read The Lord of the Rings and realised how much better it was than anything else I’d read until then. But I’ve learnt that they’re not all that different, whether in kind or degree. Magic, if you’ve read the Malazan series but also if you’ve dabbled in the Elden Ring lore or played a Dungeons & Dragons campaign or two, can be found to be a thing of the world, this material world, occupying the space between you and me as surely as sunlight and birdsong. This is ultimately why I keep returning to The Lord of the Rings at least once a year, and why I find echoes of stories imagined much later by authors from different worlds in its old, familiar pages. Casting a spell to harm someone is no different from hitting them with a stick or bullying them when they’re helpless. Just as well, choosing not to do any of these things even when the incentive presents itself is equally virtuous.
The Lord of the Rings first brought me to this borderless field: even if I’m not frolicking yet, I’m not going to leave either. Now, back to The Lions…
A day before NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore were to return onboard a SpaceX crew capsule, Prime Minister Narendra Modi published a letter in which he said he had inquired after her when he met U.S. President Donald Trump and that even if “you are thousands of miles away, you remain in our hearts”.
Union Minister of State Jitendra Singh declared “a moment of glory, pride and relief” when Williams, whom he called “this illustrious daughter of India”, splashed down in Florida Bay. He lauded her “for the courage, conviction and consistency with which she endured the uncertainties of space”.
If one had only Singh’s note to read, one may not have realised another person, Barry Wilmore, endured what she had or that there were two other astronauts in the capsule when it descended. Yet Singh’s peers, including Jyotiraditya Scindia and Piyush Goyal, also published similar posts on their LinkedIn profiles extolling Williams alone. Scindia even thanked the other two astronauts “for rescuing our brave warriors of the space”. ISRO chimed in as well.
Williams was born in Ohio to Indian and Slovene American parents; her father emigrated from India in 1958. As such, she lived, studied, and worked all in the US. While the extent to which she is “Indian” per se is debatable, self-identity is personal and ultimately for Williams to determine.
In the last half year, however, many news reports in the mainstream press have referred to her as being of “Indian origin” or as “Indian-American”. Labels like this are poorly defined, if at all; writers and authors typically use them on the basis of a pulse or a sentiment. Are they accurate? It might seem that it does not matter whether a minister refers to Williams as a ‘woman of India’, that there is no price to pay. But there is.
In and of themselves, the pronouncements about Williams are not problematic. They become that way when one recalls what has been given to her, and by whom, that has been denied to many others, some arguably more deserving. An example from recent memory is wrestlers Vinesh Phogat and Sakshi Malik, whose peaceful protest to reform India’s professional wrestling administration was quelled violently by police acting on orders of the Union government. They were not “India’s daughters” then.
The year after, in 2024, when Phogat was disqualified from participating in the finals of the 50-kg wrestling event at the Paris Olympics, the immediate reaction was to allege a conspiracy, blame her for not trying hard “enough”, and to ask whether she had let Indians down even though the prime minister had “let” her participate despite her role in the protests.
There was no meaningful discussion or dialogue in government circles about systematically averting the circumstances that saw Phogat exit the Olympics, instead it seemed to grate that she had come so close to a monumental success yet still missed out.
The chief minister of Haryana, a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party at the Centre, celebrated Phogat’s return to India as if she had had a podium finish, arranging for merriment on the streets of her home state. It was an attempt to paper over his peers’ accountability with sound and fury.
Williams occupies a similar liminal space: as Phogat had lost yet not lost, Williams was not Indian yet Indian — both narratives twisting the lived realities of these women in the service of a common message: that India is great. Williams’s feats in the space and spaceflight domains have been exceptional, but neither more than other astronauts who have gone to space on long missions nor because India had any role in facilitating it.
Presumably in response to an excellent article by Chethan Dash at The Times of India, Singh said on March 19 that the government had not arranged for India’s own astronaut-designates — the four men in the shortlist to pilot Gaganyaan’s maiden crewed flight — to have conversations with the press and the public at large, at a time when an exceptional number of people were interested in Williams’s life and work. The government had clearly missed an invaluable opportunity to build interest in the Indian space programme. Its excuse did not wash either: that the astronauts had to not be “distracted”.
The loud and repeated bids to coopt Williams’s success as India’s by extension has been disingenuous, a continuing pattern of crusting the shell with as many jewels as possible to hide the infirmity within.
An odd little detail in a Physics World piece on Microsoft’s claim to have made a working topological qubit:
Regardless of the debate about the results and how they have been announced, researchers are supportive of the efforts at Microsoft to produce a topological quantum computer. “As a scientist who likes to see things tried, I’m grateful that at least one player stuck with the topological approach even when it ended up being a long, painful slog,” says [Scott] Aaronson.
“Most governments won’t fund such work, because it’s way too risky and expensive,” adds [Winfried] Hensinger. “So it’s very nice to see that Microsoft is stepping in there.”
In drug development, defence technologies, and life sciences research, to name a few, we’ve seen the opposite: governments fund the risky, expensive part for many years, often decades, until something viable emerges. Then the IP moves to public and private sector enterprises for commercialisation, sometimes together with government subsidies to increase public access. With pharmaceuticals in particular, the government often doesn’t recoup investments it has made in the discovery phase, which includes medical education and research. An illustrative recent example is the development of mRNA vaccines; from my piece in The Hinducriticising the medicine Nobel Prize for this work:
Dr. Kariko and Dr. Weissman began working together on the mRNA platform at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1990s. The University licensed its patents to mRNA RiboTherapeutics, which sublicensed them to CellScript, which sublicensed them to Moderna and BioNTech for $75 million each. Dr. Karikó joined BioNTech as senior vice-president in 2013, and the company enlisted Pfizer to develop its mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 in 2020.
Much of the knowledge that underpins most new drugs and vaccines is unearthed at the expense of governments and public funds. This part of drug development is more risky and protracted, when scientists identify potential biomolecular targets within the body on which a drug could act in order to manage a particular disease, followed by identifying suitable chemical candidates. The cost and time estimates of this phase are $1billion-$2.5 billion and several decades, respectively.
Companies subsequently commoditise and commercialise these entities, raking in millions in profits, typically at the expense of the same people whose taxes funded the fundamental research. There is something to be said for this model of drug and vaccine development, particularly for the innovation it fosters and the eventual competition that lowers prices, but we cannot deny the ‘double-spend’ it imposes on consumers — including governments — and the profit-seeking attitude it engenders among the companies developing and manufacturing the product.
Quantum computing may well define the next technological revolution together with more mature AI models. Topological quantum computing in particular — if realised well enough to compete with alternative architectures based on superconducting wires and/or trapped ions — could prove especially valuable for its ability to be more powerful with fewer resources. Governments justify their continuing sizeable expense on drug development by the benefits that eventually accrue to the country’s people. By all means, quantum technologies will have similar consequences, following from a comparable trajectory of development where certain lines of inquiry are not precluded because they could be loss-making or amount to false starts. And they will impinge on everything from one’s fundamental rights to national security.
But Hensinger’s opinion indicates the responsibility of developing this technology has been left to the private sector. I wonder if there are confounding factors here. For example, is Microsoft’s pursuit of a topological qubit the exception to the rule — i.e. one of a few enterprises that are funded by a private organisation in a sea of publicly funded research? Another possibility is that we’re hearing about Microsoft’s success because it has a loud voice, with the added possibility that its announcement was premature (context here). It’s also possible Microsoft’s effort included grants from NSF, DARPA or the like.
All this said, let’s assume for a moment that what Hensinger said was true of quantum computing research in general: the lack of state-led development in such potentially transformative technologies raises two (closely related) concerns. The first is scientific progress, especially that it will happen behind closed doors. In a June 2023 note, senior editors of the Physical Review B journal acknowledged the contest between the importance of researchers sharing their data for scrutiny, replication, and for others to build on their work — all crucial for science — and private sector enterprises’ need to protect IP and thus withhold data. “This will not be the last time the American Physical Society confronts a tension between transparency and the transmission of new results,” they added. Unlike in drug development, life sciences, etc., even the moral argument that publicly funded research must be in the public domain is rendered impotent, although it can still be recast as the weaker “research that affects the public sphere…”.
The second is democracy. In a March 2024 commentary, digital governance experts Nathan Sanders, Bruce Schneier, and Norman Eisen wrote that the state could develop a “public AI” to counter the already apparent effects of “private AI” on democratic institutions. According to them, a “public AI” model could “provide a mechanism for public input and oversight on the critical ethical questions facing AI development,” including “how to incorporate copyrighted works in model training” and “how to license access for sensitive applications ranging from policing to medical use”. They added: “Federally funded foundation AI models would be provided as a public service, similar to a health care private option. They would not eliminate opportunities for private foundation models, but they would offer a baseline of price, quality, and ethical development practices that corporate players would have to match or exceed to compete.”
Of course, quantum computing isn’t beset by the same black-box problem that surrounds AI models, yet what it implies for our ability to secure digital data means it could still benefit from state-led development. Specifically: (i) a government-funded technology standard could specify the baseline for the private sector to “match or exceed to compete” so that computers deployed to secure public data maintain a minimum level of security; (ii) private innovation can build on the standard, with the advantage of not having to lay new foundations of their own; and (iii) the data and the schematics pertaining to the standard should be in the public domain, thus restricting private-sector IP to specific innovations.[1]
[1] Contrary to a lamentable public perception, just knowing how a digital technology works doesn’t mean it can be hacked.
On February 1, SpaceX launched its Starlink 11-4 mission onboard a Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket's reusable first stage returned safely to the ground and the second stage remained in orbit after deploying the Starlink satellites. It was to deorbit later in a controlled procedure and land somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. But on February 19 it was seen breaking up in the skies over Denmark, England, Poland, and Sweden, with some larger pieces crashing into parts of Poland. After the Polish space agency determined the debris to belong to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was asked about its liability. This was its response:
The FAA determined that all flight events for the SpaceX Starlink 11-4 mission occurred within the scope of SpaceX's licensed activities and that SpaceX satisfied safety at end-of-launch requirements. Per post-launch reporting requirements, SpaceX must identify any discrepancy or anomaly that occurred during the launch to the FAA within 90-days. The FAA has not identified any events that should be classified as a mishap at this time. Licensed flight activities and FAA oversight concluded upon SpaceX's last exercise of control over the Falcon 9 vehicle. SpaceX posted information on its website that the second stage from this launch reentered over Europe. The FAA is not investigating the uncontrolled reentry of the second stage nor the debris found in Poland.
I've spotted a lot of people on the internet (not trolls) describing this response as being in line with Donald Trump's "USA first" attitude and reckless disregard for the consequences of his government's actions and policies on other countries. It's understandable given how his meeting with Zelenskyy on February 28 played out as well as NASA acting administrator Janet Petro's disgusting comment about US plans to "dominate" lunar and cislunar space. However, the FAA's position has been unchanged since at least August 18, 2023, when it issued a "notice of proposed rulemaking" designated 88 FR 56546. Among other things:
The proposed rule would … update definitions relating to commercial space launch and reentry vehicles and occupants to reflect current legislative definitions … as well as implement clarifications to financial responsibility requirements in accordance with the United States Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act.
Under Section 401.5 2(i), the notice stated:
(1) Beginning of launch. (i) Under a license, launch begins with the arrival of a launch vehicle or payload at a U.S. launch site.
The FAA's position has likely stayed the same for some duration before the August 2023 date. According to Table 1 in the notice, the "effect of change" of the clarification of the term "Launch", under which Section 401.5 2(i) falls, is:
None. The FAA has been applying these definitions in accordance with the statute since the [US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act 2015] went into effect. This change would now provide regulatory clarity.
(i) For an orbital launch of a vehicle without a reentry of the vehicle, launch ends after the licensee’s last exercise of control over its vehicle on orbit, after vehicle component impact or landing on Earth, after activities necessary to return the vehicle or component to a safe condition on the ground after impact or landing, or after activities necessary to return the site to a safe condition, whichever occurs latest;
(ii) For an orbital launch of a vehicle with a reentry of the vehicle, launch ends after deployment of all payloads, upon completion of the vehicle's first steady-state orbit if there is no payload deployment, after vehicle component impact or landing on Earth, after activities necessary to return the vehicle or component to a safe condition on the ground after impact or landing, or after activities necessary to return the site to a safe condition, whichever occurs latest; …
In part B of this document, under the heading "Detailed Discussion of the Final Rule" and further under the sub-heading "End of Launch", the FAA presents the following discussion:
[Commercial Spaceflight Federation] and SpaceX suggested that orbital launch without a reentry in proposed §450.3(b)(3)(i) did not need to be separately defined by the regulation, stating that, regardless of the type of launch, something always returns: Boosters land or are disposed, upper stages are disposed. CSF and SpaceX further requested that the FAA not distinguish between orbital and suborbital vehicles for end of launch.
The FAA does not agree because the distinctions in § 450.3(b)(3)(i) and (ii) are necessary due to the FAA's limited authority on orbit. For a launch vehicle that will eventually return to Earth as a reentry vehicle, its on-orbit activities after deployment of its payload or payloads, or completion of the vehicle's first steady-state orbit if there is no payload, are not licensed by the FAA. In addition, the disposal of an upper stage is not a reentry under 51 U.S.C. Chapter 509, because the upper stage does not return to Earth substantially intact.
Reentry vehicle means a vehicle designed to return from Earth orbit or outer space to Earth substantially intact. A reusable launch vehicle that is designed to return from Earth orbit or outer space to Earth substantially intact is a reentry vehicle.
This means Section 450.1 (b) 3(i) under "Streamlined Launch and Reentry License Requirements" of 2020 applies to the uncontrolled deorbiting of the Falcon 9 upper stage in the Starlink 11-4 mission. In particular, according to the FAA, the launch ended "after the licensee’s last exercise of control over its vehicle on orbit", which was the latest relevant event.
Back to the "Detailed Discussion of the Final Rule":
Both CSF and SpaceX proposed “end of launch” should be defined on a case-by-case basis in pre-application consultation and specified in the license. The FAA disagrees, in part. The FAA only regulates on a case-by-case basis if the nature of an activity makes it impossible for the FAA to promulgate rules of general applicability. This need has not arisen, as evidenced by decades of FAA oversight of end-of-launch activities. That said, because the commercial space transportation industry continues to innovate, §450.3(a) gives the FAA the flexibility to adjust the scope of license, including end of launch, based on unique circumstances as agreed to by the Administrator.
The world currently doesn't have a specific international law or agreement dealing with accountability for space debris that crashes to the earth, including paying for the damages such debris wreaks and imposing penalties on offending launch operators. In light of this fact, it's important to remember the FAA's position — even if it seems disagreeable — has been unchanged for some time even as it has regularly updated its rulemaking to accommodate private sector innovation within the spirit of the existing law.
Trump is an ass and I'm not holding out for him to look out for the concerns of other countries when pieces of made-in-USA rockets descend in uncontrolled fashion over their territories, damaging property or even taking lives. But that the FAA didn't develop its present position afresh under Trump 2.0, and that it was really developed with feedback from SpaceX and other US-based spaceflight operators, is important to understand that its attitude towards crashing debris goes beyond ideology, encompassing the support of both Democrat and Republican governments over the years.
After US troops withdrew from Afghanistan after two decades in 2021, the Taliban returned to power. In its oppressive regime many groups of people, but especially women, girls, and minorities, have lost most of their civil rights. In this time, Afghanistan has also suffered devastating floods and an ongoing famine, and has mounted tentative attempts at diplomacy with countries it could count on to be sympathetic to Afghanistan’s plight, if not the Taliban’s. Separate from other goals, it seemed like a bid by the Taliban to improve Afghanistan’s ability to survive future disasters.
But New Delhi’s willingness to so much as engage with Taliban-appointed diplomats — even while declining to acknowledge the political legitimacy of the Taliban government — has elicited strong words of caution from former diplomats.
Similarly, when the International Cricket Council (ICC) allowed the Afghanistan men’s team to participate in the Champions Trophy tournament despite a rule that it won’t recognise any country without both men’s and women’s teams, Afghan refugee and taekwondo champion Marzieh Hamidi accused the body of tolerating “gender apartheid”, which is also understandable.
These attempts by Afghanistan are reminiscent of a particular passage in my favourite work of fantasy, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen. [Spoiler alert] The Crippled God, a vile new deity in the books’ world, petitions vociferously to be included in the world’s pantheon, side by side with all the other gods. The Master of the Deck, the mortal tasked with this decision, initially believes the answer to be easy: to decline admission. But the thought of doing so weighs heavily on him, until one day, on a bloody battlefield, a weary soldier points him to an obvious answer of another variety: to admit the Crippled God in the pantheon only to force it to play by the same rules all the other gods play by. [end alert]
There’s something to be said for doing right by a weakened people ruled by an unelected, oppressive, and insular government. The Taliban idea of human rights is subservient to the group’s hardline religious beliefs, and the country’s people didn’t sign up for it.
No matter how much control the Taliban aspires to exert on the affairs of Afghanistan, it can’t restrict the effects of climate change to beyond its borders. This is why the UN allowed Afghanistan’s representatives to participate as observers at the COP29 climate talks in November 2024 in Azerbaijan, even though the UN doesn’t recognise the Taliban government and had prohibited its participation altogether for three years until then. It was progress of a sort.
Similarly, New Delhi may seek to admit an Afghan diplomat by arguing the merits of having a finger on the button and the ICC may allow the men’s cricket team to play by claiming doing so allows the Afghan people something to cheer for. How meritorious their arguments are in the real world is a separate matter.
But can we apply the same sort of thinking to the US under Donald Trump, Sr.? As soon as he took office in his second term, Trump relaunched the process to free the US of commitments made under the Paris Agreement and to the World Health Organisation, cut funding for research into various diseases, drugs, and vaccines, and nixed support for DEI efforts, trans people, and reproductive rights. He returned to power by winning 312 votes in the electoral college and 49.8% of the popular vote, or 77.3 million votes. Kamala Harris received 75 million votes (48.3%).
As with Afghanistan, does the rest of the world have a responsibility to stand by the people who opposed Trump, as well as the rights of those who supported him but couldn’t have expected the consequences of his actions for themselves? Or is the US beyond concession?
Trump isn’t a terrorist but his protectionist agenda, authoritarian stance, and inflammatory rhetoric also endanger lives and livelihoods and isolate his compatriots in the international area. In fact, the questions arise because Trump’s actions affect the whole world, not the US alone, thanks to ways in which his predecessors have already embedded the country in multilateral collaborations to fight climate change, the spread of communicable diseases, plastic pollution, etc.
While I havemanyissues with how the Nobel Prizes are put together as an institution, the scientific achievements they have revealed have been some of the funnest concepts I’ve discovered in science, including the clever ways in which scientists revealed them. If I had to rank them on this metric, the first place would be a tie between the chemistry and the physics prizes of 2016. The chemistry prize went to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Fraser Stoddart, and Ben Feringa for “for the design and synthesis of molecular machines”. Likewise, the physics prize was shared between David Thouless, Duncan Haldane, and John Kosterlitz “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter”. If you like, you can read my piece about the 2016 chemistry prize here. A short excerpt about the laureates’ work:
… it is fruitless to carry on speculating about what these achievements could be good for. J. Fraser Stoddart, who shared the Nobel Prize last year with Feringa for having assembled curious molecular arrangements like Borromean rings, wrote in an essay in 2005, “It is amazing how something that was difficult to do in the beginning will surely become easy to do in the event of its having been done. The Borromean rings have captured our imagination simply because of their sheer beauty. What will they be good for? Something for sure, and we still have the excitement of finding out what that something might be.” Feringa said in a 2014 interview that he likes to build his “own world of molecules”. In fact, Stoddart, Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage shared the chemistry prize for having developed new techniques to synthesise and assemble organic molecules in their pursuits.
In the annals of the science Nobel Prizes, there are many, many laureates who allowed their curiosity about something rather than its applications to guide their research. In the course of these pursuits, they developed techniques, insights, technologies or something else that benefited their field as a whole but which wasn’t the end goal. Over time the objects of many of these pursuits have also paved the way for some futuristic technology themselves. All of this is a testament to the peculiar roads the guiding light of curiosity opens. Of course, scientists need specific conditions of their work to be met before they can commitment themselves to such lines of inquiry. For just two examples, they shouldn’t be under pressure to publish papers and they shouldn’t have to worry about losing their jobs if they don’t file patents. I can also see where the critics of such blue-sky research stand and why: while there are benefits, it’s hard to say ahead of time what they might be and when they might appear.
This said, the work that won the 2016 physics prize is of a similar nature and also particularly relevant in light of a ‘development’ in the realm of quantum computing earlier this month. Two of the three laureates, Thouless and Kosterlitz, performed an experiment in the 1970s in which they found something unusual. To quote from my piece in The Hindu on February 23:
If you cool some water vapour, it will become water and then ice. If you keep lowering the temperature until nearly absolute zero, the system will have minimal thermal energy, allowing quantum states of matter to show. In the 1970s, Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless found that the surface of superfluid helium sometimes developed microscopic vortices that moved in pairs. When they raised the temperature, the vortices decoupled and moved freely. It was a new kind of … phase transition: the object’s topological attributes changed in response to changes in energy [rather than it turning from liquid to gas].
The findings here, followed by many others that followed, together with efforts by physicists to describe this new property of matter using mathematics, in harmony with other existing theories of nature all laid the foundation for Microsoft’s February 19 announcement: that it had developed a quantum-computing chip named Majorana 1 with topological qubits inside. (For more on this, please read my February 23 piece.) Microsoft has been trying to build this chip since at least 2000, when a physicist then on the company’s payroll named Alexei Kitaev published a paper exploring its possibility. Building the thing was a tall order, requiring advances in a variety of fields that eventually had to be brought together in just the right way, but Microsoft knew that if it succeeded the payoff would be tremendous.
This said, even if this wasn’t curiosity-driven research on Microsoft’s part, such research has already played a big role in both the company’s and the world’s fortunes. In the world’s fortune because, as with the work of Stoddart, Feringa, and Sauvage, the team explored, invented and/or refined new methods en route to building Majorana 1, methods which the rest of the world can potentially use to solve other problems. And in the company’s fortune because while Kitaev’s paper was motivated by the possibility of a device of considerable technological and commercial value, it drew from a large body of knowledge that — at the time it was unearthed and harmonised with the rest of science — wasn’t at all concerned with a quantum-computing chip in its then-distant future. For all its criticism, blue-sky research leads to some outcomes that no other forms of research can. This isn’t an argument in support of it so much as in defence of not sidelining it altogether.
While I have many issues with how the Nobel Prizes are put together as an institution, I’ve covered each edition with not inconsiderable excitement[1]. Given the fondness of the prize-giving committee for work on or with artificial intelligence last year, it’s possible there’s a physics prize vouchsafed for work on the foundations of contemporary quantum computers in the not-too-distant future. When it comes to pass, I will be all too happy to fall back on the many pieces I’ve written on this topic over the years, to be able to confidently piece together the achievements in context and, personally, to understand the work beyond my needs as a journalist, as a global citizen. But until that day, I can’t justify the time I do spend reading up about and writing on this and similar topics as a journalist in a non-niche news publication — one publishing reports, analyses, and commentary for a general audience rather than those with specialised interests.
The justification is necessary at all because the time I spend doing something is time spent not doing something else and the opportunity cost needs to be rational in the eyes of my employers. At the same time, journalism as a “history of now” would fail if it didn’t bring the ideas, priorities, and goals at play in the development of curiosity-driven research and — with the benefit of hindsight — its almost inevitable value for commerce and strategy to the people at large. This post so far, until this point, is the preamble I had in mind for my edition of The Hindu’s Notebook column today. Excerpt:
It isn’t until a revolutionary new technology appears that the value of investing in basic research becomes clear. Many scientists are rooting for more of it. India’s National Science Day, today, is itself rooted in celebrating the discovery of the Raman effect by curiosity-driven study. The Indian government also wants such research in this age of quantum computing, renewable energy, and artificial intelligence. But it isn’t until such technology appears that the value of investing in a science journalism of the underlying research — slow-moving, unglamorous, not application-oriented — also becomes clear. It might even be too late by then.
The scientific ideas that most journalists have overlooked are still very important: they’re the pillars on which the technologies reshaping the world stand. So it’s not fair that they’re overlooked when they’re happening and obscured by other concerns by the time they’ve matured. Without public understanding, input, and scrutiny in the developmental phase, the resulting technologies have fewer chances to be democratic, and the absence of the corresponding variety of journalism is partly to blame.
I would have liked to include the preamble with the piece itself but the word limit is an exacting 620. This is also why I left something else unsaid in the piece, something important for me, the author, to have acknowledged. After the penultimate line — “You might think just the fact that journalists are writing about an idea should fetch it from the fringes to the mainstream, but it does not” — I wanted to say there’s a confounding factor: the skills, choices, and circumstances of the journalists themselves. If a journalist isn’t a good writer[2] or doesn’t have the assistance of good editors, what they write about curiosity-driven research, which already runs on weak legs among the people at large, may simply pass through their feeds and newsletters without inviting even a “huh?”. But as I put down the aforementioned line, a more discomfiting thought erupted at the back of my mind.
In 2017, on the Last Word on Nothing blog, science journalist Cassandra Willyard made a passionate case for the science journalism of obscure things to put people at its centre in order to be effective. The argument’s allure was obvious but it has never sat well with me. The narrative power of human emotion, drawn from the highs or lows in the lives of the people working on obscure scientific ideas, is in being able to render those ideas more relatable. But my view is that there’s a lot out there we may never write about if we couldn’t also write about what highs/lows it rendered among its discoverers or beholders, and more so if such highs/lows don’t exist at all, as is often the case with a big chunk of curiosity-driven research. Willyard herself had used the then-recent example of the detection of gravitational waves from two neutron stars smashing into each other billions of lightyears away. This is conveniently (but perhaps not by her design) an example of Big Science where many people spent a long time looking for something and finally found it. There’s certainly a lot of drama here.
But the reason I call having to countenance Willyard’s arguments discomfiting is that I understand what she’s getting at and I know I’m rebutting it on the back of only a small modicum of logic. It’s a sentimental holdout, even: I don’t want to have to care about the lives of other people when I know I care very well for how we extracted a world’s worth of new information by ‘reading’ gravitational waves emitted by a highly unusual cosmic event. The awe, to me, is right there. Yet I’m also keenly aware how impactful the journalism advocated by Willyard can be, having seen it in ‘action’ in the feature-esque pieces published by science magazines, where the people are front and centre, and the number of people that read and talk about them.
I hold out because I believe there are, like me, many people out there (I’ve met a few) that can be awed by narratives of neutron-star collisions that dispense with invoking the human condition. I also believe that while a large number of people may read those feature-esque pieces, I’m not convinced they have a value that goes beyond storytelling, which is of course typically excellent. But I suppose those narratives of purely scientific research devoid of human protagonists (or antagonists) would have to be at least as excellent in order to captivate audiences just as well. If a journalist — together with the context in which they produce their work — isn’t up to the mark yet, they should strive to be. And this striving is essential if “you might think just the fact that journalists are writing about an idea should fetch it from the fringes to the mainstream, but it does not” is to be meaningful.
[1] Not least because each Nobel Prize announcement is accompanied by three press releases: one making the announcement, one explaining the prize-winning work to a non-expert audience, and one explaining it in its full technical context. Journalism with these resources is actually quite enjoyable. This helps, too.
[2] I’m predominantly a textual journalist and default to “write” when writing about journalistic communication. But of course in this sentence I mean journalists who aren’t good writers and/or good video-makers or editors and/or good podcasters, etc.
Finally some external validation. After months of insisting Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore aren’t “stuck” or “stranded” in the International Space Station, after Boeing Starliner’s first crewed flight test went awry, the two astronauts have themselves repudiated the use of such words to describe their mission profile so far. On February 18, Moneycontrol quoted a CNN report to say:
In an interview with CNN, Wilmore said they are neither abandoned nor stuck. “We come prepared and committed,” he stated, adding that all ISS astronauts have emergency return options. Williams also reflected on their space experience, saying, “Floating in space never gets old.”
Williams’s statement isn’t bravado just much as the use of “stranded” isn’t a matter of describing what’s right in front of us. Crewed missions to space are always more complicated than that. That’s why Boeing picked Williams and Wilmore in the first place: they’re veteran astronauts who know when not to panic. To quote from a previous post:
The history of spaceflight — human or robotic — is the history of people trying to expect the unexpected and to survive the unexpectable. That’s why we have test flights and then we have redundancies. For example, after the Columbia disaster in 2003, part of NASA’s response was a new protocol: that astronauts flying in faulty space capsules could dock at the ISS until the capsule was repaired or a space agency could launch a new capsule to bring them back. So Williams and Wilmore aren’t “stuck” there: they’re practically following protocol.
For its upcoming Gaganyaan mission, ISRO has planned multiple test flights leading up the human version. It’s possible this flight or subsequent ones could throw up a problem, causing the astronauts within to take shelter at the ISS. Would we accuse ISRO of keeping them “stuck” there or would we laud the astronauts’ commitment to the mission and support ISRO’s efforts to retrieve them safely?
… “stuck” or “stranded” implies a crisis, an outcome that no party involved in the mission planned for. It creates the impression human spaceflight (in this particular mission) is riskier than it is actually and produces false signals about the competencies of the people who planned the mission. It also erects unreasonable expectations about the sort of outcomes test flights can and can’t have.
Narratives matter. Words don’t always describe only what the senses can perceive. Certain words, including “stuck” and “stranded”, also impute intentions, motive, and agency — which are things we can’t piece together without involving the people to whom we are attributing these things (while ensuring they have the ability and opportunity to speak up). Wilmore says he’s “committed”, not “stuck”. When Williams says “floating in space never gets old”, it means among other things that she’s allowed to define her journey in that way without only navigating narratives in which she’s “stranded”.
In fact, as we make more forays into space — whether specific tasks like taking a brand new crew capsule for its first spin, guiding robots into previously uncharted areas of space or ourselves going where only robots have been before — we need to stay open to the unexpected and we need to keep ready a language that doesn’t belittle or diminish the human experience of it, which by all means can be completely wonderful.
Finally, I support restricting our language to what’s right in front of us in the event that we don’t know, which would be to simply say they’re in space.
CPI(M) Polit Bureau member Brinda Karat said the recent remarks on freebies by Supreme Court Judge Justice B.R. Gavai fails to recognise the struggle of India’s labouring class for survival in the face of “rampant unemployment, precarious nature of work and low wages”.
In an open letter to Justice Gavai on Friday (February 14, 2025), Ms. Karat urged him to reconsider his comments as they could prejudice social opinion against those receiving social benefits from the government.
Justice Gavai made the remarks on Wednesday while hearing petitions on the shortage of night shelters for the urban homeless in the national capital. During the hearing, he had asked whether untrammelled freebies lull the poor into a parasitic existence, depriving them of any initiative to find work, join the mainstream, and contribute to national development.
Kudos to Brinda Karat for raising this counterargument and for asking Justice Gavai to reconsider his views. Aside from “prejudicing social opinion”, Justice Gavai’s observation also goes against a fact that social scientists and behavioural economists alike have repeatedly established: the poor don’t want to stay poor, they don’t like to stay poor. This extends to the degree to which they are comfortable about leading a “parasitic existence” as well as vexes the allegation that they are devoid of initiative.
This is why, Justice Gavai may be interested in being reminded, researchers and policymakers have found the most effective welfare scheme in various countries worldwide to be simply giving poorer people money to spend as they see fit. Studies of social welfare schemes in low- and middle-income countries have even found that giving households money to spend doesn’t affect whether their working-age members want to work.
If Justice Gavai’s concern is that the poor stay poor and don’t seem to be able to exit poverty, he should redirect the force of his words at how easy it has become to slip into destitution in contemporary India and at initiatives that render direct benefit transfer schemes — including handing out money — more frictionless.
NavIC’s hurdles project govt’s reluctance to fund innovation’, Hindustan Times, February 7, 2025:
India … chose a more cautious path. For decades, we’ve been telling ourselves that we’ll invest in science “when we’re economically better off.” It’s both prudent and a paradox. How do you become economically better off without investing in the very thing that drives development in the first place? It’s like waiting to plant a tree until you’re sure it will bear fruit tomorrow. That hesitation shows in the numbers: India spends just 0.6% of its GDP on scientific research. For comparison, China spends over 2.5%, and the United States spends 3%.
Charles Assisi has an interesting analysis of the partial failure of the NVS-02 mission. (‘Partial’ because ISRO is currently looking to repurpose the satellite. The terms of this exercise aren’t yet clear.) “When you’re constantly short of funds, every setback feels heavier” — spot on. In fact, my cynical self inclined is inclined ask him if he really believes the present government is interested in stoking development when it has been making the right noises, but only noises, about increasing the private sector’s contribution to R&D expenses while allowing the growth of the public sector’s contribution to grow more slowly than the GDP.
This said, I’m more curious about the final sentence of the same paragraph:
Worse still, when you dig into the details, much of India’s scientific budget is buried within defense spending, which means it doesn’t always trickle down to civilian applications or long-term innovation.
Unless growth in defence spending has somehow exactly matched decline in spending on R&D, I’m curious how defence alone can be said to have subtracted from science. Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn’t, but I wouldn’t have used the argument because it presumes whatever that money was spent on didn’t have civilian interests at heart. It’s a strawman. It isn’t a crime without a victim either because of the notion that the scientific enterprise is incapable of delivering anything less than “civilian applications or long-term innovation”, even with sufficient funding. The arc of the scientific enterprise doesn’t bend towards the public interest by itself.
It’s also possible that what the R&D budget lost, the nuclear establishment gained — and I could get behind that. But beyond the subtraction itself, the question of which ministry or sector benefited is meaningless. The finance ministry makes its allocations from a large pool, and it only makes sense to talk about what science lost in terms of what science lost, rather than because X gained rather than Y.
I have access to the premium version of ChatGPT, and every day I ask it a few questions about concepts in physics that I’d like to know more about. Yesterday, for example, I learnt the difference between quenching and annealing…
Is there an opposite phenomenon for quenching?
Yes! The opposite of quenching would be processes that allow gradual relaxation, equilibration, or annealing rather than rapid freezing. Some terms that describe this include:
Annealing (Thermal and Simulated) — In metallurgy and physics, annealing is the process of slow cooling a material so it can reach a more ordered, lower-energy state.
In simulated annealing (used in optimization and machine learning), a system is gradually "cooled" to allow it to find a global minimum rather than getting trapped in local minima (which can happen in quenching).
Slow Equilibration / Adiabatic Processes — Unlike quenching, which often leads to metastable states, slow thermalization allows the system to reach true equilibrium.
Adiabatic processes in quantum mechanics and condensed matter physics allow the system to evolve slowly so that it remains in a well-defined state.
Supercooling vs. Slow Nucleation — When liquids are rapidly cooled (quenched), they might bypass crystallization and form a glass. In contrast, if cooling is slow, proper nucleation occurs, leading to a well-ordered crystal.
Self-Organization & Aging in Complex Systems — Some complex systems exhibit aging (e.g., glasses, biological systems) where they slowly evolve toward an ordered or more stable configuration over time, in contrast to being frozen in a quenched state.
… and later about the Weierstrass function.
Please explain the Weierstrass function to me.
The Weierstrass function is a famous example of a continuous but nowhere differentiable function. It is defined as:
[ W(x) = \sum_{n=0}{\infty} an \cos(bn \pi x) ]
where:
( 0 < a < 1 ) (controls decay)
( b ) is an odd integer ( > 1 ) (controls frequency)
The product ( ab > 1 + \frac{3\pi}{2} ) ensures nowhere differentiability.
Key Properties
Continuous Everywhere — Despite its wild oscillations, ( W(x) ) is continuous for all ( x ).
Nowhere Differentiable — No well-defined slope exists at any point, making it an early example of a function that is continuous yet "rough" at all scales.
Self-Similarity (Fractal-like Behavior) — Since it is constructed as an infinite sum of cosine waves with exponentially increasing frequencies, it exhibits self-similarity: small-scale structures resemble larger-scale patterns.
Role in Mathematics — This function was introduced by Karl Weierstrass in the 19th century as a counterexample to the assumption that "continuous functions are differentiable almost everywhere."
I have found using ChatGPT in this way to be a valuable learning tool, and I imagine there are already people out there who are repackaging instances of ChatGPT to be autonomous ‘teachers’ for students looking to learn something.
One of my jobs at The Hindu is to get explanatory articles for concepts in (pure) science. I recently attempted one on amplifiers, which required me to explain the working of a NPN bipolar junction transistor, a device I’d until then been happy to leave behind in my high school classroom. I turned to ChatGPT, asking for a visualisation of the transistor, and it obliged. I’m a visual learner and having access to the tool made a big difference.
How does an NPN bipolar junction transistor work? Please explain with a visualisation.
An NPN bipolar junction transistor (BJT) is a type of transistor that consists of three layers of semiconductor material: two n-type layers (emitter and collector) separated by a p-type layer (base). It is commonly used for switching and amplification.
How an NPN Transistor Works
Structure & Terminals:
Emitter (E): Heavily doped n-type region that emits electrons.
Base (B): Thin, lightly doped p-type region.
Collector (C): Moderately doped n-type region that collects electrons.
Operation Principles:
When a small current is applied to the base-emitter junction (forward-biased), it allows a larger current to flow from the emitter to the collector.
The base-emitter junction acts as a diode, allowing electrons to flow into the base.
Most electrons injected from the emitter into the base are swept into the collector due to the voltage difference.
Visualization
Collector (C)
|
|
|----|----|
| N | <-- Collector (N-type)
|----|----|
|
|----|----|
| P | <-- Base (P-type, thin and lightly doped)
|----|----|
|
|----|----|
| N | <-- Emitter (N-type, heavily doped)
|----|----|
|
|
Emitter (E)
Current Flow:
Electrons flow from Emitter (E) to Collector (C).
A small Base (B) current controls a much larger Collector (C) current.
I_B (Base Current) is small but controls I_C (Collector Current), which is large.
( +V_C ) | | [C] ← Electrons | | | [B] → Small Base Current (I_B) | | | [E] → Large Electron Flow (I_E) | ( GND )
Working Mechanism:
The Base-Emitter junction is forward-biased, allowing electrons to move from Emitter to Base.
Most electrons are swept into the Collector due to the reverse-biased Collector-Base junction.
A small Base current (I_B) controls a large Collector current (I_C), amplifying the input signal.
I have a background in engineering plus more than a decade’s experience in spotting yellow/red flags in scientific papers, and I imagine anyone with these skills will have an easier time navigating ChatGPT’s answers. For anyone else that lacks these skills, all we need is a guarantee from OpenAI that the tool doesn’t hallucinate or that it hallucinates in specific contexts, and definitely not above a certain rate.
‘The Lunacy Of Rebuilding In Disaster-Prone Areas’, Noema, April 25, 2024:
In the months after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans proposed a flood control program unlike any other in U.S. history. Developed by the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, a diverse group of stakeholders appointed by the mayor, the resulting plan called for large parts of the city to be converted from longstanding residential zones to floodable parks. Released to the public in the form of a map, large green circles were positioned over neighborhoods where owners would be forced into buyouts. These were some of the most historic districts in a very historic city … and almost exclusively in majority Black and marginalized neighborhoods.
Christened in the press as the “Green Dot” map, the proposal ranks among the most profoundly unsuccessful plans ever issued by a municipal body and would never be put to a vote in the city council. … The Green Dot map’s remarkably brief tenure can be attributed in part to its proponents’ failure to adhere to the most basic rule of community planning: Never designate the where before building support for the what.
“Building support”. What a quaint idea. Everyone should be doing it the way India’s doing it: don’t ask anyone. That way “building support” is redundant and “where” starts to really mean “anywhere”.
‘Expert committee clears plan to rebuild washed-out Teesta dam in Sikkim’, The Hindu, January 28, 2025:
Fourteen months after a devastating glacier lake outburst flood in Sikkim washed away the Teesta-3 dam – the state’s biggest hydropower project – and killing at least 100, an expert committee of the environment ministry has recommended that the dam be reconstructed.
Instead of the older structure that was part rock and part concrete, the new dam will be entirely concrete – reportedly to increase its strength – and its spillway will be capable of managing a peak flow of 19,946 cubic metres a second (cumecs), thrice the capacity of the former dam, which was 7000 cumecs.
Sounds reasonable, right?
The new design incorporates a “worst-case scenario” – meaning the maximum possible rain in the upstream glacier lake, modelled by the India Meteorological Department, in the South Lhonak region over the next 100 years influencing further downstream modifications.
Now all we have to do is wait for the flood that will show up the IMD’s model — a fate models have often had to contend with this century, especially when dealing with rainfall.
‘The value of attributing extreme events to climate change’, The Hindu, May 24, 2024:
It is worth understanding how these ‘rapid extreme event attributions’ are performed. The most important concept is the change in probability: in this case, climate scientists contrasted the conditions in which the heatwaves occurred against a counterfactual world in which climate change did not happen. The conditions that prevail in the counterfactual world depend on the availability of data from our world. When there isn’t enough data, the researchers run models for the planet’s climate without increasing greenhouse gas emissions and other anthropogenic forcing. Where there is sufficient data, they use trends in the data to compare conditions today with a period from the past in which human effects on the planet were relatively minimal.
[But] the data are hardly ever sufficient, especially for rainfall, and almost never for extreme rainfall events. Climate models are also notoriously bad at properly capturing normal rainfall and worse at extreme ones.
Thus, the environment ministry keeps the gates open to a new dam with a 59,838-cumec spillway in future.
The Hindu has an unusual ad in today’s paper (at least in the Chennai edition, which I get) on the occasion of Republic Day.
At the middle is an ambigram that reads “journalism” one way and “democracy” upside down. Below the way that reads “journalism”, there’s a statement saying:
This Republic Day, we reaffirm our commitment to journalism that strengthens a democracy—today and always.
And below the way that reads “democracy”, the statement goes:
This Republic Day, we reaffirm our commitment to a democracy that strengthens journalism—today and always.
The whole idea is that journalism is the republic’s mirror.
I’m posting this for no reason other than that I found it quite clever. 😄
Place a pot of water on the stove and light the fire. Once the temperature in the pot reaches 100º C or so, the water will boil to vapour. This is an example of a phase transition that occurs every day in our houses. Yet scientists have difficulty predicting whether a bunch of water molecules, like in the pot, will be liquid or gaseous in a given set of conditions.
This is different from your everyday experience with the pot on the stove and has to do with the model a computer can simulate to predict the phase of a group of interacting particles. Models that can make these predictions efficiently are prized in the study of wet surfaces, porous materials, microfluidics, and biological cells. They can also reveal ‘hidden’ phenomena we may not notice at the macroscopic level, i.e. just by looking at the water boil, and which scientists can use to make sense of other things and/or come up with new applications.
Remember your high school practicals notebook? For each experiment, you had to spell out sections called “given”, “to find”, “apparatus”, “methods”, and “results”. A model is an “apparatus” — a computer program — that uses the “given” (some input data) and certain “methods” (model parameters) to generate “results”. For example, the model below shows how a fluid with certain properties, like air, flowing around a spherical obstacle in its path, like a big rock, leads to the formation of vortices.
A popular “method” that models use to predict a phase transition is called classical density functional theory (DFT). Say there are a bunch of particles in a container. These particles can be the atoms of air, molecules of water, whatever the smallest unit of the substance is that you’re studying. Every three-dimensional distribution of these particles has a quantity called the free-energy functional associated with it. (Functionals and functions are the same thing except functionals can also accept functions as inputs.) The free-energy functional calculates the total free energy of a system based on how the density of its particles is distributed in three dimensions.
Classical DFT is a way to find the equilibrium state of a system — when it’s reached a stable state where its macroscopic properties don’t change and it doesn’t exchange energy with its surroundings — by minimising the system’s free energy.
A model can thus simulate a group of particles in a container, varying their distribution until it finds the one with the lowest free-energy functional, and thus the conditions in which the system is at its lowest energy. “Once [the free-energy functional] is specified, consistent and complete investigation of a wide variety of properties can be made,” the authors of a paper published in the journal Physical Review X on January 24 wrote.
While this sounds simple, the problem is that determining the free-energy functional becomes more difficult the more particles there are. And only once the functional has been determined can the model check when its value is lowest. This is why a model using classical DFT to determine the properties of a liquid at specific temperature and pressure, say, will struggle.
In the January 24 study in Physical Review X, scientists from the University of Bayreuth and the University of Bristol made an advance in this process when they replaced the free-energy functional with a neural network that had been trained on simulations of particles-in-a-container in a variety of conditions (e.g. changing the pressure and temperature across a range of values), then used it to model a realistic fluid.
From the abstract of the paper:
Local learning of the one-body direct correlation functional is based on Monte Carlo simulations of inhomogeneous systems with randomized thermodynamic conditions, randomized planar shapes of the external potential, and randomized box sizes.
Monte Carlo simulations are quite cool. You set up a computer to simulate, say, a poker game with five players. As the game progresses, at some point in the game you ask the computer to take a snapshot of the game and save it. This snapshot has information about each player’s cards, what decisions they made in the previous round (fold, call or raise), the stakes, and the cards on the table. Once the game ends, you rerun the simulation, each time freshly randomising the cards handed out to the players. Then again at some point during the game, the computer takes a snapshot and saves it.
Once the computer has done this a few thousand times, you collect all the snapshots and share them with someone who doesn’t know poker. Based on understanding just the snapshots, they can learn how the game works. The more snapshots there are, the finer their understanding will be. Very simply speaking this is how a Monte Carlo simulation operates.
The researchers generated data for the neural network to train on by running around 900 Monte Carlo simulations of “inhomogeneous systems with randomized thermodynamic conditions [including temperature], randomized planar shapes of the external potential, and randomized box sizes”. (The external potential refers to some energy field applied across the system, giving each of the particles inside some potential energy.) Then they used their classical DFT model with the “neural functional” to study a truncated Lennard-Jones system.
Scientists have previously combined machine-learning with classical DFT models to study particles moving randomly, interacting with each other only when they collide. Actual, real fluids aren’t so simple, however. Instead, their behaviour is more closely modelled as a Lennard-Jones system: the particles in a container repel each other at very short distances, are attracted to each other across intermediate distances, and at larger distances don’t have an effect on each other. As the researchers wrote in their paper:
… understanding the physics in such a simple model, which encompasses both repulsive and attractive interparticle interactions, provides a basis for understanding the occurrence of the same phenomena that arise in more complex fluids .
They also added that:
… recent investigations did not address the fundamental issue of how the presence of a phase transition might be accounted for within the framework of a neural density functional.
So they set about studying a truncated Lennard-Jones system with a phase transition. Their model started with predicting how the particles are distributed, the overall system’s thermodynamic properties, the conditions in which liquid and gaseous phases coexist in the container, and the particles’ behaviour at interfaces, like evaporating from the surface of a hard wall. Then, the researchers wrote:
… we focus on the liquid-gas transition which is a basic manifestation of the presence of interparticle attraction and seek to assess whether the neural functional can describe (i) phase coexistence and the approach to the associated critical point, (ii) surface tension and density profiles of the liquid-gas interface, (iii) drying and capillary evaporation transitions that occur at subcritical temperatures, and (iv) how accurately the approach performs for both bulk and interfacial properties.
(Emphasis in the original.)
So could the neural functional describe i-iv?
The answer is emphatically yes.
In fact, the model was able to accurately predict phase transitions even when it was trained only on supercritical states — i.e. when the container contains both liquid and gaseous states. The researchers singled this ability of the model out for especial praise, calling it “one of the most striking results”.
Source: Phys. Rev. X 15, 011013 (2025)
This plot, generated by the model, shows the states of a truncated Lennard-Jones fluid with density on the x-axis and temperature on the y-axis. In the red areas, the substance — the collection of particles in the box — is either liquid or gaseous. In the blue areas, the liquid and gaseous phases become separated. The intensity of the colour denotes the substance’s bulk modulus, i.e. how much it resists being compressed at a fixed temperature, from dark blue at the lower end to dark red at the upper.
Overall, the researchers wrote their “neural functional approach” is distinguished by the fact that “the range of phenomena and results it can describe … far exceed the information provided during training.” They attribute this ability to the information contained in a “single numerical object” that the neural network was tuned to track: 𝑐1(𝐫;[𝜌],𝑇), a.k.a. the one-body direct correlation functional. It’s a functional that describes the variation of the density of particles inside the container in response to the external potential. As they put it:
Inputting only Monte Carlo training data of one-body profiles in planar geometry and then examining 𝑐1(𝐫;[𝜌],𝑇) through the functional lens provides access to quantities which could not be obtained directly from the input data. Indeed, determining these usually requires advanced simulation techniques.
They added their method also required fewer computational resources than a classical DFT setup operating without a neural functional in order to achieve “comparable” accuracy. On the back of this resounding success, the researchers plan to use their model to study interactions in water and colloidal gels. They also wrote that they expect their findings will help solve problems in computational chemistry and condensed matter physics.
ThatVulture piece. If you haven’t already, read it but be warned: it’s just as disturbing as everyone is saying it is.
One paragraph in particular I found more unsettling than the rest — not because it presents one more awful detail but because I just didn’t know, while I was reading the piece, what I was expected to make of it.
In various interviews over the years, Gaiman has called The Ocean at the End of the Lane his most personal book. While much of it is fantastical, Gaiman has said “that kid is me.” The book is set in Sussex, where Gaiman grew up. In the story, the narrator survives otherworldly evil with the help of a family of magical women. As a child, Gaiman had no such friends to call on. “I was going back to the 7-year-old me and giving myself a peculiar kind of love that I didn’t have,” he told an interviewer in 2017. “I never feel the past is dead or young Neil isn’t around anymore. He’s still there, hiding in a library somewhere, looking for a doorway that will lead him to somewhere safe where everything works.”
It paints a fuller picture of Neil Gaiman but the article as a whole says nothing about why that’s necessary. The piece is overall well-composed; the writer and editors have obviously gone to great lengths to produce it. As a result, most parts of the piece justify themselves. But I couldn’t say why they saw fit to include parts like this paragraph, which (re-)humanise Gaiman unto some unclear end. Ultimately, there’s nothing in these narratives to suggest the perpetrators of sexual violence ever lost track of the difference between right and wrong.
Reality is strange and truths pointing at contradicting implications can coexist, but this coexistence defies logic and I find that quite disturbing. This isn’t that abstract, disconnected “cold logic” so much as that it’s not just about the coexistence of truths, that somewhere between the past and the future the fellow had a chance to weigh right and wrong and picked the wrong thing to do. The buck stops there and whatever happened to him in his childhood — as long as it didn’t leave him with schizophrenia, psychosis or any other condition that took away his ability to tell if what he was doing was wrong — ceases to matter.
I realise I might be thinking about this in an incomplete way, but since that big #MeToo wave, I’ve always had in mind those nonsensical statements by some men that they were depressed or anxious and that they’d go to therapy and ‘fix’ themselves. None of these conditions could have interfered with these men’s ability to tell right from wrong (which in some legal systems would have been required to mount an insanity defence), but by blaming them the men stigmatised them in a horrible way. Since then, bad men pointing to bad childhoods, as if the past offers some kind of mitigating background, has only been confusing.
In fact, I wonder if the two truths really do coexist. Maybe they don’t because somewhere in between, these men decided the past doesn’t matter any more.
To me the line that Gaiman hadn’t ever been to therapy was a red flag. When there’s emotional trauma, therapy is useful — as many of us know — to reprogramme emotional pathways that have become hijacked and distorted to respond in harmful ways to even benign stimuli. But there was still an opportunity in front of these men to do the right thing. Self-discipline was still possible and they possessed the agency for it.
Humans are both logical and emotional beings. At times like this, however, in a rush to remind ourselves of how a life of emotion can lead to discomfiting truths — like how a childhood of suffering trauma needn’t preclude an adulthood of inflicting trauma or that antithetical narratives of reality can be equally and simultaneously legitimate — we seem to forget humans are still capable of logic, and thus of restraint and forethought. And well-exercised restraint and forethought often lead to compassionate actions towards others. This logic only comes to the fore when we choose to do the right thing.
Gaiman had this choice, the doorway in the library. Now, he doesn’t get to pretend he didn’t do to his past what he did to his work and what he did to all those women, turning them into his fantasy.
Saying “choosing to do the right thing is easier than done” risks trivialising the difficulty, but again, the right thing here is to look for help before rather than succumb, more so because a man of Gaiman’s tremendous wealth and privileges is also bound to find it.
Self-discipline in this context often reminds me of a piece from a decade ago about how tough the road can be for people with illegal sexual preferences, so to speak, without also being a cul-de-sac. The piece is a long-form deep-dive (trigger warnings: child sexual abuse and discussions of suicide) into the inner lives of people who identify as paedophiles but who also recognise their urges are wrong and refuse to act on them. The narrative is careful enough to be fair to all the dramatis personae (fair of course doesn’t mean nice). Where you draw parallels with the Gaiman story, if it all, is up to you; I found the following passages particularly enlightening:
Dr. Klaus Beier doesn’t believe in sexual reconditioning. He leads the team behind Prevention Project Dunkelfeld, a therapeutic program based in Germany that targets potential offenders. He believes that minor attraction is a fixed part of someone’s makeup, that it’s “fate and not choice.” His program is considered the global gold standard of preventive treatment, and its practitioners help adults manage their attraction to children rather than try to change it. “In my view, it’s not the inclination that’s a problem,” he said. “And I wouldn’t condemn the inclination, I’d condemn the behavior.”
Later:
When [Mike] started his teaching placement, he created a strict set of rules: staying away from the bathroom area where possible and avoiding any physical contact with the children. He said he would tense up when the more playful kids approached him for a hug. This wasn’t so much to keep the children safe, he told me, as to ensure people wouldn’t become wary of him. Which was something his dad warned him about when he first started. “He’s like, ‘People are going to be suspicious of you simply because you’re a guy. Don’t do anything stupid,’” he said. “And, honestly, I wonder if that had anything to do with it, because that kind of freaked me out.”
...
Like Adam, Mike grew increasingly depressed while grappling with his desires. He never made active plans to commit suicide, but told me that he thought about it and knew what to do if the time came. “If I had a sawn-off shotgun, that would be it,” he said. “I don’t want to take pills because I could come back from that.” Ultimately, he felt he couldn’t kill himself and leave his family with no context for what he had done, and instead hoped that God would take care of matters for him. “But at the same time, I was still… It would be nice if I got hit by a car or I got really sick,” he said.
More than anyone else I spoke with, Mike seems like he could benefit from having a professional to talk to, and not just because of his proximity to children. I was taken by his urgent need to disclose information others might have a hard time expressing. Late one afternoon we were sitting in his car in the parking lot of a different shopping mall. After hours of conversation, I suggested that we wrap for the day and he flat-out refused, telling me in an uncharacteristically abrupt tone that he had to get it out. We continued speaking until the encroaching shadows finally met and turned to darkness, stopping only when the center’s cleaning staff began arriving for their night’s work.
Later:
Now the largest pedophile support group in the U.S., [Virtuous Paedophiles’] 318 active members are clear in their belief that sex with children is wrong. The founders, Ethan Edwards and Nick Devin (also pseudonyms), both family men with children, enact this policy with tight moderation. If someone is seen to be voicing the opinion that minor sex is acceptable, he gets a warning. Repeat offenders are ousted from the group. The membership list is also restricted to those aged 18 and over, lest they be accused of wrongdoing.
While Adam contributes to discussions there from time to time, his focus remains on the young men who come to his own group for help. James, for one, speaks with a clear reverence for Adam. Though his status as a sex offender means he must attend court-mandated therapy, it is Adam and the others that he credits with helping keep him on the right path. It’s also not lost on him that, for everyone else, it is the only lifeline they have. “If they want help, if they want to be better, to try and fix their behavior and be a better person, he’s never given up on them,” he said. “He didn’t give up on me, he didn’t give up on Mike, he never gave up on any of us.”
In one version, just as a young employee is grabbing her fast-food lunch, she notices her snooty boss get on an elevator. So she drops her sandwich, rushes to meet her just as the doors are about to close, and submits her proposal in the form of a thick dossier. The boss asks her for a 500-word summary to consume during her minute-long elevator ride. The employee turns to Google Gemini, which digests the report and spits out the gist, and which the employee regurgitates to the boss’s approval. The end.
Isn’t this unsettling? Google isn’t alone either. In May this year, Apple released a tactless ad for its new iPad Pro. From Variety:
The “Crush!” ad shows various creative and cultural objects — including a TV, record player, piano, trumpet, guitar, cameras, a typewriter, books, paint cans and tubes, and an arcade game machine — getting demolished in an industrial press. At the end of the spot, the new iPad Pro pops out, shiny and new, with a voiceover that says, “The most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest.”
After the backlash, Apple bactracked and apologised — and then produced two ads in November for its Apple Intelligence product showcasing how it could help thoughtless people continue to be thoughtless.
The second video is additionally weird because it seems to suggest reaching all the way for an AI tool makes more sense than setting a reminder on the calendar that comes in all smartphones these days.
And they are now joined in spirit by Google, because bosses can now expect their subordinates to Geminify their way through what could otherwise have been tedious work or just impossible to do on punishingly short deadlines — without the bosses having to think about whether their attitudes towards what they believe is reasonable to ask of their teammates need to change. (This includes a dossier of details that ultimately won’t be read.)
If AI is going to absorb the shock that comes of someone being crappy to you, will we continue to notice that crappiness and demand they change or — as Apple and Google now suggest — will we blame ourselves for not using AI to become crappy ourselves? To quote from a previous post:
When machines make decisions, the opportunity to consider the emotional input goes away. This is a recurring concern I’m hearing about from people working with or responding to AI in some way. … This is Anna Mae Duane, director of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, in The Conversation: “I fear how humans will be damaged by the moral vacuum created when their primary social contacts are designed solely to serve the emotional needs of the ‘user’.”
The applications of these AI tools have really blossomed and millions of people around the world are using them for all sorts of tasks. But even if the ads don’t pigeonhole these tools, they reveal how their makers — Apple and Google — are thinking about what the tools bring to the table and what these tech companies believe to be their value. To Google’s credit at least, its other ads in the same series are much better (see here and here for examples), but they do need to actively cut down on supporting or promoting the idea that crappy behaviour is okay.
The space to disagree with the Election Commission’s position vis-à-vis the integrity of electronic voting machines without finding oneself backtracking into the Congress or the BJP camps is shrinking, and both national parties as well as the Supreme Court have been wilfully engendering this state of affairs at the expense of — ironically — logic.
Dr. Parameshwara, who was also the AICC observer for Maharashtra elections, told presspersons that his party leaders, including former Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and former Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel, discussed the EVM issues and were planning to appeal to the Election Commission of India (ECI) in this regard. “We are now sure that till the EVMs are used, there is no hope for the Congress or any other party other than the BJP. There is an urgent need to return to ballot papers,” he said.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday (November 26, 2024) indicated a level of hypocrisy attached to criticism about Electronic Voting Machines (EVM), saying “EVMs are tampered when you lose and fine if you win”. The oral remark was made by Justice Vikram Nath before dismissing a petition filed by evangelist K.A. Paul, who sought a judicial order to return to paper ballots.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday underscored that it cannot ask the Election Commission of India (ECI) to disclose the source codes of the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) as it can result in its misuse. The source code often called “the brain” refers to a set of instructions that tells the machine how to function. A Bench comprising Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta made the observation while hearing a batch of petitions seeking 100% cross-verification of the vote count in EVMs with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) paper slips.
Taking a swipe at the Congress president over his latest remarks on the EVMs, BJP Lok Sabha MP and national spokesperson Sambit Patra also said Mr. Kharge can go to “planet Mars” taking Gandhi with him and “live there happily” if he doesn’t want electronic voting machines, Election Commission, Enforcement Directorate, Central Bureau of Investigation, judiciary and the Modi government.
In his opening remarks to the CWC, party president Mallikarjun Kharge mentioned the electronic voting machines (EVMs) making the poll process “suspect”. And that set the tone for the speakers who followed him, as the discussions mostly focussed on EVMs and the Election Commission (EC).Veteran leader Digvijaya Singh was the first among CWC members to question EVMs. While Rajya Sabha member Abhishek Singhvi argued for a nuanced approach and pitched for 100 per cent voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT), Ms. Vadra said the party should press for a return to ballot paper. Mr. Gandhi urged his colleagues to “adopt a firm stand and take the issues to the hilt and convert it into a movement”.
We don’t need a “movement” because we don’t know that EVMs are the issue! This is a farce. It’s helping only the Congress — and then again only by fanning the flames of a misguided suspicion. The BJP’s overreach vis-à-vis many of the institutions of Indian democracy, including the Reserve Bank (RBI), the Enforcement Directorate (ED), and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), has rendered all of them suspect, especially when some outcome goes the BJP’s way when it wasn’t expected to.
But a mismatch between expectations and outcomes alone can never be conclusive proof of malfeasance. Today many people harbour similar doubts about the Election Commission — and it’s easy to understand this isn’t implicitly unwarranted or even unfair. However, the Election Commission’s integrity vis-à-vis the tallies of votes cast in an election offers a handle on the situation that the RBI, ED, the CBI or any other such institution can’t offer: mathematics.
Contrary to the Supreme Court’s views about electronic voting machines (EVMs) harbouring some kind of “source code” that must be protected at all costs, EVMs are simple signal counters whose security arises from more sophisticated means. Their electronics are isolated from external sources of input and their ability to count votes is tested in a specific way at each polling booth before the machines are set up for public use. Indeed, as a counter of votes, ‘leaking’ the “source code” of EVMs is pointless because anyone can write it up on their own: it’s after all an algorithm to count how many different buttons are pushed, each of which produces a distinct signal.
But thanks to the Election Commission’s reluctance to submit its machines to independent testing and abetted by the Supreme Court’s refusal, inability or disinterest in the technical architecture of EVMs, any questions about the integrity of EVMs — specifically their abilities to count votes a specific way and of an external actor to interfere in this process — falls under the wheels of contempt of the Supreme Court or, thanks to the BJP’s habitual overreach, allegations of anti-nationalist activity. This is unfortunate.
EVMs make use of mathematics to operate just the way modern computers do. They both have the same fundamental components, just put together differently for different purposes. And just as it’s possible to test whether a computer is working as intended without taking it apart, it’s possible to test EVMs without taking them apart. Independent researchers can test an EVM without touching it, without in any way being able to access its constituent components (except to supply input signals and receive output signals), and without even knowing its internal logic — and with an Election Commission official monitoring the whole process.
Even Congress leader and Rajya Sabha member Abhishek Singhvi’s demand for 100% VVPAT has met with a corresponding fate at the apex court (brought there by a different petitioner) — and yet which is similarly unnecessary. From The Hindu, April 15, 2024:
The VVPAT-based audit of EVMs … very similar to the “lot acceptance sampling technique” that is widely used in industry and trade. If the number of defectives found in a randomly drawn statistical sample is less than or equal to a specified acceptance number, the lot (or ‘population’) is accepted; otherwise, the lot is rejected. … The hypergeometric distribution model should form the basis of the sampling plan for the VVPAT-based audit of EVMs because it is an exact fit. In the discussion that follows, we assume the percentage of defective EVMs in the population (P) to be 1%, and calculate sample sizes, for various population sizes, for 99% probability of detecting at least one defective EVM. We also compute the probability that the ECI-prescribed sample size of “five EVMs per Assembly constituency” will fail to detect a defective EVM for different population sizes. The great merit of the hypergeometric distribution model is that the sample size is the greatest when P is very close to zero (which is what the ECI claims it is), and it becomes lesser as P increases. …
We can use the ‘plateau effect’ of sample sizes to divide the bigger States into ‘regions’ (an integral number of districts) with EVM population sizes of about 5,000 each. We treat “EVMs deployed in the region” as the ‘population’. On average, there would be about 20 Assembly constituencies in a region. The sample size required is 438 and the average number of EVMs per Assembly constituency whose VVPAT slips are to be hand counted is 22. For example, U.P with 1,50,000 EVMs can be divided into 30 regions with roughly 5,000 EVMs each. In the event of a defective EVM turning up, the hand counting of VVPAT slips of the remaining EVMs will confined to the region. This option is statistically robust and administratively viable.
But like the Supreme Court, the Congress isn’t interested in mathematical tests of EVMs’ integrity. This sounds bizarre because the Congress wants something the Supreme Court won’t give — but instead of disagreeing with the court’s refusal to have EVMs independently tested, which is where the problem really lies, the party has elected to disagree with the Indian government’s decision in the 1990s to switch paper ballots with EVMs.
A return to paper ballots is a terrible, terrible idea that forgets how much EVMs simplify the vote-casting activity (while removing ‘bad votes’) and speed up the whole process, all the way up to recounting, while requiring fewer safeguards to prevent mistakes or interference. But worse: neither the Congress nor any activists supporting the demand to revert to paper ballots can claim to understand how EVMs work or what really could be going wrong, if it is.
The party may lack a member with the skills to test the machines and the Election Commission may be disinclined to comply to requests — but this doesn’t mean “it’s working as intended” and “it’s not working as intended” are the only two possible outcomes here. There’s a third: “we don’t know”. And the ignorant views of both political and judicial leaders are eroding the space for this possibility in public dialogue.
Because the outcomes in the Maharashtra state assembly election defied the expectations of Congress et al., the party and its allies have stretched their latent distrust of the Election Commission to the extreme of assuming they also know the EVMs malfunctioned and/or the commission misbehaved. No one in this milieu is stopping to consider they don’t know something because they lack proof of malfeasance and/or misbehaviour.
Thus no one will pursue even a public debate on an independent democratic mechanism that acquires and places in the public domain data from the integrity tests of EVMs slated for use in specific elections. But they will pursue a (presumably) national “movement” by attributing with no evidence their loss in a recent election on EVMs with or without the Election Commission’s imaginary complicity while demanding a return to a primitive voting system, and about which the commission and the national government will do nothing other than to make snarky comments while the Supreme Court issues uncritical remarks.
Featured image credit: Dmitrii Vaccinium/Unsplash.
Vettaiyan steers clear of unconditionally qualifying “encounter killings” as the only way out — a line many Tamil films have been only too happy to tout of late. There’s in fact an instructive passage at the film’s start that’s probably deliberate. Rajinikanth’s character says there is no personal gain to be had or personal grouse to be avenged in an “encounter killing”, that a police officer who kills in this way has to suffer the “risk” of enquiries by departmental, magisterial, and human-rights commissions, and that the officer may be dismissed or “even” jailed. The choice of words here sets up a narrative whose denouement, pronounced by Rajinikanth’s character in the same scene, is the idea that police personnel are prepared to protect the people at large at risk to their own lives.
The film intercalates elements of this scene with another in which Amitabh Bachchan’s character is being persuasive in his own right about the pitfalls of “encounter killings”. The virtue of this arrangement is that it reveals a fundamental truth about the world: when a narrative triumphs, it isn’t because it has vanquished other narratives. It’s the idea that many narratives, even those at odds with each other, can be simultaneously true, and that we always have the option to choose the one we’d like to adopt — and suddenly the world could look very different. The tenets of populism can fully explain the (alleged) public support for “encounter killings” but the deeper issue is that we need people to want to adopt a different narrative of the phenomenon.
Vettaiyan uses Rajinikanth’s character to embody this arc, and attempts to bend it slowly over its 160-minute runtime to intersect with Amitabh Bachchan’s character’s demand: that we need education as a public service and that it needs to be universally accessible, so that from the more learned foundations that result, people will demand timely justice instead of a rushed one. That there are two scenes later in the narrative explicitly acknowledging the risk of “encounter killings” becoming misappropriated by vested interests — à la Vikram Vedha — is only to the writers’ credit.
In fact, since a single film has come this far, I only wish Vettaiyan also examined the belief, which Rajinikanth’s character articulates in the film without challenge, that “encounter killings” can deter similar crimes in future by scaring potential perpetrators away. Such beliefs are mistaken because they presume there is no relationship between the particulars of violent crimes and how the law punishes them, or overlook it altogether. In reality, there is ample evidence that harsher punishment for a sexual violence conviction can incentivise perpetrators to kill the victims (i.e. prevent their survival) in order to minimise the perpetrators’ chances of being caught.
Nonetheless the film’s decision to draw its driving force from sexual violence, especially gratuitous sexual violence reinforced with graphic imagery, is deeply disconcerting. Repeatedly setting up the ‘dishonouring’ of a woman as the raison d’être of the pursuit of justice is dangerous because it also sets up any crime less heinous — as deemed by the socio-cultural mores of the time — as undeserving of such pursuits. The practice of refrigeration certainly needs to end. The film also maintains the film industry’s tradition of not thinking about the tropes that concern women. The protagonist’s second in command is a woman in both phases of the film — Ritika Singh first and Rohini Molleti second — and the distribution of labour (especially of the tedious variety) and credit is correspondingly lopsided. The antagonist’s lieutenant is a woman, too.
Yet even after all these missteps — and the many others a contemporary superstar vehicle demands — on the scale of badness Vettaiyan steers clear of Annaatthe (undoubtedly Rajinikanth’s worst outing since Baba) and, importantly, of Maharaja, whose diet was even heavier on sexual violence. And to achieve all this, Vettaiyan expects us to overlook all sorts of small but mighty details, including (i) a company’s monarch storing details of the bribes he’s given on the company servers; (ii) a wasp-sized drone that could transmit high-definition images in near-real-time with what could only have been a profoundly energy-dense battery; (iii) an otherwise devious antagonist being unable to think of any ways around a protagonist who’s being a nuisance other than to offer bribes or organise hitmen; and (iv) the spectacle of one-on-one physical violence to pad the otherwise feeble arguments to suspend disbelief.
There’s a fifth detail that’s also my favourite: in many, many Tamil films (and quite possibly in films made around the country; I’m leaving them out only because I haven’t watched most of them), the protagonist has need for great public support to surmount a great challenge — and immediately finds it. I found both parts of Dhanush’s Velailla Pattadhaari completely uninspiring for this reason: both narratives would’ve gone to pot if certain social media posts hadn’t gone viral. Garnering enthusiastic public support for a common cause is an extremely valuable thing and thus quite rare in reality. But in Tamil films it happens with an astounding success rate of 100%.
“These are small prices to pay,” you say, and I’m not so sure. If it weren’t for these details, Vettaiyan would have no feet to stand on. Given a film’s claims to grandness — depicted by the scope of its characters’ actions and the virtues its makers allege the characters are showcasing — we’re often expected to overlook such details. And we do because if we apply this lens to one film at a time, it seems okay. But zoom out and a rash of films comes into view that has progressively rendered the terms of the buy-in more and more exorbitant until, at one point, we’re being asked to overlook patently absurd claims in the service of some unattainable, even deceptive, virtue. Vettaiyan, for example, would’ve had trouble just getting off the ground if that drone hadn’t or achieving any of the major leads in its central procedural without its “fight scenes”.
The film is ultimately a good hand with the misfortune of being erected as a house of cards. And the reason it doesn’t collapse at the first breeze is its principled refusal to lose sight of the corruption at the heart of “encounter killings”.
Featured image: A scene from Vettaiyan (2024). Source: Amazon Prime Video.
Remember the most common question the protagonists of the eponymous British sitcom The IT Crowd asked a caller checking why a computer wasn’t working? “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” Nine times out of 10, this fixed the problem, whatever it was, and the IT team could get on with its life.
Around COP26 or so, I acquired a similar habit: every time someone presented something as a model of energy and/or cost efficiency, my first thought was whether they’d included the externalised costs. This is clearly a global problem today yet many people continue to overlook it in contexts big and small. So when I came across a neat graph on Bluesky (shown below), drawn from an old article in Scientific American, I began to wonder if the awesome transportation efficiency of the human on the bicycle (HotB) included the energy costs of making the bicycle as well.
According to the article, written by an SS Wilson and published in 1973, the HotB required 1-2 calories per gram per km to move around. The next most efficient mover was the salmon, which needed 4 cal/g/km. If the energy costs of making the bicycle are included, the energy cost per g/km would shoot up and, depending on the distance the MotB travels, the total cost may never become fully amortised. (It also matters that the math works out only this way at the scale of the human: anything smaller or bigger and the energy cost increases per unit weight per unit distance.)
But there’s a problem with this line of thinking. On a more basic level, neither Wilson nor Scientific American intended the graph to be completely accurate or claimed it was backed by any research more than that required to estimate the energy costs of moving different kinds of moving things through some distance. It was a graph to make one limited point. More importantly, it illustrates how externalised costs can become counterproductive if attempts to factor them in are not guided by subjective, qualitative assessments of what we’re arguing for or against.
Of course the question of external costs is an important one to ask — more so today, when climate commitments and actions are being reinterpreted in dollar figures and quantitative assessments are gaining in prominence as the carbon budget may well have to be strictly rationed among the world’s countries. But whether or not some activity is rendered more or less efficient by factoring in its externalised costs, any human industrial activities — including those to manufacture bicycles — are polluting. There’s no escaping that. And the struggle to mitigate climate change is a struggle to mitigate climate change while ensuring we don’t undermine or compromise the developmental imperative. Otherwise the struggle isn’t one at all.
Even more importantly, this balancing act isn’t a strategy and isn’t the product of consensus: it’s an implicit and morally and ethically correct assumption, an implicit and inviolable component of global climate mitigation efforts. Put another way, this is how it needs to be. In this milieu, and at a time it’s becoming clear the world’s richer countries have a limit to how much they’re prepared to spend to help poorer countries deal with climate change, the impulse to consider externalised costs can mislead decision-making by making some choices seem more undesirable than they really are.
Externalised costs are, or ought to be, important when the emissions from some activity don’t stack up commensurately with any social, cultural, and/or political advantages they confer as well. These costs are not always unavoidable nor undesirable, and we need to keep an eye on where we’re drawing the line between acceptable and unacceptable costs. The danger is that as richer countries both expect and force poorer ones to make more emissions cuts, the latter may have to adopt more robust quantitative rationales to determine what emissions to cut from which sources and when. Should they include externalised costs, many enterprises that should actually live on may face the axe instead.
For one, the HotB should be able to continue to ride on.
Addendum: Here’s an (extended) excerpt from the Scientific American article on where the HotB scores their efficiency gains.
Before considering these developments in detail it is worth asking why such an apparently simple device as the bicycle should have had such a major effect on the acceleration of technology.The answer surely lies in the sheer humanity of the machine. Its purpose is to make it easier for an individual to move about, and this the bicycle achieves in a way that quite outdoes natural evolution. When one compares the energy consumed in moving a certain distance as a function of body weight for a variety of animals and machines, one finds that an unaided walking man does fairly well (consuming about .75 calorie per gram per kilometer), but he is not as efficient as a horse, a salmon or a jet transport. With the aid of a bicycle, however, the man’s energy consumption for a given distance is reduced to about a fifth (roughly .15 calorie per gram per kilometer). Therefore, apart from increasing his unaided speed by a factor of three or four, the cyclist improves his efficiency rating to No. 1 among moving creatures and machines.
… The reason for the high energy efficiency of cycling compared with walking appears to lie mainly in the mode of action of the muscles. … the cyclist … saves energy by sitting, thus relieving his leg muscles of their supporting function and accompanying energy consumption. The only reciprocating parts of his body are his knees and thighs; his feet rotate smoothly at a constant speed and the rest of his body is still. Even the acceleration and deceleration of his legs are achieved efficiently, since the strongest muscles are used almost exclusively; the rising leg does not have to be lifted but is raised by the downward thrust of the other leg. The back muscles must be used to support the trunk, but the arms can also help to do this, resulting (in the normal cycling attitude) in a little residual strain on the hands and arms.
Though I’ve been interested of late with the idea of random walks, I was introduced to the concept when, more than two decades ago, I stumbled across Conway’s Game of Life, the cellular automaton built by John Conway in 1970. A cellular automaton is a grid of cells in which each cell has a value depending on the values of its neighbours. The automaton simulates the evolution of the grid as the cells’ values change dynamically.
Langton’s ant was a popular instance of the simulator and one of my favourites, too. One 2001 conference paper described it as “a simple … system with a surprisingly complex behaviour.” Here, a (virtual) ant starts off at a random cell on the grid and moves randomly into one of the four neighbouring squares (diagonal squares aren’t accessible). There are three rules:
(i) A cell can be either black or white in colour;
(ii) If the square is white when the ant moves into it, the colour is flipped, and the ant turns 90º clockwise and moves forward;
(iii) If the square is black, the colour is flipped, and the ant turns 90º counter-clockwise and moves forward.
As the ant moves across the grid in this way, the first hundred or so steps produce a symmetric pattern before chaos ensues. For the next 9,900 or so steps, an image devoid of any patterns comes into view. But after around 10,000 steps, there’s magic: the ant suddenly enters into a repetitive 104-step pattern that it continues until the end of time. You can run your own simulation and check.
The path of a Langton’s ant. The repetitive pattern after ~10,000 steps is the ‘highway’ growing at the bottom. The location of the ant is shown in red. Credit: Krwarobrody and Ferkel/Wikimedia Commons
The march of the Langton’s ant before the repetitive portion has been described as a pseudorandom walk — a walk whose pattern appears random but whose next step is not quite random (because of the rules). In a truly random walk, the length of each step is fixed and the direction of each step is chosen at random from a fixed number of options.
If it sounds simple, it is, but you might be forgiven for thinking it’s only a mathematical flight of fancy. Random walks have applications in numerous areas, including econometrics, finance, biology, chemistry, and quantum physics.
The trajectory of a random walk after 25,000 steps. Credit: László Németh/Wikimedia Commons
Specific variants of the random walk behave in ways that closely match the properties of some complex system evolving in time. For example, in a Gaussian random walk, the direction of each step is random and the length of each step is sampled randomly from a Gaussian distribution (the classic example of a bell curve). Experts use the evolution of this walk to evaluate the risk exposure of investment portfolios.
The Lévy flight is a random walk with a small change: instead of the step length being determined by a random pick from the Gaussian distribution, it comes from any distribution with a heavy tail. One common example is the gamma distribution. Each such distribution can be tweaked with two parameters called κ (kappa) and θ (theta) to produce different plots on a graph, all with the same general properties. In the examples shown below, focus on the orange line (κ = 2, θ = 2): it shows a gamma distribution with a heavy tail.
Various gamma distributions for different values of κ and θ. Credit: MarkSweep and Cburnett/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Put another way, the distribution has some large values but mostly small values. A Lévy flight is a random walk where the step length is sampled randomly from this distribution, and as a result has a few large steps and many small steps. Research has shown that the foraging path of animals looking for food that is scarce can be modelled as a Lévy flight: the large steps correspond to the long distances towards food sources that are located far apart and the short steps to finding food spread in a small area at each source.
A Lévy flight simulated for 1,000 steps. Credit: PAR/Wikimedia Commons
Perhaps the most famous ‘example’ of a random walk is Brownian motion; it isn’t a perfect example however. Brownian motion can describe, say, the path of a single atom over time in a gas of billions of atoms by using a Lévy process. Whereas a random walk proceeds in discrete steps, a Lévy process is continuous; they are in other respects the same. The motion itself refers to the atom’s journey in some time period, frequently bumping into other atoms (depending on the gas’s density) and shifting its path in random ways.
The yellow circle depicts the motion of a larger particle in a container filled with smaller particles moving in random directions at different speeds. Credit: Francisco Esquembre, Fu-Kwun and lookang/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Brownian motion in particular uses a type of Lévy process called the Wiener process, where the path evolves according to the following rules:
(i) Each increment of the process is independent of other (non-overlapping) increments;
(ii) How much the process changes over a period of time depends only on the duration of the period;
(iii) Increments in the process are randomly sampled from a Gaussian distribution;
(iv) The process has a statistical mean equal to zero;
(v) The process’s covariance between any two time points is equal to the lower variance at those two points (variance denotes how quickly the value of a variable is spreading out over time).
The path of the atom in the gas follows a Wiener process and is thus Brownian motion. The Wiener process has a wealth of applications across both the pure and the applied sciences. Just to name one: say there is a small particle — e.g. an ion — trapped in a cell. It can’t escape the cell except through a small opening. The Wiener process, which models the Brownian motion of the ion through the cell, can be used to estimate the average amount of time the ion will need to reach the opening and escape.
Like random walks, Wiener processes can also be tweaked to produce models for different conditions. One example is the Brownian bridge, which arises when a Wiener process is limited to appear at the start of an interval and disappear at the end, with the start and end points fixed. A different, more visual way to put this is in terms of a graph with two y-axes and one x-axis. Say the point 0 is the start of the interval on the left y-axis and 1 is the end of the interval on the right y-axis. A Wiener process in the interval [0, 1] will be a ‘bridge’ that connects 0 and 1 in a path that follows Brownian motion.
A Brownian bridge pinned at the two endpoints of an interval. Credit: Zemyla/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
By analogy, a random bridge in the interval [0, 1] will be a random walk based on the Gaussian distribution between 0 and 1; a gamma random bridge in the interval [0, 1] will be a random walk based on the gamma distribution between 0 and 1; and so on. (This said, a Wiener process and a random walk are distinct: a Wiener process will play out the same way if the underlying grid is rotated by an arbitrary angle but a random walk won’t.)
It’s a wonder of mathematics that it can discern recurring behaviours in such highly noisy systems and with its finite tools distil from them glimpses into their future. According to a 2020 preprint paper on arXiv, “Various random-walk-related models can be applied in different fields, which is of great significance to downstream tasks such as link prediction, recommendation, computer vision, semi-supervised learning, and network embedding.”
If some basic conditions are met, there are random walks out in the universe as well. In 2004, researchers estimated the Brownian velocity of the black hole at the Milky Way’s centre to be less than 1 km/s.
For a more mathematical example, in a ‘conventional’ random walk, after N steps the walker’s distance from the origin will be comparable to the square root of N. Further, it takes on average S2 steps to travel a distance of S from the origin. For a long time, researchers believed this so-called S → S2 scaling law could model almost any process in which a physical entity was moving from one location to another. The law captured the notion of how much a given distribution would spread out over time.
One of the earliest deviations from this law was fractals, where there is an S → Sβ law but such that β is always greater than 2, implying a greater amount of spread relative to the step length vis-à-vis random walks. (Factoid: a random walk on a fractal also gives rise to a fractal.)
A Sierpinski triangle fractal. Credit: Beojan Stanislaus/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
For yet another example, random walks have a famously deep connection to resistor networks: electric circuits where a bunch of resistors are connected in some configuration, plus a power source and a grounding. Researchers have found that the effective voltage between any two points in the circuit is proportional to the time a random-walker would take to travel between those two points for the first time.
A schematic diagram of an electrical circuit where the challenge is to determine the resistance to the flow of an electric current at each of the in-between nodes. Source: math.ucla.edu
The resistor model speaks to a beautiful thing random walks bring to light: the influence an underlying structure exerts on a stochastic process — one governed entirely by chance — playing out on that structure, its inherent geometry imposing unexpected limits on the randomness and keeping it from wheeling away into chaos. At each step the random walk makes an unpredictable choice but the big picture in which these steps are individual strokes is a picture of predictability, to some degree at least.
Flip this conclusion on its head and an even more captivating notion emerges: that though two random walks may resemble each other in their statistical properties, they can still be very different journeys.
This city is essentially uninhabitable from November to January inclusive and barely liveable the rest of the year. Should it even remain the nation’s capital?
I realise Shashi Tharoor is frustrated here — revealing the increasingly evident gap between what the Delhi and the Indian governments can do about air pollution and the scale of improvements on the ground — but Delhi should certainly remain the national capital. Changing this designation because the existing one has become nearly uninhabitable for four months out of 12 is to say the capitalhood of the city is the problem, not the pollution itself. Low hanging fruit but still.
The country’s mainstream press has also been cynical enough to remember there’s an air pollution crisis only when Delhi’s air becomes patently foul, not the air in any other city. Ambient pollution in places like Guwahati and Katihar is also not concentrated in the winter months, although this isn’t to say Delhi’s air is better during the summer. If the national capital moves away from Delhi, the press spotlight will move with it, and rather than deal with Delhi’s pollution now, we’ll all deal with the new capital’s pollution a few years later.
Then again Prime Minister Narendra Modi isn’t bound to go anywhere considering he just had a fancy new parliament built for himself.
Estimates of a heatwave’s deadliness are typically based on the extent to which the ambient temperature deviates from the historical average at a specific location and the number of lives lost during and because of the heatwave. This is a tricky, even devious, combination as illustrated by the accompanying rider: “to the reasonable exclusion of other causes of hyperthermia”.
A heatwave injures and/or kills by first pushing more vulnerable people over the edge; the less vulnerable are further down the line. The new policy is presumably designed to help the State catch those whose risk exposure the State has not been able to mitigate in time. However, the goal should be to altogether reduce the number of people requiring such catching. The policy lacks the instruments to guide the State toward this outcome.
The project of demolishing the building opposite my house has taken a new turn. As part of the deal between me and my neighbours and the contractor, Monday, November 18, was his deadline to finish the part of the job that required the use of the offensively loud pneumatic jackhammers. The contractor was also to pause work on Sunday (November 17), which he didn’t: the workers didn’t use the jackhammers but continued working with sledgehammers and the much simpler electric drills.
My neighbours and I also noticed the two tractors that powered the jackhammers were driven away on Sunday morning. We simply assumed the contractor had leased the equipment and was returning them for the day to avoid paying rent. However, the workers continued to demolish the building on Monday with sledgehammers and electric drills. (One of us went over but the contractor wasn’t on site.) The tractors didn’t return either.
The situation continued into Tuesday. At this point we began to wonder if the article in The Hindu might have had anything to do with it. Late last week, after we’d lodged out complaint with the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (TNPCB), I reached out to one of my colleagues at The Hindu asking if they could help expedite the board’s response. Apparently they did, and they also arranged for the noise complaints to be covered as a small item in the paper the next day (November 16).
It wasn’t implausible that the people who made the work noisy in the first place decided to take a step back at this point and revert to more peaceable methods. A user named “Joseph” also posted an encouraging comment on the article: “If the TNPCB cannot take action on a complaint already received, then what is the drafted jurisprudence and responsibility of the TNPCB? Hope the lawmakers amend the defective law and permit the TNPCB to take suitable action against willful noise pollutors.”
But my neighbours and I also began to feel guilty: if that bigwig at the other end of the road didn’t allow the contractor to use an excavator and we didn’t want him to use pneumatic jackhammers, were we condemning the workers the contractor had hired to slowly, painstakingly demolish the building with sledgehammers and electric drills over several weeks?
Fortunately, Wednesday (November 20) dawned with good news for us as well as the workers: the contractor brought the excavator back. Unlikely though it may be, I’m tempted to think the article in The Hindu also spooked the bigwig. The excavator is currently parked on the front side of the building and we’re all excited for it to bring what remains of the structure down in a day or two.
A curious claim by all means. The scientist, a Hiren Jethva at NASA Goddard, compared data from the Aqua, Suomi-NPP, and GEO-KOMPSAT 2A satellites and reported that the number of farm fires over North India and Pakistan had dropped whereas the aerosol optical depth — a proxy measure of the aerosol load in the atmosphere — has remained what it’s been over the last half decade or so. He interpreted this to suggest farmers could be burning paddy stubble after the Aqua and Suomi-NPP satellites had completed their overpass. GEO-KOMPSAT 2A is in a geostationary orbit so there’s no evading its gaze.
The idea that farmers across the many paddy-growing states in North India collectively decided to postpone their fires to keep them out of the satellites’ sight seems preposterous. The The Times of India article has some experts towards the end saying this…
… and I sort of agree because it’s in farmers’ interests for the satellites to see more of their fires so the national and state governments can give them better alternatives with better incentives.
The farmers aren’t particularly keen on burning the stubble — they’re doing it because it’s what’s cheapest and quickest. It also matters that there is no surer path to national headlines than being one of the causes of air pollution in New Delhi, much more than dirtying the air in any other city in the country, and that both national and states’ governments have thus far failed to institute sustainable alternatives to burning the stubble. Taken together, if any farmers are looking for better alternatives, more farm fires seem to be the best way to put pressure on governments to do better.
All this said, there may be a fallacy lurking in Jethva’s decision to interpret the timing change solely with respect to the overpass times of the two US satellites and not with any other factor. It’s amusing with a tinge of disappointment that the possibility of someone somewhere “educating” farmers to change their behaviour — and then them following suit en masse — was more within reach than the possibility of satellite data being flawed. If a fire burns in a farm and no satellite is around to see it, does it still produce smoke?
The data on fire counts are from a heat-sensing instrument on two American satellites — Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20 polar-orbiting satellites. Instruments on polar-orbiting satellites typically observe a wildfire at a given location a few times a day as they orbit the Earth, pole to pole. They pass over India from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. …
Other researchers also suggest that merely relying on fire counts from the polar satellites may be inadequate and newer satellite data parameters, such as estimating the actual extent of fields burned, may be a more accurate indicator of the true measure of stubble burning.
I’m not just disappointed with an editorial published by the journal Science on November 14, I’m angry.
Irrespective of whether the Republican Party in the US has shifted more or less rightward on specific issues, it has certainly shifted towards falsehoods on many of them. Party leaders, including Donald Trump, have been using everything from lazily inaccurate information to deliberately misleading messages to preserve conservative attitudes wherever that’s been the status quo and to stoke fear, confusion, uncertainty, and animosity where peace and good sense have thus far prevailed.
Against this backdrop, which the COVID-19 pandemic revealed in all its glory, Science‘s editorial is headlined “Science is neither red nor blue”. (Whether this is a reference to the journal itself is immaterial.) Its author, Marcia McNutt, president of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), writes (emphasis added):
… scientists need to better explain the norms and values of science to reinforce the notion—with the public and their elected representatives—that science, at its most basic, is apolitical. Careers of scientists advance when they improve upon, or show the errors in, the work of others, not by simply agreeing with prior work. Whether conservative or liberal, citizens ignore the nature of reality at their peril. A recent example is the increased death rate from COVID-19 (as much as 26% higher) in US regions where political leaders dismissed the science on the effectiveness of vaccines. Scientists should better explain the scientific process and what makes it so trustworthy, while more candidly acknowledging that science can only provide the best available evidence and cannot dictate what people should value. Science cannot say whether society should prioritize allocating river water for sustaining fish or for irrigating farms, but it can predict immediate and long-term outcomes of any allocation scheme. Science can also find solutions that avoid the zero-sum dilemma by finding conservation approaches to water management that benefit both fish and farms.
Can anyone explain to me what the first portion in bold even means? Because I don’t want to assume a science administrator as accomplished as McNutt is able to ignore the narratives and scholarship roiling around the sociology of science at large or the cruel and relentless vitiation of scientific knowledge the first Trump administration practiced in particular. Even if the editorial’s purpose is to extend an olive branch to Trump et al., it’s bound to fail. If, say, a Republican leader makes a patently false claim in public, are we to believe an institution as influential as the NAS will not call it out for fear of being cast as “blue” in the public eye?
The second portion in bold is slightly less ridiculous: “science can only provide the best available evidence and cannot dictate what people should value.” McNutt is creating a false impression here by failing to present the full picture. During a crisis, science has to be able to tell people what to value more or less rather than what to value at all. Crises create uncertainty whereas science creates knowledge that is free from bias (at least it can be). It offers a pillar to lean on while we figure out everything else. People should value these pillars.
When a national government — in this case the government of one of the world’s most powerful countries — gives conspiracies and lies free reign, crises will be everywhere. If McNutt means to suggest these crises are so only insofar as the liberal order is faced with changes inimical to its sustenance, she will be confusing what is today the evidence-conspiracy divide for what was once, but is no longer, the conservative-liberal divide.
As if to illustrate this point, she follows up with the third portion in bold: “Science cannot say whether society should prioritize allocating river water for sustaining fish or for irrigating farms, but it can predict immediate and long-term outcomes of any allocation scheme.” Her choice of example is clever because it’s also fallacious: it presents a difficult decision with two reasonable outcomes, ‘reasonable’ being the clincher. The political character of science-in-practice is rarely revealed in debates where reasonability is allowed through the front door and given the power to cast the decisive vote. This was almost never the case under the first Trump administration nor the parts of the Republican Party devoted to him (which I assume is the whole party now), where crazy* has had the final say.
The choice McNutt should really have deliberated is “promoting the use of scientifically tested vaccines during a pandemic versus urging people to be cautious about these vaccines” or “increasing the stockpile of evidence-backed drugs and building social resilience versus hawking speculative ideas and demoralising science administrators”. When the choice is between irrigation for farms and water for fisheries, science can present the evidence and then watch. When the choice is between reason and bullshit, still advocating present-and-watch would be bullshit, too — i.e. science would be “red”.
This is just my clumsy, anger-flecked take on what John Stuart Mill and many others recognised long past: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing.” But if McNutt would still rather push the line that what seem like “bad men” to me might be good men to others, she and the policies she influences will have committed themselves to the sort of moral relativism that could never be relevant to politics in practice, which in turn would be a blow for us all.
(* My colloquialism for the policy of being in power for the sake of being in power, rather than to govern.)
In 2020, India and Pakistan shared the Ig Nobel Prize for peace “for having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other’s doorbells in the middle of the night, and then run away before anyone had a chance to answer the door.” The terms of the ongoing spat between North Korea and South Korea aren’t any less amusing and they may be destined for an Ig Nobel Prize of their own, even if animosity between the two countries — much like India and Pakistan — is rooted in issues with more gravitas.
North Korea has of late been sending balloons loaded with garbage over the border to the south whereas South Korea has stepped up its “psychological warfare” by blasting K-pop music over loudspeakers into the north. But as befits any functional democracy, the latter has run into trouble.
On June 17, Reuters reported the South Korean government faces “audits and legal battles claiming [the loudspeakers] are too quiet, raising questions over how far into the reclusive North their propaganda messages can blast”. Note: K-pop is propaganda because, per the same report, “These broadcasts play a role in instilling a yearning for the outside world, or in making them realize that the textbooks they have been taught from are incorrect,” according to Kim Sung-min, “who defected from the North in 1999 and runs a Seoul radio station that broadcasts news into North Korea”.
Apparently the speakers passed two tests in 2016 but failed subsequent audits, prompting the national defence ministry to sue the manufacturers. The court threw the case out because “too many environmental factors can affect the performance”. The ministry and the manufacturer have since made up, going by the fact that the ministry reportedly gave Reuters the same excuse when it was under fire over the speakers: environmental factors.
Imagine being the manufacturer who has to build a ridiculous set of speakers while being able to do nothing about the physics of sound propagation itself. The government wanted the K-pop to reach Kaesong, 10 km in from the border, whereas checks in 2017 found sound from the speakers could only get as far as 7 km, and in most cases managed 5 km. And to think the whole enterprise hinges on (a) North Korea being annoyed enough by the K-pop to blast music of its own in the opposite direction, at least to muddle the South Korean broadcast, and (b) South Korea’s claim that two soldiers defected from the North after listening to the music. Two.
Did they risk it all to turn the damned things off, you think?
Heidi Ledford had a tragic and powerful story published yesterday in Nature, about a team of scientists at the CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology racing to develop a CRISPR treatment for Uditi Saraf, a young girl whose brain was losing neurons due to a very rare, very aggressive genetic condition called FENIB. The story’s power comes from what it reveals about several facets of developing new treatments, looking for a cure for a rare disease, the importance of state support as well as control, the fact of the existence of neglected diseases, the demands made of clinical researchers, self-sufficiency in laboratory research infrastructure, and of course the cost of treatment. But most of all, it is a critical study of time. Uditi passed away four months after one of the researchers working on a CRISPR-based treatment for her told her parents they’d be ready with a solution in six. But even before her passing, there was time, there was no time, there was hurry, and there were risks.
Uditi’s disease was caused by a mutation that converts a single DNA base from a ‘G’ to an ‘A’. A variation on CRISPR genome editing, called base editing, could theoretically correct exactly this kind of mutation (see ‘Precision gene repair’). … But Rajeev and Sonam saw an opportunity for hope: perhaps such a therapy could slow down the progression of Uditi’s disease, buying time for scientists to develop another treatment that could repair the damage that had been done. The Sarafs were on board.
…
There were a lot of unknowns in the base-editing project. And in addition to the work on stem cells in the lab, the team would need to do further experiments to determine which base-editing systems would work best, where and how to deliver its components into the body, and whether the process generated any unwanted changes to the DNA sequence. They would need to do experiments in mice to test the safety and efficacy of the treatment. They also needed to get Ghosh’s facility approved by India’s regulators for producing the base-editing components.
Then there was the pandemic:
In December 2019, the Sarafs moved back to India. … Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and in January 2021, Uditi was hospitalized with severe COVID-19. She spent 20 days in the hospital and her health was never the same, says Sonam. Communication became increasingly difficult for Uditi and she began to pace the house incessantly, rarely even going to sleep. The Sarafs decided to speed up the base-editing project by funding a second team in India.
Developing treatments takes time. Uditi’s story was a one-off, a singular disease that few researchers on the planet were working on, so developing an experimental alternative based on cutting-edge medical technology was a reasonable option. And yet:
Meanwhile, Devinsky had petitioned a US foundation to devise a different experimental treatment called antisense therapy for Uditi. … The treatments didn’t work. And the experience taught Rajeev and Sonam how long it could take to get approval to try an experimental therapy in the United States. They decided Uditi’s base-editing therapy should also be manufactured and administered in India.
Uditi didn’t live long enough to receive treatment that could have slowed FENIB’s progression — hopefully long enough for researchers to come up with a better and more long-lasting solution. Now, after her death, the thinking and effort that motivated the quest to find her a cure has shifted to the future tense.
It will take years to establish the techniques needed to create rapid, on-demand, bespoke CRISPR therapies. Most people with these conditions don’t have that kind of time. … Rajeev has urged Chakraborty to finish the team’s studies in mice, so that the next person with FENIB will not have to wait as long for a potential treatment. … “We are not really trying as aggressively as we did earlier,” he says.
When the health of a loved one is rapidly deteriorating, the clock of life resets — from the familiar 24-hour rhythms of daily life to days that start and end to the beats of more morbid milestones: a doctor’s visit, a diagnostic test result, the effects of a drug kicking in, the chance discovery of a new symptom, an unexpected moment of joy, the unbearable agony of helplessness. The passage of time becomes distorted, sometimes slow, sometimes too fast. People do what they can when they can. They will take all their chances. Which means the chances they encounter on their way matters. Technological literacy and personal wealth expand the menu of options. The Sarafs knew about CRISPR, had a vague idea of how it worked, and could afford it, so they pursued it. They came really close, too; their efforts may even prove decisive in pushing a cure for FENIB past the finish line. For those who don’t know about CRISPR-based therapies and/or don’t have the means to pay for it, the gap between hope and cure is likely to be more vast, and more dispiriting. And one chapter of the Sarafs’ journey briefly threatened to pull them to this path — just as it relentlessly threatens to waylay many families’ laborious pursuits to save the lives of their loved ones:
The Sarafs studied what they could find online and tried the interventions available to them: Indian ayurvedic treatments, a ketogenic diet, special schools, seeing a slew of physicians and trying out various medicines.
Ledford’s narrative doesn’t get into who these physicians were, but let’s set them and the special schools aside. Just this morning, I read a report by Rema Nagarajan in The Times of India that a company called Natelco in Bengaluru has been selling human milk even though its license was cancelled two years ago. Specifically, the FSSAI cancelled Natelco’s license in 2021; a few months later, Natelco obtained a license from the Ministry of AYUSH claiming it was selling “Aryuevdic proprietary medicine”. When the Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India complained to the ministry, the ministry cancelled its license in August 2022. Then, a month later, the Karnataka high court granted an interim stay on this cancellation but said the respondents — AYUSH representatives in Karnataka, in the Karnataka licensing authority or from the ministry — could have it vacated. They didn’t bother. In June 2023, the ministry filed objections but nothing more. It finally moved to vacate the stay only in March this year.
Natelco’s case is just one example. There are hundreds of companies whose charade the Ministry of AYUSH facilitates by allowing specious claims ranging from “Ayurvedic toothpaste” to calling human breast milk “Ayurvedic medicine”. This is not Ayurveda: very few of us know what Ayurveda is or looks like; even Ayurveda itself doesn’t belong in modern medicine. But together with the FSSAI, the food regulation body notorious for dragging its feet when the time comes to punish errant manufacturers, and a toothless advertisement monitoring regime, the Indian food and beverages market has provided a hospitable work environment for quacks and their businesses. And inevitably, their quackery spills over into the path of an unsuspecting yet desperate father or mother looking for something, anything, that will help their child. When faced with trenchant criticism, many of these business adopt the line that their products are not unsafe. But they are terribly unsafe: they steal time to do nothing with it, taking it away from a therapy or a drug that could have done a lot. Such cynical alternatives shouldn’t be present anywhere on any family’s path, yet the national government itself gives them a license to be.
Featured image credit: Sangharsh Lohakare/Unsplash
In a WhatsApp group of which I’m a part, there’s a heated discussion going on around an article published by NDTV on June 10, entitled ‘Sun’s Fury May Fry Satellites, But India Has A Watchful Space Protector’. The article was published after the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) published images of the Sun the Aditya L1 spacecraft (including its coronagraph) captured during the May solar storm. The article also features quotes by ISRO chairman S. Somanath — and some of them in particular prompted the discussion. For example, he says:
“Aditya L1 captured when the Sun got angry this May. If it gets furious in the near future, as scientists suggest, India’s 24x7X365 days’ eye on the Sun is going to provide a forewarning. After all, we have to protect the 50-plus Indian satellites in space that have cost the country an estimated more than ₹ 50,000 crore. Aditya L1 is a celestial protector for our space assets.”
A space scientist on the group pointed out that any solar event that could fry satellites in Earth orbit would also fry Aditya L1, which is stationed at the first Earth-Sun Lagrange point (1.5 million km from Earth in the direction of the Sun), so it doesn’t make sense to describe this spacecraft as a “protector” of India’s “space assets”. Instead, the scientist said, we’re better off describing Aditya L1 as a science mission, which is what it’d been billed as.
Another space scientist in the same group contended that the coronagraph onboard Aditya L1, plus its other instruments, still give the spacecraft a not insignificant early-warning ability, using which ISRO could consider protective measures. He also said not all solar storms are likely to fry all satellites around Earth, only the very powerful ones; likewise, not all satellites around Earth are equally engineered to withstand solar radiation that is more intense than usual, to varying extents. With these variables in mind, he added, Aditya L1 — which is protected to a greater degree — could give ISRO folks enough head start to manoeuvre ‘weaker’ satellites out of harm’s way or prevent catastrophic failures. By virtue of being ISRO’s eyes on the Sun, then, he suggested Aditya L1 was a scientific mission that could also perform some, but not all, of the functions expected of a full-blown early warning system.
(For such a system vis-a-vis solar weather, he said the fourth or the fifth Earth-Sun Lagrange points would have been better stations.)
I’m putting this down here as a public service message. Characterising a scientific mission — which is driven by scientists’ questions, rather than ISRO’s perception of threats or as part of any overarching strategy of the Indian government — as something else is not harmless because it downplays the fact that we have open questions and that we need to spend time and money answering them. It also creates a false narrative about the mission’s purpose that the people who have spent years designing and building the instruments onboard Aditya L1 don’t deserve, and a false impression of how much room the Indian space programme currently has to launch and operate spacecraft that are dedicated to providing early warnings of bad solar weather.
To be fair, the NDTV article says in a few places that Aditya L1 is a scientific mission, as does astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhury in the last paragraph. It’s just not clear why Somanath characterised it as a “protector” and as a “space-based insurance policy”. NDTV also erred by putting “protector” in the headline (based on my experiences at The Wire and The Hindu, most readers of online articles read and share nothing more than the headline). That it was the ISRO chairman who said these things is more harmful: as the person heading India’s nodal space research body, he has a protagonist’s role in making room in the public imagination for the importance and wonders of scientific missions.
The headlines in Indian mainstream media over the course of June 6, after Boeing (finally) launched its Starliner capsule on its first crewed test flight…
… betray a persistent inability to let go of the little yet also false pride that comes with calling Sunita Williams an “Indian-American” astronaut. This is from the Wikipedia page on Williams:
Williams is a native of Needham, Massachusetts, was born in Euclid, Ohio, to Indian-American neuroanatomist from Mumbai, Deepak Pandya, and Slovene-American Ursuline Bonnie (Zalokar) Pandya, who reside in Falmouth, Massachusetts. She was the youngest of three children. … Williams’ paternal family is from Jhulasan in the Mehsana district in Gujarat, India, whereas her maternal family is of Slovene descent.
Williams’s national identity is (US-of-) American. She was born in the US and spent all her formative years there, studying and working within an institutional framework that had little to do with India. Why is she still “Indian-American” or even “Indian-origin”, then? By the simple, even facile, virtue of her father having left the country in search of greener pastures after his MD, the forced India connection reeks of a desperation to cling to her achievements as at least partly our own. India doesn’t have a woman astronaut and facing up to this and other impossibilities and eliminating them is an important way that every country has to grow. But keep thinking she’s partly Indian and you may never have to think about what could be stopping women in India from becoming astronauts in future.
This said, I know very little about Williams’ upbringing. According to Wikipedia, she’s a practising Hindu and has taken copies of the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads to space with her. But I fail to see why these features would make her national identity “Indian-American”. Like me, I imagine the people at large know little about her cultural identity considering her shared Indian and Slovenian heritage. I’d also be wary of conflating the social and political culture of India in the 1950s, when her father left the country, with that prevalent today. A close friend who grew up in India and now lives in the US told me in a conversation last year that pre-2014 India seems lost to her forever. I think even the recent outcome of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections may not change that: a lot of damage Hindu nationalism has wrought is irreversible, especially — but not restricted to — making it okay to aspire to inflicting violence on minorities and liberals. Thus, by all means, even the contrived “Indian” in “Indian-American” refers to another India, not the one we have today.
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
— LP Hartley, The Go-Between
Yet in the eyes of those penning articles and headlines, “Indian-American” she is. They’re using this language to get people interested in these articles, and if they succeed, they’re effectively selling the idea that it’s not possible for Indians to care about the accomplishments of non-Indians, that only Indians’, and by extension India’s, accomplishments matter. It’s a good example of why beating back the Hindu majoritarian nationalism in India has been such an uphill battle, and why the BJP’s smarting win in the 2024 polls was so heartening: the nuclei of nationalistic thinking are everywhere, you need just the right arguments — no matter how kettle-logic-y — to nurture them into crystals of hate and xenophobia. Calling Williams “Indian-American” is to retrench her patriarchal identity as being part of her primary identity — just as referring to her as “Indian origin” is to evoke her genetic identity; to recall her skin colour as being similar to that of many Indians; and perhaps to passively inculcate her value to the US as an opportunity for soft diplomacy with India.
As of 4.25 pm on June 4, the NDA alliance stood to win 294 seats in the Lok Sabha while the INDIA bloc was set for 225 seats. This is more than a pleasant surprise.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) consumed everything in its path in its aggressive bid to stay in power. If it is being pushed back, it is not a feat that can be the product of nothing.
After a decade of resistance without outright victories, in a manner of speaking, the pushback is a resounding abnegation of the BJP’s politics, and by doing that it embodies what the resistance has stood for: good-faith governance informed by reason and respect for the spirit and letters of the Constitution.
Embodiment is a treasure because it gives form to some specific meaning in our common and shared reality, which is important: it needs to breach BJP supporters’ pinched-off reality as well. There needs to be no escaping it.
Embodied meaning is also a treasure because the meaning is no longer restricted to “just” shouts of protest carried off by the wind, words left unread or protests the national government saw fit to ignore.
This is 294-227 — or whatever the figures are once the ECI has declared final results in all constituencies.
It’s a win for democracy, but a lot of my elation is coming from the notion that the outcome of the polls also demonstrate not only that journalists’ work matters — we already knew that — but that we’re not pissing into the wind with it. It’s being read, heard, and watched. People are paying attention.
In the day or so before June 1, 14 people died in Bihar of heat stroke. Ten of these people were election personnel deployed to oversee voting and associated activities in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and of them, five died in Bhojpur alone. On Friday, at least 17 people in Uttar Pradesh, 14 in Bihar, and four in Jharkhand had died of heat-related morbidity. And of the 17 in Uttar Pradesh, 13 deaths were reported from Mirzapur alone. This is a toll rendered all the more terrible by two other issues.
First, after the first phase of the polls, the Election Commission of India (ECI) recorded lower voter turnout than expected (from previous Lok Sabha polls) and blamed the heat. Srinivasan Ramani, my colleague at The Hindu, subsequently found “little correlation” between the maximum temperature recorded and turnouts in various constituencies, and in fact an anti-correlation in some places. By this time the ECI had said it would institute a raft of measures to incentivise voters to turn up. These were certainly welcome irrespective of there being a relationship between turnout and heat. However, did it put in place similar ‘special’ measures for electoral officials?
On March 16, the ECI forwarded an advisory that included guidelines by the National Disaster Management Authority to manage heat to the chief electoral officers of all states and Union territories. These guidelines had the following recommendations, among others: “avoid going out in the sun, especially between 12.00 noon and 3.00 pm”; “wear lightweight, light-coloured, loose, and porous cotton clothes. Use protective goggles, umbrella/hat, shoes or chappals while going out in sun”; and “avoid strenuous activities when Balliathe outside temperature is high”.
A question automatically arises: if poll officers are expected to avoid such activities, the polling process should have been set up such that those incidents requiring such activities wouldn’t arise in the first place. So were they? Because it’s just poka-yoke: if the process itself didn’t change, expecting poll officers to “avoid going out in the sun … between 12 pm and 3 pm” would have been almost laughable.
The second issue is worse. Heat wave deaths in India are often the product of little to no advance planning, even if the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has forecast excessive heat on certain dates. But to make matters worse, there was a deadly heat wave last year in the same region where many of these deaths have been reported now.
Recall that in the first half of June 2023, more than 30 people died of heat-related illnesses in Ballia village in Uttar Pradesh. After the chief medical superintendent of the local district hospital told mediapersons the people had indeed died of excessive heat, the state health department — led by deputy chief minister Brajesh Pathak — transferred him away, and his successors later denied heat had had anything to do with the deaths.
So even if the IMD hadn’t predicted a heat wave in this region for around May 30-31, the local and national governments and the ECI should have made preparations for heat exposure leading at least to morbidity. Did they? To the extent that people wouldn’t have had to be hospitalised or have died if they’d made effective preparations, they didn’t. Actively papering over the effects of extreme weather (and of adverse exposure) has to be the most self-destructive thing we’re capable of in the climate change era.
Featured image: Representative image of a tree whose leaves appear to have wilted in the heat. Credit: Zoltan Tasi/Unsplash.
I’ve been a journalist for 12 years. For the first few years these anniversaries helped to remember that I was able to survive in the industry but now, after 12, I’m well and truly part of the industry itself — the thing that others survive — and the observances don’t mean anything as such. This said, my professional clock runs from June 1 from May 31 and the day is when I break up the last 365 days into a neat little block of memories and put it away, with some notes about whether anything was worth remembering.
Last year of course, I joined The Hindu as deputy science editor and began a new chapter in many ways (see here and here). One that I’d like to take note of here is The Hindu’s paywall. As you may know, thehindu.com has soft and hard paywalls. You hit the former when you read 10 free articles; the eleventh will have to be paid for. The latter is the paywall in front of articles that are otherwise not freely available to read. Most articles behind a soft paywall are straight news reports and, of course, The Hindu’s prized editorials. Analyses, commentaries, features, and most explainers are behind the hard paywall.
We all know why these barriers exist: journalism needs to be paid for, and better journalism all the more so. But one straightforward downside is that the contents of articles behind paywalls are rarely, if ever, represented in the public conversations and debates of the day — and I haven’t been able to make my peace with this fact. Yet.
Eight years at The Wire spoilt me for it but the upside was clear: everything from analysis to commentary would be part of the marketplace of ideas. Siddharth Varadarajan was clear The Wire would always be free to read. Of course, The Wire and The Hindu are different beasts and pursuing very different survival strategies, and on the path The Hindu is treading, quite simply forcing people to pay to read has become necessary.
This shift has also forced me to contend with my own writing — mostly explainers, op-eds, and reports of physics research — being confined to a smaller, but paying, subset of The Hindu’s readers rather than all of them as well as to the public at large, which in turn often makes me feel… distance, not readily visible, if at all.
Earlier this month, a study by a team at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in Varanasi concluded that fully 1% of Covaxin recipients may suffer severe adverse events. One percent is a large number because the multiplier (x in 1/100 * x) is very large — several million people. The study first hit the headlines for claiming it had the support of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and reporting that both Bharat Biotech and the ICMR are yet to publish long-term safety data for Covaxin. The latter is probably moot now, with the COVID-19 pandemic well behind us, but it’s the principle that matters. Let it go this time and who knows what else we’ll be prepared to let go.
But more importantly, as The Hindu reported on May 25, the BHU study is too flawed to claim Covaxin is harmful, or claim anything for that matter. Here’s why (excerpt):
Though the researchers acknowledge all the limitations of the study, which is published in the journal Drug Safety, many of the limitations are so critical that they defeat the very purpose of the study. “Ideally, this paper should have been rejected at the peer-review stage. Simply mentioning the limitations, some of them critical to arrive at any useful conclusion, defeats the whole purpose of undertaking the study,” Dr. Vipin M. Vashishtha, director and pediatrician, Mangla Hospital and Research Center, Bijnor, says in an email to The Hindu. Dr. Gautam Menon, Dean (Research) & Professor, Departments of Physics and Biology, Ashoka University shares the same view. Given the limitations of the study one can “certainly say that the study can’t be used to draw the conclusions it does,” Dr. Menon says in an email.
Just because you’ve admitted your study has limitations doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to interpret your research data with integrity. In fact, the journal needs to speak up here: why did Drug Safety publish the study manuscript? Too often when news of a controversial or bad study is published, the journal that published it stays out of the limelight. While the proximal cause is likely that journalists don’t think to ask journal editors and/or publishers tough questions about their publishing process, there is also a cultural problem here: when shit hits the fan, only the study’s authors are pulled up, but when things are rosy, the journals are out to take credit for the quality of the papers they publish. In either case, we must ask what they actually bring to the table other than capitalising on other scientists’ tendency to judge papers based on the journals they’re published in instead of their contents.
Of course, it’s also possible to argue that unlike, say, journalistic material, research papers aren’t required to be in the public interest at the time of publication. Yet the BHU paper threatens to undermine public confidence in observational studies, and that can’t be in anyone’s interest. Even at the outset, experts and many health journalists knew observational studies don’t carry the same weight as randomised controlled trials as well as that such studies still serve a legitimate purpose, just not the one to which its conclusions were pressed in the BHU study.
After the paper’s contents hit the headlines, the ICMR shot off a latter to the BHU research team saying it hasn’t “provided any financial or technical support” to the study and that the study is “poorly designed”. Curiously, the BHU team’s repartee to the ICMR’s makes repeated reference to Vivek Agnihotri’s film The Vaccine War. In the same point in which two of these references appear (no. 2), the team writes: “While a study with a control group would certainly be of higher quality, this immediately points to the fact that it is researchers from ICMR who have access to the data with the control group, i.e. the original phase-3 trials of Covaxin – as well publicized in ‘The Vaccine War’ movie. ICMR thus owes it to the people of India, that it publishes the long-term follow-up of phase-3 trials.”
I’m not clear why the team saw fit to appeal to statements made in this of all films. As I’ve written earlier, The Vaccine War — which I haven’t watched but which directly references journalistic work by The Wire during and of the pandemic — is most likely a mix of truths and fictionalisation (and not in the clever, good-faith ways in which screenwriters adopt textual biographies for the big screen), with the fiction designed to serve the BJP’s nationalist political narratives. So when the letter says in its point no. 5 that the ICMR should apologise to a female member of the BHU team for allegedly “spreading a falsehood” about her and offers The Vaccine War as a counterexample (“While ‘The Vaccine War’ movie is celebrating women scientists…”), I can’t but retch.
Together with another odd line in the latter — that the “ICMR owes it to the people of India” — the appeals read less like a debate between scientists on the merits and the demerits of the study and more like they’re trying to bait the ICMR into doing better. I’m not denying the ICMR started it, as a child might say, but saying that this shouldn’t have prevented the BHU team from keeping it dignified. For example, the BHU letter reads: “It is to be noted that interim results of the phase-3 trial, also cited by Dr. Priya Abraham in ‘The Vaccine War’ movie, had a mere 56 days of safety follow-up, much shorter than the one-year follow-up in the IMS-BHU study.” Surely the 56-day period finds mention in a more respectable and reliable medium than a film that confuses you about what’s real and what’s not?
In all, the BHU study seems to have been designed to draw attention to gaps in the safety data for Covaxin — but by adopting such a provocative route, all that took centerstage was its spat with the ICMR plus its own flaws.
Against the background of the H5N1 pandemic in birds and an epidemic among cattle in the US, the Government of Victoria, in Australia, published a statement on May 21 that the province had recorded the country’s first human H5N1 case. This doesn’t seem to be much cause (but also not negligible cause) for concern because, according to the statement as well as other experts, this strain of avian influenza hasn’t evolved to spread easily between people. The individual in question who had the infection — “a child”, according to Victoria’s statement — had a severe form of it but has since recovered fully as well.
But this story isn’t testament to Australia’s pathogen surveillance, at least not primarily; it’s testament to India’s ability to do it. In Vivek Agnihotri’s film The Vaccine War — purportedly about the efforts of Bharat Biotech, the ICMR, and the NIV to develop Covaxin during the COVID-19 pandemic — Raima Sen, who plays the science editor of a fictitious publication called The Daily Wire, says about developing the vaccine in a moment of amusing cringe on a TV news show that “India can’t do it”. Agnihotri didn’t make it difficult to see myself in Sen’s character: I was science editor of the very real publication The Wire when Covaxin was being developed. And I’m here to tell you that India, in point of fact, can: according to Victoria’s statement, the child became infected by a strain of the H5N1 virus in India and fell ill in March 2024.
And what is it that India can do? According to Victoria’s statement, spotting the infection required “Victoria’s enhanced surveillance system”. Further, “most strains don’t infect humans”; India was able to serve the child with one of the rare strains that could. “Transmission to humans” is also “very rare”, happening largely among people who “have contact with infected birds or animals, or their secretions, while in affected areas of the world”. Specifically: “Avian influenza is spread by close contact with an infected bird (dead or alive), e.g. handling infected birds, touching droppings or bedding, or killing/preparing infected poultry for cooking. You can’t catch avian influenza through eating fully cooked poultry or eggs, even in areas with an outbreak of avian influenza.”
So let’s learn our lesson: If we give India’s widespread dysregulation of poultry and cattle health, underinvestment in pathogen surveillance, and its national government’s unique blend of optimism and wilful ignorance a chance, the country will give someone somewhere a rare strain of an avian influenza virus that can infect humans. Repeat after me: India can do it!
Sharda Ugra has a sharp piece out in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2024 laying bare the ways in which the BJP hijacked the 2023 ODI Cricket World Cup via the BCCI, whose secretary Jay Shah is the son of Union home minister Amit Shah. The Reddit thread on the article has a link to a full archival copy.
It was clear to everyone the World Cup had been stage-managed by the BCCI; as I wrote when it concluded, just a few of the symptoms of the BJP’s interference were that Sunday games had been reserved for India, many tickets were vouchsafed for government officials or to bodies with ties to such officials, police personnel were present in the stands for many games, snatching away placards with shows of support for Pakistan; many spectators (but not all, and not everywhere) often chanted “jai shri Ram” — the BJP’s “call to arms”, as Ugra put it — in unison; Air Force jets flew past the Modi stadium named for Prime Minister Narendra (even though he’s alive) on the day of the finals, which only the government has the power to arrange; the man himself elected to bunk the game once it started to become clear India would lose it; and throughout the tournament the game’s broadcaster was fixated on showing visuals of celebrities, including BJP leaders and supporters, in the stands when they weren’t of the game itself.
Together with releasing the tournament schedule late, all-but-accidental delays in clearing visas for Pakistani and Pakistan-affiliated cricketers and journalists, suppressing the sale of merchandise affiliated with the Pakistani and Bangladeshi cricket teams, and DJs playing songs like “Ram Siya Ram” and “India jeetega” during India games, the BJP’s hyper-nationalist hand was in plain sight, especially to those who knew what to look for. Many of these feats had been foreshadowed during the 2022 Asia Cup, when Star Sports and Pepsi had joined in on the fun. To these incursions, Ugra’s essay has added something more in-your-face, and obnoxious for it:
… three independent sources — one each from the team, the ICC and the BCCI — have confirmed the existence of an all-orange uniform, which was presented to the team as an alternative two days before the [India-Pakistan] game. They had already been given a new training kit — an orange shirt and dark trousers — a week before their first fixture. When the all-orange kit arrived in the dressing-room, the players looked nonplussed, according to an insider. Here, the story split into two versions. One, out first, said the uniform was rejected because it “looks like Holland”. The other had the Indian cricketers saying to each other: “This is not on… We won’t do it… It is disrespectful to some of the members of the team” [referring to Mohammed Shami and Mohammed Siraj].
That this was an ICC tournament had become moot by this point, with the BJP-BCCI combine subsuming or just disregarding too many of its rules and tenets for the international body to matter. The BJP sought to have a literal saffron-versus-green contest on the ground, replete with provocative music and police presence — not to mention also packing the stands with people who booed Pakistani players as they walked in/out — and the BCCI obliged. The only reason this doesn’t seem to have succeeded was either an unfavourable comparison to the Dutch circket jersey — which I’m sure the BJP and/or the BCCI would have noticed beforehand — or that the players didn’t want to put it on. According to Ugra, an orange or a blue-orange jersey was on for a UNICEF event called “One Day for Children”, and the corresponding match was to be an India-Sri Lanka fixture three weeks after the match against Pakistan; there, India wore its traditional blue, presumably the BCCI had stopped insisting on the saffron option.
But what rankles more isn’t that the ICC folded so easily (Ugra: “The ICC demonstrated neither the nous nor the spine to resist the takeover”) but that the BCCI, and the BJP behind it, laboured all the time as if there would be no resistance to their actions. Because, clearly, the two things that seemingly didn’t go the BJP’s way were the result of two minimal displays of effective resistance: the first when “Young Indians among the ICC volunteers eventually had [“Ram Siya Ram”] removed from the playlist for the rest of the tournament”, and the second when the Indian men’s team refused to don the saffron tees and trousers.
The ICC is a faraway body, as much undermined by the Indian cricketing body’s considerable wealth and political influence in the country as by the BJP’s now well-known tactic to take advantage of every little administrative loophole, leeway or liberty to get what it wants. The latter alone is reason enough to not expect more from the ICC, at least not without being exposed a few times to the demands of the adversarial posture engaging with the BCCI merits. Instead, the BCCI’s capitulation — completed in 2019, when Jay Shah became its secretary — and its organisational strategies in the Asia Cup and the World Cup cement the conclusion that it cares nothing for rituals and traditions in service of the spirit of the game. There is no public-spiritedness, only party-spiritedness.
And just as the BJP wins its third term to form the national goverbment, the T20 World Cup will begin.
Featured image: A surfeit of India flags among spectators of the India versus South Africa match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, 2015. Credit: visitmelbourne, CC BY 2.0.
On May 3, Bloomberg published a profile of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s 1t.org project to plant or conserve one trillion trees around the world in order to sequester 200 gigatonnes of carbon every year. The idea reportedly came to Benioff from Thomas Crowther’s infamous September 2015 paper in Nature that claimed restoring trees was the world’s best way to ‘solve’ climate change.
Following pointed criticism of the paper’s attitude and conclusions, they were revised to a significant extent in October 2019 to tamper predictions about the carbon sequestration potential of the world’s trees and to withdraw its assertion that no other solution could work better than planting and/or restoring trees.
According to Bloomberg’s profile, Benioff’s 1t.org initiative seems to be faltering as well, with unreliable accounting of the pledges companies submitted to 1t.org and, unsurprisingly, many of these companies engaging in shady carbon-credit transactions. This is also why Jane Goodall’s comment in the article is disagreeable: it isn’t better for these companies to do something vis-à-vis trees than nothing at all because the companies are only furthering an illusion of climate action — claiming to do something while doing nothing at all — and perpetuating the currency of counterproductive ideas like carbon-trading.
A smattering of Benioff’s comments to Bloomberg are presented throughout the profile, as a result of which he might come across like a sage figure — but take them together, in one go, and he sounds actually like a child.
“I think that there’s a lot of people who are attacking nature and hate nature. I’m somebody who loves nature and supports nature.”
This comment follows one by “the climate and energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists”, Rachel Cleetus, that trees “should not be seen as a substitute for the core task at hand here, which is getting off fossil fuels.” But in Bloomberg’s telling, Cleetus is a [checks notes] ‘nature hater’. Similarly, the following thoughtful comment is Benioff’s view of other scientists who criticised the Crowther et al. paper:
“I view it as nonsense.”
Moving on…
“I was in third grade. I learned about photosynthesis and I got it right away.”
This amazing quote appears as the last line of a paragraph; the rest of it goes thus: “Slashing fossil fuel consumption is critical to slowing warming, but scientists say we also need to pull carbon that’s already in the air back out of it. Trees are really good at that, drawing in CO2 and then releasing oxygen.” Then Benioff’s third-grade quote appears. It’s just comedy.
His other statements make for an important reminder of the oft-understated purpose of scientific communication. Aside from being published by a ‘prestige’ journal — Nature — the Crowther et al. paper presented an easy and straightforward solution to reducing the concentration of atmospheric carbon: to fix lots and lots of trees. Even without knowing the specific details of the study’s merits, any environmental scientist in South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America, i.e. the “Global South”, would have said this is a terrible idea.
“I said, ‘What? One trillion trees will sequester more than 200 gigatons of carbon? We have to get on this right now. Who’s working on this?’”
“Everybody agreed on tree diplomacy. I was in shock.”
“The greatest, most scalable technology we have today to sequester carbon is the tree.”
The countries in these regions have become sites of aggressive afforestation that provide carbon credits for the “Global North” to encash as licenses to keep emitting carbon. But the flip sides of these exercises are: (i) only some areas are naturally amenable to hosting trees, and it’s not feasible to plant them willy-nilly through ecosystems that don’t naturally support them; (ii) unless those in charge plant native species, afforestation will only precipitate local ecosystem decline, which will further lower the sequestration potential; (iii) unafforested land runs the risk of being perceived as ‘waste land’, sidelining the ecosystem services provided by wetlands, deserts, grasslands, etc.; and (iv) many of these countries need to be able to emit more carbon before being expected to reach net-zero, in order to pull their populations out of poverty and become economically developed — the same right the “Global North” countries had in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Scientists have known all this from well before the Crowther et al. paper turned up. Yet Benioff leapt for it the moment it appeared, and was keen on seeing it to its not-so-logical end. It’s impossible to miss the fact that his being worth $10 billion didn’t encourage him to use all that wealth and his clout to tackle the more complex actions in the soup of all actions that make up humankind’s response to climate change. Instead, he used his wealth to go for an easy way out, while dismissing informed criticism of it as “nonsense”
In fact, a similar sort of ‘ease-seeking’ is visible in the Crowther et al. paper as well, as brought out in a comment published by Veldman et al. In response to this, Crowther et al. wrote in October 2019 that their first paper simply presented value-neutral knowledge and that it shouldn’t be blamed for how it’s been construed:
Veldman et al. (4) criticize our results in dryland biomes, stating that many of these areas simply should not be considered suitable for tree restoration. Generally, we must highlight that our analysis does not ever address whether any actions “should” or “should not” take place. Our analysis simply estimated the biophysical limits of global forest growth by highlighting where trees “can” exist.
In fact, the October 2019 correction to Crowther et al., in which the authors walked back on the “trees are the best way” claim, was particularly important because it has come to mirror the challenges Benioff has found himself facing through 1t.org: it isn’t just that there are other ways to improve climate mitigation and adaptation, it’s that those ways are required, and giving up on them for any reason could never be short of a moral hazard, if not an existential one.
On May 7, I received a press release touting a product called “coherent water” made by a company named Analemma Water India. According to the document, “coherent water” is based on more than “15 years of rigorous research and development” and confers “a myriad … health benefits”.This “rigorous research” is flawed research. There’s definitely such a thing as “coherent water” and it’s indistinguishable from regular water at all scales. The “coherent water” scam has reared its serpentine head before with the names “hexagonal water”, “structured water”, “polywater”, “exclusion zone water”, and water with one additional hydrogen and oxygen atom each, i.e. “H3O2”. Analemma’s “Mother Water”, which is its brand name for “coherent water”, itself is a rebranding of a product called “Somarka” that hit the Indian market in 2021.
The scam here is that the constituent molecules of “coherent water” get together to form hexagonal structures that persist indefinitely. And these structures distinguish “coherent water”, giving it wonderful abilities like possessing a greater energy content than regular water, boosting one’s “life force”, and — this one I love — being able to “encourage” other water molecules around it to form similar hexagonal assemblages.
I hope people won’t fall for this hoax but I know some will. But thanks to the lowest price of what Analemma is offering — a vial of “Mother Water” that it claims is worth $180 (Rs 15,000) — it’ll be some rich buggers and I think that’s okay. Fools, their wealth, and all that. Then again, it’s somewhat saddening that while (some) people are fighting to keep junk foods and bad medicines out of the market, we have “coherent water” companies and their PR outfits bravely broadcasting their press releases to news publications (and at least one publishing it) at around the same time.
If you’re curious about the issue with “coherent water”: At room temperature and pressure, the hydrogen atoms of water keep forming and breaking weak bonds with other hydrogen atoms. These bonds last for a very small duration and give water its high boiling point and ice crystals their characteristic hexagonal structure.
Sometimes water molecules organise themselves using these bonds into a hexagonal structure as well. But these formations are very short-lived because the hydrogen bonds last only around 200 quadrillionths of a second at a time, if not lower. According to the hoax, however, in “coherent water”, the hydrogen bonds continue to hold such that its water molecules persist in long-lived hexagonal clusters. But this conclusion is not supported by research — nor is the claim that, “When swirled in normal water, the [magic water] encourages chaotic and irregular H2O molecules to rearrange into the same liquid crystalline structure as the [magic water]. What’s more, the coherent structure is retained over time – this stability is unique to Analemma.”
I don’t think this ability is unique to the “Mother Water”. In 1963, a scientist named Felix Hoenikker invented a variant of ice that, when it came in contact with water cooler than 45.8º C, quickly converted it to ice-nine as well. Sadly Hoenikker had to abandon the project after he realised the continued use of ice-nine would simply destroy all life on Earth.
Anyway, water that’s neither acidic nor basic also has a few rare hydronium (H3O+) and hydroxide (OH-) ions floating around as well. The additional hydrogen ion — basically a proton — from the hydronium ion is engaged in a game of musical chairs with the protons in the same volume of water, each one jumping to a molecule, dislodging a proton there, which jumps to another molecule, and so on. This is happening so rapidly that the hydrogen atoms in every water molecule are practically being changed several thousand times every minute.
In this milieu, it’s impossible for a fixed group of water molecules to be hanging around. In addition, the ultra-short lifetime of the hydrogen bonds are what makes water a liquid: a thing that flows, fills containers, squeezes between gaps, collects into droplets, etc. Take this ability and the fast-switching hydrogen bonds away, as “coherent water” claims to do by imposing a fixed structure, and it’s no longer water — any kind of water.
Analemma has links to some reports on its website; if you’re up to it, I suggest going through them with a simple checklist of the signs of bad research side by side. You should be able to spot most of the gunk.
While space is hard, there are also different kinds of hardness. For example, on April 15, ISRO issued a press release saying it had successfully tested nozzles made of a carbon-carbon composite that would replace those made of Columbium alloy in the PSLV rocket’s fourth stage and thus increase the rocket’s payload capacity by 15 kg. Just 15 kg!
The successful testing of the C-C nozzle divergent marked a major milestone for ISRO. On March 19, 2024, a 60-second hot test was conducted at the High-Altitude Test (HAT) facility in ISRO Propulsion Complex (IPRC), Mahendragiri, confirming the system’s performance and hardware integrity. Subsequent tests, including a 200-second hot test on April 2, 2024, further validated the nozzle’s capabilities, with temperatures reaching 1216K, matching predictions.
Granted, the PSLV’s cost of launching a single kilogram to low-earth orbit is more than 8 lakh rupees (a very conservative estimate, I reckon) – meaning an additional 15 kg means at least an additional Rs 1.2 crore per launch. But finances alone are not a useful way to evaluate this addition: more payload mass could mean, say, one additional instrument onboard an indigenous spacecraft instead of waiting for a larger rocket to become available or postponing that instrument’s launch to a future mission.
But equally fascinating, and pride- and notice-worthy, to me is the fact that ISRO’s scientists and engineers were able to fine-tune the PSLV to this extent. This isn’t to say I’m surprised they were able to do it at all; on the contrary, it means the feat is as much about the benefits accruing to the rocket, and the Indian space programme by extension, as about R&D advances on the materials science front. It speaks to the oft-underestimated importance of the foundations on which a space programme is built.
Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre … has leveraged advanced materials like Carbon-Carbon (C-C) Composites to create a nozzle divergent that offers exceptional properties. By utilizing processes such as carbonization of green composites, Chemical Vapor Infiltration, and High-Temperature Treatment, it has produced a nozzle with low density, high specific strength, and excellent stiffness, capable of retaining mechanical properties even at elevated temperatures.
A key feature of the C-C nozzle is its special anti-oxidation coating of Silicon Carbide, which extends its operational limits in oxidizing environments. This innovation not only reduces thermally induced stresses but also enhances corrosion resistance, allowing for extended operational temperature limits in hostile environments.
The advances here draw from insights into metallurgy, crystallography, ceramic engineering, composite materials, numerical methods, etc., which in turn stand on the shoulders of people trained well enough in these areas, the educational institutions (and their teachers) that did so, and the schooling system and socio-economic support structures that brought them there. A country needs a lot to go right for achievements like squeezing an extra 15 kg into the payload capacity of an already highly fine-tuned machine to be possible. It’s a bummer that such advances are currently largely vertically restricted, except in the case of the Indian space programme, rather than diffusing freely across sectors.
Other enterprises ought to have these particular advantages ISRO enjoys. Even should one or two rockets fail, a test not work out or a spacecraft go kaput sooner than designed, the PSLV’s new carbon-carbon-composite nozzles stand for the idea that we have everything we need to keep trying, including the opportunity to do better next time. They represent the idea of how advances in one field of research can lead to advances in another, such that each field is no longer held back by the limitations of its starting conditions.
Earlier this month, a study by a team at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in Varanasi concluded that fully 1% of Covaxin recipients may suffer severe adverse events. One percent is a large number because the multiplier (x in 1/100 * x) is very large — several million people. The study first hit the headlines for claiming it had the support of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and reporting that both Bharat Biotech and the ICMR are yet to publish long-term safety data for Covaxin. The latter is probably moot now, with the COVID-19 pandemic well behind us, but it’s the principle that matters. Let it go this time and who knows what else we’ll be prepared to let go.
But more importantly, as The Hindu reported on May 25, the BHU study is too flawed to claim Covaxin is harmful, or claim anything for that matter. Here’s why (excerpt):
Though the researchers acknowledge all the limitations of the study, which is published in the journal Drug Safety, many of the limitations are so critical that they defeat the very purpose of the study. “Ideally, this paper should have been rejected at the peer-review stage. Simply mentioning the limitations, some of them critical to arrive at any useful conclusion, defeats the whole purpose of undertaking the study,” Dr. Vipin M. Vashishtha, director and pediatrician, Mangla Hospital and Research Center, Bijnor, says in an email to The Hindu. Dr. Gautam Menon, Dean (Research) & Professor, Departments of Physics and Biology, Ashoka University shares the same view. Given the limitations of the study one can “certainly say that the study can’t be used to draw the conclusions it does,” Dr. Menon says in an email.
Just because you’ve admitted your study has limitations doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to interpret your research data with integrity. In fact, the journal needs to speak up here: why did Drug Safety publish the study manuscript? Too often when news of a controversial or bad study is published, the journal that published it stays out of the limelight. While the proximal cause is likely that journalists don’t think to ask journal editors and/or publishers tough questions about their publishing process, there is also a cultural problem here: when shit hits the fan, only the study’s authors are pulled up, but when things are rosy, the journals are out to take credit for the quality of the papers they publish. In either case, we must ask what they actually bring to the table other than capitalising on other scientists’ tendency to judge papers based on the journals they’re published in instead of their contents.
Of course, it's also possible to argue that unlike, say, journalistic material, research papers aren't required to be in the public interest at the time of publication. Yet the BHU paper threatens to undermine public confidence in observational studies, and that can't be in anyone's interest. Even at the outset, experts and many health journalists knew observational studies don’t carry the same weight as randomised controlled trials as well as that such studies still serve a legitimate purpose, just not the one to which its conclusions were pressed in the BHU study.
After the paper’s contents hit the headlines, the ICMR shot off a latter to the BHU research team saying it hasn’t "provided any financial or technical support" to the study and that the study is “poorly designed". Curiously, the BHU team’s repartee to the ICMR's makes repeated reference to Vivek Agnihotri's film The Vaccine War. In the same point in which two of these references appear (no. 2), the team writes: "While a study with a control group would certainly be of higher quality, this immediately points to the fact that it is researchers from ICMR who have access to the data with the control group, i.e. the original phase-3 trials of Covaxin – as well publicized in 'The Vaccine War' movie. ICMR thus owes it to the people of India, that it publishes the long-term follow-up of phase-3 trials."
I'm not clear why the team saw fit to appeal to statements made in this of all films. As I've written earlier, The Vaccine War — which I haven't watched but which directly references journalistic work by The Wire during and of the pandemic — is most likely a mix of truths and fictionalisation (and not in the clever, good-faith ways in which screenwriters adopt textual biographies for the big screen), with the fiction designed to serve the BJP's nationalist political narratives. So when the letter says in its point no. 5 that the ICMR should apologise to a female member of the BHU team for allegedly “spreading a falsehood” about her and offers The Vaccine War as a counterexample ("While 'The Vaccine War' movie is celebrating women scientists…”), I can’t but retch.
Together with another odd line in the latter — that the "ICMR owes it to the people of India" — the appeals read less like a debate between scientists on the merits and the demerits of the study and more like they’re trying to bait the ICMR into doing better. I'm not denying the ICMR started it, as a child might say, but saying that this shouldn't have prevented the BHU team from keeping it dignified. For example, the BHU letter reads: "It is to be noted that interim results of the phase-3 trial, also cited by Dr. Priya Abraham in 'The Vaccine War' movie, had a mere 56 days of safety follow-up, much shorter than the one-year follow-up in the IMS-BHU study.” Surely the 56-day period finds mention in a more respectable and reliable medium than a film that confuses you about what’s real and what’s not?
In all, the BHU study seems to have been designed to draw attention to gaps in the safety data for Covaxin — but by adopting such a provocative route, all that took centerstage was its spat with the ICMR plus its own flaws.
Against the background of the H5N1 pandemic in birds and an epidemic among cattle in the US, the Government of Victoria, in Australia, published a statement on May 21 that the province had recorded the country’s first human H5N1 case. This doesn’t seem to be much cause (but also not negligible cause) for concern because, according to the statement as well as other experts, this strain of avian influenza hasn’t evolved to spread easily between people. The individual in question who had the infection — “a child”, according to Victoria’s statement — had a severe form of it but has since recovered fully as well.
But this story isn’t testament to Australia’s pathogen surveillance, at least not primarily; it’s testament to India’s ability to do it. In Vivek Agnihotri’s film The Vaccine War — purportedly about the efforts of Bharat Biotech, the ICMR, and the NIV to develop Covaxin during the COVID-19 pandemic — Raima Sen, who plays the science editor of a fictitious publication called The Daily Wire, says about developing the vaccine in a moment of amusing cringe on a TV news show that “India can’t do it”. Agnihotri didn’t make it difficult to see myself in Sen’s character: I was science editor of the very real publication The Wire when Covaxin was being developed. And I’m here to tell you that India, in point of fact, can: according to Victoria’s statement, the child became infected by a strain of the H5N1 virus in India and fell ill in March 2024.
And what is it that India can do? According to Victoria’s statement, spotting the infection required “Victoria’s enhanced surveillance system”. Further, “most strains don’t infect humans”; India was able to serve the child with one of the rare strains that could. “Transmission to humans” is also “very rare”, happening largely among people who “have contact with infected birds or animals, or their secretions, while in affected areas of the world”. Specifically: “Avian influenza is spread by close contact with an infected bird (dead or alive), e.g. handling infected birds, touching droppings or bedding, or killing/preparing infected poultry for cooking. You can’t catch avian influenza through eating fully cooked poultry or eggs, even in areas with an outbreak of avian influenza.”
So let’s learn our lesson: If we give India’s widespread dysregulation of poultry and cattle health, underinvestment in pathogen surveillance, and its national government’s unique blend of optimism and wilful ignorance a chance, the country will give someone somewhere a rare strain of an avian influenza virus that can infect humans. Repeat after me: India can do it!
Sharda Ugra has a sharp piece out in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2024 laying bare the ways in which the BJP hijacked the 2023 ODI Cricket World Cup via the BCCI, whose secretary Jay Shah is the son of Union home minister Amit Shah. The Reddit thread on the article has a link to a full archival copy.
It was clear to everyone the World Cup had been stage-managed by the BCCI; as I wrote when it concluded, just a few of the symptoms of the BJP’s interference were that Sunday games had been reserved for India, many tickets were vouchsafed for government officials or to bodies with ties to such officials, police personnel were present in the stands for many games, snatching away placards with shows of support for Pakistan; many spectators (but not all, and not everywhere) often chanted “jai shri Ram” — the BJP’s “call to arms”, as Ugra put it — in unison; Air Force jets flew past the Modi stadium named for Prime Minister Narendra (even though he’s alive) on the day of the finals, which only the government has the power to arrange; the man himself elected to bunk the game once it started to become clear India would lose it; and throughout the tournament the game’s broadcaster was fixated on showing visuals of celebrities, including BJP leaders and supporters, in the stands when they weren’t of the game itself.
Together with releasing the tournament schedule late, all-but-accidental delays in clearing visas for Pakistani and Pakistan-affiliated cricketers and journalists, suppressing the sale of merchandise affiliated with the Pakistani and Bangladeshi cricket teams, and DJs playing songs like “Ram Siya Ram” and “India jeetega” during India games, the BJP’s hyper-nationalist hand was in plain sight, especially to those who knew what to look for. Many of these feats had been foreshadowed during the 2022 Asia Cup, when Star Sports and Pepsi had joined in on the fun. To these incursions, Ugra’s essay has added something more in-your-face, and obnoxious for it:
… three independent sources — one each from the team, the ICC and the BCCI — have confirmed the existence of an all-orange uniform, which was presented to the team as an alternative two days before the [India-Pakistan] game. They had already been given a new training kit — an orange shirt and dark trousers — a week before their first fixture. When the all-orange kit arrived in the dressing-room, the players looked nonplussed, according to an insider. Here, the story split into two versions. One, out first, said the uniform was rejected because it “looks like Holland”. The other had the Indian cricketers saying to each other: “This is not on… We won’t do it… It is disrespectful to some of the members of the team” [referring to Mohammed Shami and Mohammed Siraj].
That this was an ICC tournament had become moot by this point, with the BJP-BCCI combine subsuming or just disregarding too many of its rules and tenets for the international body to matter. The BJP sought to have a literal saffron-versus-green contest on the ground, replete with provocative music and police presence — not to mention also packing the stands with people who booed Pakistani players as they walked in/out — and the BCCI obliged. The only reason this doesn’t seem to have succeeded was either an unfavourable comparison to the Dutch circket jersey — which I’m sure the BJP and/or the BCCI would have noticed beforehand — or that the players didn’t want to put it on. According to Ugra, an orange or a blue-orange jersey was on for a UNICEF event called “One Day for Children”, and the corresponding match was to be an India-Sri Lanka fixture three weeks after the match against Pakistan; there, India wore its traditional blue, presumably the BCCI had stopped insisting on the saffron option.
But what rankles more isn’t that the ICC folded so easily (Ugra: “The ICC demonstrated neither the nous nor the spine to resist the takeover”) but that the BCCI, and the BJP behind it, laboured all the time as if there would be no resistance to their actions. Because, clearly, the two things that seemingly didn’t go the BJP’s way were the result of two minimal displays of effective resistance: the first when “Young Indians among the ICC volunteers eventually had [“Ram Siya Ram”] removed from the playlist for the rest of the tournament”, and the second when the Indian men’s team refused to don the saffron tees and trousers.
The ICC is a faraway body, as much undermined by the Indian cricketing body’s considerable wealth and political influence in the country as by the BJP’s now well-known tactic to take advantage of every little administrative loophole, leeway or liberty to get what it wants. The latter alone is reason enough to not expect more from the ICC, at least not without being exposed a few times to the demands of the adversarial posture engaging with the BCCI merits. Instead, the BCCI’s capitulation — completed in 2019, when Jay Shah became its secretary — and its organisational strategies in the Asia Cup and the World Cup cement the conclusion that it cares nothing for rituals and traditions in service of the spirit of the game. There is no public-spiritedness, only party-spiritedness.
And just as the BJP wins its third term to form the national government, the T20 World Cup will begin.
On May 3, Bloomberg published a profile of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's 1t.org project to plant or conserve one trillion trees around the world in order to sequester 200 gigatonnes of carbon every year. The idea reportedly came to Benioff from Thomas Crowther's infamous September 2015 paper in Nature that claimed restoring trees was the world's best way to 'solve' climate change.
Following pointed criticism of the paper's attitude and conclusions, they were revised to a significant extent in October 2019 to tamper predictions about the carbon sequestration potential of the world's trees and to withdraw its assertion that no other solution could work better than planting and/or restoring trees.
According to Bloomberg's profile, Benioff's 1t.org initiative seems to be faltering as well, with unreliable accounting of the pledges companies submitted to 1t.org and, unsurprisingly, many of these companies engaging in shady carbon-credit transactions. This is also why Jane Goodall's comment in the article is disagreeable: it isn't better for these companies to do something vis-à-vis trees than nothing at all because the companies are only furthering an illusion of climate action — claiming to do something while doing nothing at all — and perpetuating the currency of counterproductive ideas like carbon-trading.
A smattering of Benioff's comments to Bloomberg are presented throughout the profile, as a result of which he might come across like a sage figure — but take them together, in one go, and he sounds like a child.
“I think that there’s a lot of people who are attacking nature and hate nature. I’m somebody who loves nature and supports nature.”
This comment follows one by "the climate and energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists", Rachel Cleetus, that trees “should not be seen as a substitute for the core task at hand here, which is getting off fossil fuels.” But in Bloomberg's telling, Cleetus is a [checks notes] 'nature hater'. Similarly, the following thoughtful comment is Benioff's view of other scientists who criticised the Crowther et al. paper:
“I view it as nonsense.”
Moving on…
“I was in third grade. I learned about photosynthesis and I got it right away.”
This amazing quote appears as the last line of a paragraph; the rest of it goes thus: "Slashing fossil fuel consumption is critical to slowing warming, but scientists say we also need to pull carbon that's already in the air back out of it. Trees are really good at that, drawing in CO2 and then releasing oxygen." Then Benioff's third-grade quote appears. It's just comedy.
His other statements make for an important reminder of the oft-understated purpose of scientific communication. Aside from being published by a 'prestige' journal — Nature — the Crowther et al. paper presented an easy and straightforward solution to reducing the concentration of atmospheric carbon: to fix lots and lots of trees. Even without knowing the specific details of the study's merits, any environmental scientist in South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America, i.e. the "Global South", would have said this is a terrible idea.
“I said, ‘What? One trillion trees will sequester more than 200 gigatons of carbon? We have to get on this right now. Who’s working on this?’”
“Everybody agreed on tree diplomacy. I was in shock.”
“The greatest, most scalable technology we have today to sequester carbon is the tree.”
The countries in these regions have become sites of aggressive afforestation that provide carbon credits for the "Global North" to encash as licenses to keep emitting carbon. But the flip sides of these exercises are: (i) only some areas are naturally amenable to hosting trees, and it's not feasible to plant them willy-nilly through ecosystems that don't naturally support them; (ii) unless those in charge plant native species, afforestation will only precipitate local ecosystem decline, which will further lower the sequestration potential; (iii) unafforested land runs the risk of being perceived as 'waste land', sidelining the ecosystem services provided by wetlands, deserts, grasslands, etc.; and (iv) many of these countries need to be able to emit more carbon before being expected to reach net-zero, in order to pull their populations out of poverty and become economically developed — the same right the "Global North" countries had in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Scientists have known all this from well before the Crowther et al. paper turned up. Yet Benioff leapt for it the moment it appeared, and was keen on seeing it to its not-so-logical end. It's impossible to miss the fact that his being worth $10 billion didn't encourage him to use all that wealth and his clout to tackle the more complex actions in the soup of all actions that make up humankind's response to climate change. Instead, he used his wealth to go for an easy way out, while dismissing informed criticism of it as "nonsense".
In fact, a similar sort of 'ease-seeking' is visible in the Crowther et al. paper as well, as brought out in a comment published by Veldman et al. In response to this, Crowther et al. wrote in October 2019 that their first paper simply presented value-neutral knowledge and that it shouldn't be blamed for how it's been construed:
Veldman et al. (4) criticize our results in dryland biomes, stating that many of these areas simply should not be considered suitable for tree restoration. Generally, we must highlight that our analysis does not ever address whether any actions “should” or “should not” take place. Our analysis simply estimated the biophysical limits of global forest growth by highlighting where trees “can” exist.
In fact, the October 2019 correction to Crowther et al., in which the authors walked back on the "trees are the best way" claim, was particularly important because it has come to mirror the challenges Benioff has found himself facing through 1t.org: it isn't just that there are other ways to improve climate mitigation and adaptation, it's that those ways are required, and giving up on them for any reason could never be short of a moral hazard, if not an existential one.
On May 7, I received a press release touting a product called "coherent water" made by a company named Analemma Water India. According to the document, "coherent water" is based on more than "15 years of rigorous research and development" and confers "a myriad … health benefits".
This "rigorous research" is flawed research. There's definitely such a thing as "coherent water" and it's indistinguishable from regular water at all scales. The "coherent water" scam has reared its serpentine head before with the names "hexagonal water", "structured water", "polywater", "exclusion zone water", and water with one additional hydrogen and oxygen atom each, i.e. "H3O2". Analemma's "Mother Water", which is its brand name for "coherent water", itself is a rebranding of a product called "Somarka" that hit the Indian market in 2021.
The scam here is that the constituent molecules of "coherent water" get together to form hexagonal structures that persist indefinitely. And these structures distinguish "coherent water", giving it wonderful abilities like possessing a greater energy content than regular water, boosting one's "life force", and — this one I love — being able to "encourage" other water molecules around it to form similar hexagonal assemblages.
I hope people won't fall for this hoax but I know some will. But thanks to the lowest price of what Analemma is offering — a vial of "Mother Water" that it claims is worth $180 (Rs 15,000) — it'll be some rich buggers and I think that's okay. Fools, their wealth, and all that. Then again, it's somewhat saddening that while (some) journalists, policymakers, activists, and members of the judiciary are fighting to keep junk foods and bad medicines out of the market, we have also companies and their PR outfits bravely broadcasting their press releases to news publications (and at least one publishing it) at around the same time.
Anyway, if you're curious about the issue with "coherent water": At room temperature and pressure, the hydrogen atoms of water keep forming and breaking weak bonds with other hydrogen atoms. These bonds last for a very small duration and give water its high boiling point and ice crystals their characteristic hexagonal structure.
Sometimes water molecules organise themselves using these bonds into a hexagonal structure as well. But these formations are very short-lived because the hydrogen bonds last only around 200 quadrillionths of a second at a time, if not lower. According to the hoax, however, in "coherent water", the hydrogen bonds continue to hold such that its water molecules persist in long-lived hexagonal clusters. But this conclusion is not supported by research — nor is the claim that, "When swirled in normal water, the [magic water] encourages chaotic and irregular H2O molecules to rearrange into the same liquid crystalline structure as the [magic water]. What’s more, the coherent structure is retained over time – this stability is unique to Analemma."
I don't think this ability is unique to the "Mother Water". In 1963, a scientist named Felix Hoenikker invented a variant of ice that, when it came in contact with water cooler than 45.8º C, quickly converted it to ice-nine as well. Sadly Hoenikker had to abandon the project after he realised the continued use of ice-nine would simply destroy all life on Earth.
Anyway, water that's neither acidic nor basic also has a few rare hydronium (H3O+) and hydroxide (OH-) ions floating around as well. The additional hydrogen ion — basically a proton — from the hydronium ion is engaged in a game of musical chairs with the protons in the same volume of water, each one jumping to a molecule, dislodging a proton there, which jumps to another molecule, and so on. This is happening so rapidly that the hydrogen atoms in every water molecule are practically being changed several thousand times every minute.
In this milieu, it's impossible for a fixed group of water molecules to be hanging around. In addition, the ultra-short lifetime of the hydrogen bonds are what makes water a liquid: a thing that flows, fills containers, squeezes between gaps, collects into droplets, etc. Take this ability and the fast-switching hydrogen bonds away, as "coherent water" claims to do by imposing a fixed structure, and it's no longer water — any kind of water.
Analemma has links to some reports on its website; if you're up to it, I suggest going through them with a simple checklist of the signs of bad research side by side. You should be able to spot most of the gunk.
While space is hard, there are also different kinds of hardness. For example, on April 15, ISRO issued a press release saying it had successfully tested nozzles made of a carbon-carbon composite that would replace those made of Columbium alloy in the PSLV rocket's fourth stage and thus increase the rocket's payload capacity by 15 kg. Just 15 kg!
The successful testing of the C-C nozzle divergent marked a major milestone for ISRO. On March 19, 2024, a 60-second hot test was conducted at the High-Altitude Test (HAT) facility in ISRO Propulsion Complex (IPRC), Mahendragiri, confirming the system's performance and hardware integrity. Subsequent tests, including a 200-second hot test on April 2, 2024, further validated the nozzle's capabilities, with temperatures reaching 1216K, matching predictions.
Granted, the PSLV's cost of launching a single kilogram to low-earth orbit is more than 8 lakh rupees (a very conservative estimate, I reckon) – meaning an additional 15 kg means at least an additional Rs 1.2 crore per launch. But finances alone are not a useful way to evaluate this addition: more payload mass could mean, say, one additional instrument onboard an indigenous spacecraft instead of waiting for a larger rocket to become available or postponing that instrument's launch to a future mission.
But equally fascinating, and pride- and notice-worthy, to me is the fact that ISRO's scientists and engineers were able to fine-tune the PSLV to this extent. This isn't to say I'm surprised they were able to do it at all; on the contrary, it means the feat is as much about the benefits accruing to the rocket, and the Indian space programme by extension, as about R&D advances on the materials science front. It speaks to the oft-underestimated importance of the foundations on which a space programme is built.
Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre … has leveraged advanced materials like Carbon-Carbon (C-C) Composites to create a nozzle divergent that offers exceptional properties. By utilizing processes such as carbonization of green composites, Chemical Vapor Infiltration, and High-Temperature Treatment, it has produced a nozzle with low density, high specific strength, and excellent stiffness, capable of retaining mechanical properties even at elevated temperatures.
A key feature of the C-C nozzle is its special anti-oxidation coating of Silicon Carbide, which extends its operational limits in oxidizing environments. This innovation not only reduces thermally induced stresses but also enhances corrosion resistance, allowing for extended operational temperature limits in hostile environments.
The advances here draw from insights into metallurgy, crystallography, ceramic engineering, composite materials, numerical methods, etc., which in turn stand on the shoulders of people trained well enough in these areas, the educational institutions (and their teachers) that did so, and the schooling system and socio-economic support structures that brought them there. A country needs a lot to go right for achievements like squeezing an extra 15 kg into the payload capacity of an already highly fine-tuned machine to be possible. It's a bummer that such advances are currently largely vertically restricted, except in the case of the Indian space programme, rather than diffusing freely across sectors.
Other enterprises ought to have these particular advantages ISRO enjoys. Even should one or two rockets fail, a test not work out or a spacecraft go kaput sooner than designed, the PSLV's new carbon-carbon-composite nozzles stand for the idea that we have everything we need to keep trying, including the opportunity to do better next time. They represent the idea of how advances in one field of research can lead to advances in another, such that each field is no longer held back by the limitations of its starting conditions.
From 'SC declines Ramdev, Patanjali apology; expresses concern over FMCGs taking gullible consumers ‘up and down the garden path’', The Hindu, April 10, 2024:
The Supreme Court has refused to accept the unconditional apology from Patanjali co-founder Baba Ramdev and managing director Acharya Balkrishna for advertising medical products in violation of giving an undertaking in the apex court in November 2023 prohibiting the self-styled yoga guru. ... Justices Hima Kohli and Ahsanuddin Amanullah told senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi that Mr. Ramdev has apologised only after being caught on the back foot. His violations of the undertaking to the court was deliberate and willful, they said. The SC recorded its dissatisfaction with the apology tendered by proposed contemnors Patanjali, Mr. Balkrishna and Mr. Ramdev, and posted the contempt of court case on April 16.
... The Bench also turned its ire on the Uttarakhand State Licensing Authority for “twiddling their thumbs” and doing nothing to prevent the publications and advertisements. “Why should we not come down like a ton of bricks on your officers? They have been fillibustering,” Justice Kohli said. The court said the assurances of the State Licensing Authority and the apology of the proposed contemnors are not worth the paper they are written on.
A very emotionally gratifying turn of events, but perhaps not as gratifying as they might have been had they transpired at the government's hands when Patanjali was issuing its advertisements of pseudoscience-backed COVID-19 cures during the pandemic. Or if the Supreme Court had proceeded to actually hold the men in contempt instead of making a slew of observations and setting a date for another hearing. Still, something to cheer for and occasion to reserve some hope for the April 16 session.
But in matters involving Ramdev and Patanjali Ayurved, many ministers of the current government ought to be pulled up as well, including former Union health minister Harsh Vardhan, Union micro, small, and medium enterprises minister Nitin Gadkari, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi's governance and policies both written and unwritten enabled Patanjali's charlatanry while messrs Vardhan and Gadkari were present at an event in February 2021 when Patanjali launched a product it claimed could cure COVID-19, with Vardhan – who was health minister then – speaking in favour of people buying and using the unproven thing.
I think the Supreme Court's inclination to hold Ramdev et al. in contempt should extend to Vardhan as well because his presence at the event conferred a sheen of legitimacy on the product but also because of a specific bit of theatrics he pulled in May the same year involving Ramdev and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Ramdev apologising because that's more politically convenient rather than because he thinks he screwed up isn't new. In that May, he'd called evidence-based medicine "stupid" and alleged such medicine had killed more people than the virus itself. After some virulent public backlash, Vardhan wrote a really polite letter to Ramdev asking him to apologise, and Ramdev obliged.
But just the previous month, in April 2021, Manmohan Singh had written a letter to Modi suggesting a few courses of action to improve India's response to the virus's spread. Its contents were perfectly reasonable, yet Vardhan responded to it accusing Singh of spreading "vaccine hesitancy" and alleging Congress-ruled states were responsible for fanning India's deadly second wave of COVID-19 infections (in 2021). These were all ridiculous assertions. But equally importantly, his lashing out stood in stark contrast to his letter to Ramdev: respect for the self-styled godman and businessman whose company was attempting to corner the market for COVID-19 cures with untested, pseudo-Ayurvedic froth versus unhinged rhetoric for a well-regarded economist and statesman.
For this alone, Vardhan deserves the "ton of bricks" the Supreme Court is waiting with.
Emotional decision making is in many contexts undesirable – but sometimes it definitely needs to be part of the picture, insofar as our emotions hold a mirror to our morals. When machines make decisions, the opportunity to consider the emotional input goes away. This is a recurring concern I'm hearing about from people working with or responding to AI in some way. Here are two recent examples I came across that set this concern out in two different contexts: loneliness and war.
This is Anna Mae Duane, director of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, in The Conversation:
There is little danger that AI companions will courageously tell us truths that we would rather not hear. That is precisely the problem. My concern is not that people will harm sentient robots. I fear how humans will be damaged by the moral vacuum created when their primary social contacts are designed solely to serve the emotional needs of the "user".
And this is from Yuval Abraham's investigation for +972 Magazine on Israel's chilling use of AI to populate its "kill lists":
"It has proven itself," said B., the senior source. "There’s something about the statistical approach that sets you to a certain norm and standard. There has been an illogical amount of [bombings] in this operation. This is unparalleled, in my memory. And I have much more trust in a statistical mechanism than a soldier who lost a friend two days ago. Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier."
Behold, the legerdemain of spinning bad news into good:
Setting aside the meaningless headline, we have a lede (and the rest of the article, for that matter) that claims the Supreme Court of India "struck" a fine balancing act between the transition to renewable energy and protecting the great Indian bustard by rolling back a complete ban on overhead cables in the birds' habitat.
Accepting sustained arguments from attorney general R Venkataramani, solicitor general Tushar Mehta and additional SG Aishwarya Bhati, the bench said, "India's commitment to promoting renewable energy sources, particularly in regions like Gujarat and Rajasthan, aligns with its broader sustainable development objectives."
Pats on the back for everyone.
Except while the Supreme Court is switching between imposing and revoking a ban on overhead cables and the newspaper declaring this a pro-climate triumph, there is no indication in the report that the petition before the Supreme Court is to move the power cables underground, protecting both the endangered bustards and the region's power-generation potential.
The apex court has now asked an expert committee to examine the feasibility of underground cables and their costs, which the promoters of solar- and wind-power projects in the region have contended are too high. As such, the court's order has created a false balance between the birds and the profit margins of these promoters, as if to say they're equally legitimate and equally valuable – and on this same fulcrum rests the court's view of India's attempt to balance sustainable development with climate change.
'What Muslim Women Face Every Day at Work', The Wire, April 4, 2024:
[Nisha] Shah, who prays five times a day, says such Islamophobia at the workplace – amongst highly educated Indian youth – has become more audacious. She says her two-three prayer breaks are shorter than the frequent smoke and tea breaks her colleagues take. But she was asked to leave her religion out of the office. There was no holiday for Eid and no concessions to her schedule during the month of Ramzan. But when the Hindu festival of Diwali came around, the company organised pujas at work.
It's the little stuff like this – unearthed expertly, laboriously by Mahima Jain – that really drives the pseudo-secularist point home on the ground. In my limited experience, I've noticed this kind of discrimination, motivated by anti-Muslim sentiment and sustained by kettle logic, in some research institutes, journalism establishments, and apartment complexes. Social anthropologist Renny Thomas's bookScience and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment is in this regard an eye-opener.
Some people exchange polite wishes for Islamic festivals even if they're not Muslim themselves but by and large what on-premise celebrations the powers that be consider appropriate are very different for Eid and Mawlid versus Dussehra and Janmashtami. And when these powers don't see value in or actively ignore the value of affirmative action in the cultural sphere of the space they administer, the differences hang like a reminder that, even if physical violence isn't in the offing, "the seeds of hatred" are there, as Shah says.
The folks at The Wire have laid The Wire Science to rest, I’ve learnt. The site hasn’t published any (original) articles since February 2 and its last tweet was on February 16, 2024.
At the time I left, in October 2022, the prospect of it continuing to run on its own steam was very much in the picture. But I’ve also been out of the loop since and learnt a short while ago that The Wire Science stopped being a functional outlet sometime earlier this year, and that its website and its articles will, in the coming months, be folded into The Wire, where they will continue to live. The Wire must do what’s best for its future and I don’t begrudge the decision to stop publishing The Wire Science separately – although I do wonder if, even if they didn’t see sense in finding a like-for-like replacement, they could have attempted something less intensive with another science journalist. I’m nonetheless sad because some things will still be lost.
Foremost on my mind are The Wire Science‘s distinct sensibilities. As is the case at The Hindu as well as at all publications whose primary journalistic product is ‘news’, the science coverage doesn’t have the room or license to examine a giant swath of the science landscape, which – while in many ways being science news in the sense that it presents new information derived from scientific work – can only manifest in the pages of a news product as ‘analysis’, ‘commentary’, ‘opinion’, etc. The Wire has the latter, or had when I left and I don’t know how they’ll be thinking about that going ahead, but there is still the risk of science coverage there not being able to spread its wings nearly as widely as it could on The Wire Science.
I still think such freedom is required because we haven’t figured out how best to cover science, at least not without also getting entangled in questions about science’s increasingly high-strung relationship with society and whether science journalists, as practitioners of a science journalism coming of age anew in the era of transdisciplinary technologies (AI, One Health, open access, etc.), can expect to be truly objective, forget covering science by the same rules and expectations that guide the traditional journalisms of business, politics, sports, etc. If however The Wire‘s journalists are still thinking about these things, kudos and best wishes to them.
Of course, one thing was definitely lost: the room to experiment with forms of storytelling that better interrogate many of these alternative possibilities I think science journalism needs to embrace. Such things rarely, if ever, survive the demands of the everyday newsroom. Again, The Wire must do what it deems best for its future; doing otherwise would be insensible. But loss is also loss. RIP. I’m sad, but also proud The Wire Science was what it was when it lived.
I’ve been a commissioning editor in Indian science, health, and environment journalism for a little under a decade. I’ve learnt many lessons in this time but one in particular still surprises me. Whenever I receive an email, I’m quick to at least shoot off a holding reply: “I’m caught up with other stuff today, I’ll get back to you on this <whenever>”. Having a horizon makes time management much easier. What surprises me is that many commissioning editors don’t do this. I’ve heard the same story from scores of freelancing writers and reporters: “I email them but they just don’t reply for a long time.” Newsrooms are short-staffed everywhere and I readily empathise with any editor who says there’s just no time or mental bandwidth. But that’s also why the holding email exists and can even be automated to ask the sender to wait for <insert number here> hours. A few people have even said they prefer working with me because, among other things, I’m prompt. This really isn’t a brag. It’s a fruit hanging so low it’s touching the ground. Sure, it’s nice to have an advantage just by being someone who replies to emails and sets expectations – but if you think about it, especially from a freelancer’s point of view, it has a foundation of shit. It shouldn’t exist.
There’s a problem on the other side of this coin here. I picked up the habit of the holding email when I was with The Wire (before The Wire Science) – a very useful piece of advice SV gave me. When I first started to deploy it, it worked wonders when engaging with reporters and writers. Because I wrote back, almost always within less than half a day of their emails, they submitted more of their work. Bear in mind at this point that freelancers are juggling payments for past work (from this or other publications), negotiations for payment for the current submission, and work on other stories in the pipeline. In the midst of all this – and I’m narrating second-hand experiences here – to have an editor come along who replies possibly seems very alluring. Perhaps it’s one less variable to solve for. I certainly wanted to take advantage of it. Over time, however, a problem arose. Being prompt with emails means checking the inbox every <insert number here> minutes. I quickly lost my mind over having to check for new emails as often as I could, but I kept at it because the payoff stayed high. This behaviour also changed some writers’ expectations of me: if I didn’t reply within six hours, say, I’d receive an email or two checking in or, in one case, accusing me of being like “the others”.
I want my job to be about doing good science journalism as much as giving back to the community of science journalists. In fact, I believe doing the latter will automatically achieve the former. We tried this in one way when building out The Wire Science and I think we’ve taken the first steps in a new direction at The Hindu Science – yet these are also drops in the ocean. For a community that requires so, so much still, giving can be so easy that one loses oneself in the process, including on the deceptively trivial matter of replying to emails. Reply quickly and meaningfully and it’s likely to offer a value of its own to the person on the other side of the email server. Suddenly you have a virtue, and because it’s a virtue, you want to hold on to it. But it’s a pseudo-virtue, a false god, created by the expectations of those who deserve better and the aspirations of those who want to meet those expectations. Like it or not, it comes from a bad place. The community needs so, so much still, but that doesn’t mean everything I or anyone else has to give is valuable.
I won’t stop being prompt but I will have to find a middle-ground where I’m prompt enough and at the same time the sender of the email doesn’t think I or any other editor for that matter has dropped the ball. This is as much about managing individual expectations as the culture of thinking about time a certain way, which includes stakeholders’ expectations of the editor-writer relationship in all Indian newsrooms publishing science-related material. (The fact of India being the sort of country where the place you’re at – and increasingly the government there – being one of the first things getting in the way of life also matters.) This culture should also serve the interests of science journalism in the country, including managing the tension between the well-being of its practitioners and sustainability on one hand and the effort and the proverbial extra push required for its growth on the other.
This screenshot is from ESPN Cricinfo’s live commentary for the Chennai Super Kings versus Gujarat Titans IPL match on March 26, 2024. Super Kings captain Ruturaj Gaikwad got out caught behind off the bowling of Spencer Johnson. I’m not sure why Cricinfo’s commentary says Gaikwad walked off because he didn’t. He swung his bat at the ball, got a nick, and the ball flew through to wicketkeeper Wriddhiman Saha. Saha and Johnson both started to celebrate – until Johnson noticed Gaikwad hadn’t left the crease. He turned around to appeal to the umpire, who signalled out, and it was then that Gaikwad started to walk.
A new captain at the helm of Super Kings has been due. MS Dhoni is in his early 40s. Though he still plays good cricket, it’s also time for him to make way, and Gaikwad is a good choice: he’s only 27 years old and can serve in the new role for a long time, assuming he also does well. It’s just that… if Dhoni had been the one to nick that ball, he would’ve walked the moment Saha caught it instead of waiting for the umpire’s signal. We’ve seen it in so many games both in the IPL and those for the national team, and we’ve also seen other Super Kings players follow suit. I assumed it was team culture, bolstered by the fact that Super Kings has also frequently been among the top five teams in the (meta-)race for the IPL’s ‘Fair Play Award’.
To each their own, of course, but considering Gaikwad is now the captain, I hope how he responded is just the sign of a new captain and doesn’t also signal a change in the team culture.
War is on all our minds these days. There is a war happening in Ukraine and something barely resembling a war (because it’s a genocide) in Gaza. Governments have been fond of casting our collective responses – such as they are – to climate change, antimicrobial resistance, and water crises as wars. In every nationalist country, and there are more of them every year, the states have claimed they’re at war against “anti-national” forces within and without. War is everywhere. At this time, where does fantasy fiction stand, what can it do?
First, the genre itself is often centred around military action as a means to challenge protagonists and resolve conflicts. In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the skirmish on Weathertop showcases Aragorn’s leadership; the Battle of Helm’s Deep is where Théoden truly returns as the king of Rohan; the Battle of the Pelennor Fields is the stage on which Denethor fails, Faramir rises in his stead, Rohan’s crown effectively passes to Éowyn, and Aragorn does something only Gondor’s ruler can; the Battle of the Morannon is a test of every protagonist’s mettle as they distract Sauron and his armies in a doomed stand long enough for Sam, Frodo, and Gollum to destroy the ring; and the Battles of Isengard and Bywater are where the ents and hobbits, respectively, retake their lands from Saruman’s rule, unto the powerful wizard’s political and then mortal demise. Even outside the trilogy, war is never short of a great contest between good and evil.
There have been many flights of fancy that bear little resemblance to JRR Tolkien’s epic and its style, yet it’s just as true that every English attempt at epic fantasy since the trilogy has either basked in its shadow or tried to escape from it. Another way in which Tolkien foreshadowed the genre is in terms of its authors: predominantly cis-male and white. Despite the variety of factors at play that could influence who becomes an author of epic fantasy fiction, this is no coincidence, at least insofar as it determines who becomes a ‘successful’ author – and just as well, it’s not a coincidence that so much of modern fantasy is concerned with similar depictions of war.
Bret Devereaux wrote in his popular blog that Amazon Primevideo’s Rings of Power fell so flat even though it had borrowed heavily as well as branched off from Lord of the Rings because, among other things, it failed to “maintain a believable sense of realism grounded in historical societies and technologies (something the Lord of the Rings, books and films, did very well)”, rendering it “impossible to invest in the stakes and consequences of a world that appears not to obey any perceptible rules”. Yet even with the ‘rules’, Tolkien’s narrative arcs within his books were modeled perceptibly on the Arthurian legends. A similar complaint can be foisted on other (esp. white male) works of epic fantasy fiction, which have been concerned on a metaphysical level at least with recasting the past in a different light, unto different ends.
I admit I haven’t read enough of epic fantasy – all of Tolkien, a smattering of Guy Gavriel Kay (Tigana), Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast), Peter David (Sir Apropos of Nothing), some of M. John Harrison’s short stories, Brandon Sanderson, Marlon James (BLRW), and George R.R. Martin – to be able to write with any kind of authority about the genre, but for this I blame partly myself and the rest Steven Erikson, whose Malazan Book of the Fallen series spoiled me for anything else. My own tendency to read the work of the cis-white men of fantasy is also to blame.
However, Erikson, unlike any of the other writers I’d read until then, both within and beyond the genre, is also a white man yet his Malazan series treats war differently: its tragic toll is always in view thanks to Erikson’s decision to train the narrator’s focus on its smallest players, the soldiers, rather than on its kings and queens. This is how, for its well-earned reputation as a military epic bar none, the series itself recounts a tale of compassion.
And having read and re-read the Malazan series for more than a decade (to the uninitiated: it’s possible to do this without getting bored because of its rich detailing and layered story-telling), war – including ones of annihilation, which can apparently be fought these days without the use of terrible weapons – is if nothing else the ultimate examination of purpose. It is brutal on people, the land, the cultures, and the planet for much longer after it ends, and it magnifies through these effects and the methods by which they are achieved the moral character of those conducting this violence.
Like others I’m sure, I feel completely powerless against and often dispirited by Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza, Russia’s wanton destruction in Ukraine, and the systemic violence the Indian state continues to inflict on its poorest and most marginalised sections. The best tools of opposition available at my disposal are my words, my ideas, my morality, and, if a situation demands it, some spine – and all four good fantasy fiction can inspire in abundance.
I remember reading a Roger Ebert review of a film sometime back (can’t remember its name now) in which he said good story-telling can inspire us to become our best versions of ourselves, that even should the film flop on other counts, it will have succeeded if it can do this. These words are applied easily to any form and mode of story-telling, including epic fantasy. Lord of the Rings is a tale of good versus evil but it’s also a tale of friendships and their survival through untold hardships, and while some may disagree it was good story-telling. In the end, whether or not it succeeded and also setting aside the moralities of the time in which it was written, it strove to inspire goodness.
The Malazan series strives similarly (present-tense because Erikson is still building out its lore) and, to be fair, does it much better, directing its empathy at almost everyone who appears in the books (excluding – spoiler alert – the truly vile). In our present time of seemingly incessant conflict, it helps me look beyond the propaganda both noisy and subtle at the people who are suffering, and with its stories refill senses constantly on the verge of depletion. If we just let it, fantasy can step up where reality has failed us, alerting us to the infinite possibility of worlds within worlds, new and necessary forms of justice, and of course how and where we can begin to cope together.
Note: I chose to ignore sci-fi in this post. I suspect “sci-fi” and “fantasy” are at the end of the day labels invented to make marketing these books easier, but I also stuck to fantasy per se so I could finish writing this post in a finite amount of time.
The electoral bonds release has been reassuring on one count. For some time after the (new) BJP first rose to power in 2014, with a groundswell of support (but arguably also because of the ‘first past the post’ system) I used to think it represented an ideology that I’ve been ignorant about, that the INC allowed to take root and overlooked – the way Obama’s second term seemingly laid the groundwork for Trump. But with the bonds being released and the associations we’re finding in the data, it’s becoming asymptotically more clear that there’s no ideology at work here, just as it has on many occasions before. We haven’t missed or overlooked anything, at least nothing other than the inner workings of the legerdemain we’ve found at the ends of every other rainbow drawn by this party. Brutes have taken to power, using the social media and people who wanted to get rich, in order to get rich themselves. Correlation isn’t causation but that doesn’t mean we’re going to ignore the enormous mountains of correlation, especially when read together with the BJP government’s practice of surgically withholding exactly those bits of data that establish causative links. I’m also increasingly convinced that any of the other good stuff they’ve actually managed to do (not unconditionally so, of course) – a.k.a. the foundation of the bhakt‘s whataboutery-based defence – could have been done by any other party. Because other than that, there’s only the desire to continue to occupy the national government for its own vapid sake and the pseudo-ideology that that’s okay to do.
ISRO chairman S. Somanath confirmed to TOI in an exclusive interview that the NGLV project, internally named “SOORYA”, will be headed by (Project Director/PD) S. Sivakumar, currrently the programme director (space transportation systems) at VSSC…
ISRO and DRDO really need to systematise their naming scheme here. The next iteration of ‘Agni’ ballistic missiles DRDO is working on has widely been called ‘Surya’. For ISRO to follow by calling its newfangled launch vehicle ‘Soorya’ – even if internally – complicates communications on this topic (not that it’s otherwise great).
‘Soorya’ and ‘Surya’ may have different spellings but they refer to the same Sanskrit word and meaning (‘Sun’). The typical aloofness of Indians vis-a-vis transliterating words between English and Indian languages will inevitably feed confusion over the technology to which a given instance of ‘Surya’ refers.
Another source of confusion is the existing overlap between the civilian and the military applications of suborbital and orbital flight technologies in India. This has its pros and cons and I’m not judging that now, but here we have a next-generation launch vehicle being called ‘Soorya’ and a next-generation missile being called ‘Surya’. Not helping.
Others have noticed this issue with other projects ISRO is working on and have suggested the organisation stick to its original, de facto naming scheming – e.g. one where the name of a next-generation launch vehicle is Next-generation Launch Vehicle. It’s boring, yes, but there will be no confusion.
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