The Nobel Prizes are a deeply flawed institution both out of touch with science as it is done today and with an outsized influence on scientific practice at the most demanding levels. Yet these relationships all persist with the prizes continuing to crown some of the greatest achievements in the history of modern science.

What the Nobel Prizes are not

The winners of this year’s Nobel Prizes are being announced this week. The prizes are an opportunity to discover new areas of research, and developments there that scientists consider particularly notable. In this endeavour, it is equally necessary to remember what the Nobel Prizes are not. For starters, the

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The prizes are exclusive by design and their prestige is enforced through a system of secrecy: the reasons for picking each laureate are locked away for 50 years even as the selection process happens behind closed doors. In keeping with a historical tradition of all prizes being distinguished by their laureates, the Nobel Prizes are sought after so scientists can enter the same ranks that hold Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, etc.

Of course the institution like others of its kind reinforces the need for itself, creating self-fulfilling conditions by mooching off the reputation of scientists who have laboured for decades in specific social, economic, cultural, and political contexts to produce knowledge of incredible value and in return conferring a reputation of a different kind. This is why Jean-Paul Sartre tried to decline the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964.

Then again, the way the award-giving foundation conducts the prizes’ announcements has also helped to ameliorate the neglectful treatment many sections of the mainstream media, especially in India, have meted out to the sort of scientific work the prizes fete, even if the foundation’s conduct also panders to the causes of such treatment.

The prizes

I think the Nobel Prizes for physiology/medicine and for physics caught many science communicators off guard because they were both concerned with very involved pieces of work with no direct applications. The medicine prize was for the discovery of microRNA and post-transcriptional gene regulation, which when it happened overturned what biologists had assumed was a complete picture of how the body’s cells regulate genes to make different proteins.

The physics prize was for the first work on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which produced a machine-friendly version of cognition by drawing on ideas in biology, neuropsychology, and statistical mechanics. If this work hadn’t happened, ChatGPT may not exist today, but several other developments built on the first ANNs to produce more new knowledge whose accumulation eventually led to ChatGPT et al. Ergo, calling ChatGPT et al. an application of the first ANNs would be thoroughly misguided.

The chemistry prize — for the development of computational tools to design proteins and to predict their structures — presented a slightly different problem: the tools' advent meant humans suddenly found themselves spending much less time on deciphering the structures, yet the tools didn't, and still don't, say why proteins prefer these structures over others. Scientists still need to figure out the why by themselves.

All this said, I’m grateful this year as I’ve been before for the prizes’ ability to throw up an opportunity for all sections of the media to discuss scientific work many of them would most likely have neglected otherwise. Reading the research papers that first reported the existence of microRNA and the papers that explained how models to understand exotic states of matter lent themselves to the first ANN concepts allowed me personally to refresh my basics as well as be reminded of the ability of blue-sky scicomm — as a direct counterpart of blue-sky research, one that isn’t fixated on applications — to wow us.

This post benefited from feedback from Thomas Manuel and Mahima Jain.

The Rosalind Lee issue

To reiterate from the introduction, the Nobel Prizes are one institution with deep and well-defined flaws. And I have learnt from (journalistic) experience that there’s no changing its mind. It's too big to change and doesn’t admit the need to do so, and its members have had no compunctions about articulating that in public. The vast majority of scientists also subscribe to the prizes’ value and their general desirability. So it is my view today that we work around the prizes and/or renounce the prizes altogether when dealing with the award-giving group’s choices.

Caste, and science’s notability threshold

A webinar by The Life of Science on the construct of the ‘scientific genius’ just concluded, with Gita Chadha and Shalini Mahadev, a PhD scholar at HCU, as panellists. It was an hour long and I learnt a lot in this short time, which shouldn’t be surprising because, more

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A third option is to change the foundation’s mind but this requires a considerable amount of collective work to which I doubt more than a few would like to dedicate themselves. Mind-changing work is demanding work. Then again the problem is if you fall anywhere in between these two more-viable options, you risk admitting other possibilities vis-à-vis the Nobel Prizes that (I imagine) you’d rather not.

For a background on the Rosalind Lee issue, I suggest you browse X.com. My notes on it follow:

(i) The Nobel Foundation has historically reserved the Nobel Prizes for persons who conceived of important ideas and made testable predictions about them. The latter is important. IIRC this is why SN Bose didn't win a Nobel Prize for coming up with Bose-Einstein particle statistics. Albert Einstein could have won instead because he built on Bose's ideas to predict the existence of a particular state of matter: the Bose-Einstein condensate. Who came up with the testable predictions in the paper that won Victor Ambros a share of the medicine Nobel Prize?

I’m not directly defending the exclusion of Rosalind Lee, who was the first author of that and in fact many of the more important papers Ambros published in his career. Instead, I’m pointing to an answer that could explain her exclusion with a reminder that the answer is flawed and that it has always been flawed. I suppose I’m saying that we couldn’t have expected better. 🙃

(ii) Physics World recently published an interview with Lars Brink, a physicist who has been part of the decision-making for many physics prizes the last decade. Brinks bluntly states at one point that the Nobel Academy doesn't give the prizes to collaborations or in fact even more than three people at a time because they don't want 5,000 people (for example at CERN) claiming they're Nobel laureates all of a sudden. There is an explicit and deliberate design here to keep the prizes exclusive, like Hermes handbags.

(iii) The first author is often the one who designs the experiment, performs it, collects the data, analyses it, etc. — basically everything beyond, but not necessarily excluding, the act of having an idea itself and including most of the legwork. The Nobel Prizes however are not awards for legwork. This sucks because it’s a profound misunderstanding of the people required to produce good-quality scientific knowledge.

Thanks to the influence the prizes exert on the scientific community, the people who are left out also fade further — in the public view and also in terms of not being able to benefit from the systematic rewards vouchsafed for the Nobel laureates who are now institutions unto themselves. The fading is likely compounded for people already struggling to be noticed in the scientific literature: the “technicians” who equip, maintain, and operate laboratory instruments, among others (a.k.a. the Matthew effect). Of course the axis of discrimination is gendered as well: as one friend put it, “the ‘leg work’ of science is historically feminised”, and when awards and other forms of recognition exclude such work they perpetuate the Matilda effect.

How cut-throat competition forces scientists to act against the collective

Brian Keating, an astrophysicist who led the infamous cosmic inflation announcement in 2014, thinks this is how science works: “… you put out a result, and other scientists work to test the result”. However, his own story shows that this is a cute ideal that’s often unreasonable to expect on

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Overall, whether the prize-giving body is aware of these narratives and issues is moot. What matters is that it acknowledges and responds to them — which it has signalled it won’t do. QED.

(iv) In fact, all these rules of the Nobel Prizes are arbitrary. It's effectively a sport and a poorly managed one at that. You make up a playing field, publicise some of the rules, keep the governing body beyond reach or reproach, hide the scorecard, and then you say you have to jump five feet in the air to qualify. The outragers are raising their voices for Rosalind Lee (what does she want, by the way?) but not for the first authors of all the other papers by other laureates over the years. If they don’t belong to marginalised social groups, is it okay to leave them out? Then again these are moot questions, pursuits leading nowhere at all thanks to the Nobel Prizes’ presumption that they’re not of this world.

The Nobel Prizes have also wronged many women, but I can't claim to know whether there's a case-by-case explanation (with arbitrary foundations) or if it was a systematic program to do so. Both seem equally likely given how slow attitudes have been to change on this front. This said, just because women have been wronged doesn’t mean all forms of reparation will be equally useful. More specifically, what will breaking the (arbitrary) rules do to change for women in science?

Obviously this is part of a broader question about the influence of the Nobel Prizes on doing science. Mukund Thattai ran a survey on Twitter years ago asking scientists about why they got into or stayed in science. "Because of a Nobel laureate” received the fewest votes in a large pool of respondents. It wasn’t a representative survey but it does hint at an important piece of reality. Once we start to argue that including Rosalind Lee would have been better, we also tacitly admit the Nobel Prizes matter for who chooses to stay in science and who is condemned to fade — but do they?

On the other side of this coin lie all the other prizes that did fete Rosalind Lee along with Victor Ambros. If we’d like to have any prizes at all (I don’t but YMMV), shall we celebrate the Newcomb Cleveland Prize more than the Nobel Prizes? Likewise, by railing against Rosalind Lee’s exclusion on arbitrary grounds, what do we hope to achieve? It may be more gainful to spread awareness of the Nobel Prizes’ flaws and finitude and focus on the deeper question of how the opportunities to win X award can influence the way science is done, who does it, and why.

Either Matt Mullenweg's screws have fallen off or I deeply overestimated how sensible a person I thought he was. On October 3, Mullenweg wrote on his blog that Automattic had offered those of its employees who disagreed with his actions vis-à-vis WP Engine a buyout and that 8.4% of the company's workforce took it. He wrote that he and Automattic (one and the same, really) wanted to make the buyout as enticing as possible, fixing the severance pay at $30,000 (Rs 25 lakh) or six months' salary, whichever is higher. Excerpt:

159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company, the other 91.6% gave up $126M of potential severance to stay! … It was an emotional roller coaster of a week. The day you hire someone you aren’t expecting them to resign or be fired, you’re hoping for a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Every resignation stings a bit. However now, I feel much lighter. I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who took the offer, and even more excited to work with those who turned down $126M to stay.

I'm sure he knows no group of people turned down $126M to stay, each individual in this mass simply turned down "$30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher" to stay. They decided that way because they agreed with him, didn't disagree with him strongly enough, needed to have a job beyond six months or some other reason. Similarly the 159 that took the buyout decided to leave because they disagreed strongly enough with him, because they needed the money or some other reason.

But no: for Mullenweg, it must be about him. In fact he's convinced he's still in the right, and that all those people who Automattic did so because the messaging from WP Engine and its principal investor got to them, not because Mullenweg is toying with them.

Silver Lake and WP Engine’s attacks on me and Automattic, while spurious, have been effective. It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions.

We also know Mullenweg has been carefully moderating his blog's comments section to allow only those comments that are favourable to him and his worldview. All bloggers whose blogs have comments sections do this. But the public response to the ongoing Mullenweg v. WP Engine saga has been strongly polarising, so much so that the comments Mullenweg has been letting through are just gushing. Mullenweg also said during a recent talk-show that the criticism has been getting to him — but evidently not in a way that makes him reconsider his words and actions. And the comments that he's been approving on his blog open windows into his internal narrative. This one under the post about the buyout caught my eye:

I see that twitter is treating this story as some sort of apocalypse for A8C and and don’t get it why. You shouldn’t collaborate with those who aren’t interested in working with you. Instead, you definitely want to team up with those who chose not to hit the piñata and decided to focus on the band at the candy factory.

Mullenweg wrote he called the buyout an "Alignment Offer". At least one Automattic employee who decided to stay has spun the buyout as "financial freedom" for dissenters to "stand by their choice". The irony of an echo chamber in this place, at this time, is too much to bear: WordPress was started and existed for a long time as a tool that people could use to publish themselves online, to converse with people around the planet, discover new perspectives, and ultimately change others' minds or their own. Mullenweg's September 21 post on WordPress.org was concerned with the hosting provider's decision to disable users' ability to track post revisions. He wrote there:

WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred.

Content is sacred because of its potency (although "sacred" isn't the word I'd use). The ideas in the heads of the people who will soon leave Automattic are 'content' in this way too. When in 2022 WordPress.com (which Automattic owns) consolidated its multiple subscription plans to a single "Pro" plan, I wrote a post critiquing the move and it stayed at the front page of Hacker News for almost a day. It drew so much attention — and agreement as well as disagreement — that then WordPress.com CEO Dave Martin responded to say, among other things, "Your content isn't going anywhere." This was laudable because it's important for content to be able to hang around.

In fact, let's assume a bunch of people at Automattic disagreed with Mullenweg. His response was to entice them to leave with a supposedly lucrative offer on their way out rather than engage with their disagreement, attempt to change their minds and/or his own, and from here take Automattic to a new position of strength. All good organisations contend with disagreement; those that are able to do so without altogether sundering employer-employee relations likelier than not emerge the better for it. Those that can't or won't are signalling they can only work if an important human degree of freedom is muted.

Couple things in my news feed this morning that really woke me up — one a startling statistic and the other a reminder of what statistics miss. The first from Nature, 'How to win a Nobel prize: what kind of scientist scoops medals?':

John W. Strutt, who won a physics prize in 1904 for his work on the properties of gases, has 228 academic descendants with Nobels — his students, their students and so on. … An incredible 702 out of 736 researchers who have won science and economics prizes up to 2023 are part of the same academic family — connected by an academic link in common somewhere in their history. Only 32 laureates … have no connection to the bigger academic family.

Meaning it's nearly impossible for 'true' outsiders to break in. Either you become part of the The Network or you have a very low chance of winning a Nobel Prize. Of course the prize-giving apparatus isn't a machine. There are humans making these decisions and clearly in a famously human way: not really paying attention to the consequences of their preferences or assuming that that doesn't, or even shouldn't, matter.

But what does The Network say about science itself, especially about good* science and where that gets done? That is, what institutional mechanisms and/or forces are (even passively) encouraging the scientists who do such work to clump together?

One factor that immediately comes to mind is funding: in the typical Indian experience, because most places of research have traditionally not been well-funded, the government or some philanthropic entity endeavours to set up a few facilities focused on research and funds them well, while the rest struggle on.

On a related note, should the diffusion of researchers who produce good-quality research (and know how to do it) into previously neglected locales be desirable?

Next, the reminder of what statistics miss:

The French researcher and physician Didier Raoult has been banned from practising medicine for two years. It is the latest and probably most significant sanction against Raoult after he became infamous during the pandemic for his enthusiastic support for hydroxychloroquine even though the drug lacked evidence of its efficacy against COVID-19.

His claims brought the spotlight on him as he probably intended but then expanded to reveal he had published too many papers — much more than should be humanly possible. But Raoult took pride in his research metrics, so even as research integrity investigators including Elisabeth Bik revealed dire problems in his published** papers — including image manipulation and ethical lapses in clinical trials that rendered them illegal — Raoult and his supporters came out swinging on social media.

He also filed a lawsuit against Bik alleging she and others were besmirching his name without reason. Raoult eventually lost these disputes and in the process the trust and respect of the research community. Now his medical license has been revoked. He was retired but the action was clearly symbolic: Raoult is done.

It took Bik's and her peers' scepticism to reveal the extent of Raoult's misdemeanours. His metrics betrayed nothing of it except through their largeness.

As if on cue, The Hindu published an excellent opinion piece by S. Swaminathan today about why and how we educate people, including those who become professional scientists:

The metrics-focused system has created a situation which implies that education is a market rather than a citizen’s right and the state’s duty.

* "Good" here means worthy of winning a Nobel Prize, not good per se.

** Remember that they were published, meaning the journals that did are answerable, too.

From my article in The Hindu today, New science awards, old political project:

The government has been trying repeatedly to shut … the opposition to its policies and world view emanating from academia, a space the Hindutva programme has thus far failed to breach by choking funding and revenue through the Finance Ministry and provisions of the Foreign Contributions (Regulations) Act, using bad science or pseudoscience, interfering in administrative matters, and even using violence. …

This said, nothing illustrates the ham-fisted character of the government’s attempts … as clearly as the sites of ‘alternative’ scholarship it has set up. The purpose of these sites appears to be to realise or sustain the plausibility of the claims of the Hindutva political project. … Having failed at political capture from the outside, the BJP has been taking the inside-out route. The RVP awards seem like an attempt to bring scholars in line by hijacking their reward mechanisms.

Spoilers abound; trigger warning: sexual violence

In case you haven't watched the film and don't plan to, you can check out the plot description on Wikipedia.

Maharaja was bad for two reasons.

First, good films don’t lie to their viewers. Maharaja did in two instances. It lied when it led viewers to believe the Selvam/Sabari storyline was contemporaneous to the Maharaja/Lakshmi storyline. Towards the film’s middle it slowly dawns on us that something’s off, followed by the epiphany that the Selvam/Sabari storyline concluded before the Maharaja/Lakshmi storyline began. What was the purpose of this switch? I can’t think of any beyond the film introducing a twist for a twist’s sake, which is disingenuous because it had no other point to it. It's a sign of the film taking its viewership for granted.

It lied the second time it becomes clear Nallasivam was the fourth person in Maharaja's house that day and we realise an ostensibly comical passage of the film has become doubly redundant — until we stop and think: what was the purpose of the film depicting Inspector Varadharajan’s phone calls at night to the various crooks asking them to take the responsibility for pilfering the dustbin?

Varadharajan would have known by then that Nallasivam was the culprit. Even if one of the crooks he phoned had agreed to own up to the crime, Varadharajan’s plan (previously hidden from the audience) to deliver Nallasivam to Maharaja’s house would have imploded. Alternatively, if Varadharajan was only fake-calling the crooks, why did we have to spend time watching their reactions? Maharaja offers this passage as comic relief, yet such relief wasn’t necessary. In fact the film could have done itself a favour by presaging Varadharajan’s plot against Nallasivam instead of blindsiding viewers at the climax.

This review benefited from inputs from and feedback by Srividya Tadepalli.

Second, the sexual violence in the film is gratuitous. It was reminiscent of Visaranai (2015) and parts of Paatal Lok (2020). It was trauma porn. We realise Selvam, Dhana, and Nallasivam grievously injured Jothi before Nallasivam raped her multiple times. Rather than simply and directly establish that the three men perpetrated sexual violence, Maharaja split up each instance of Nallasivam raping the girl into a separate scene. We sit there and watch Nallasivam perform the act of seeking Selvam’s ‘permission’, followed by Selvam’s drawling response, and Nallasivam making excuses for what he’s about to do.

It’s possible Maharaja’s writers presumed they had to lay the groundwork to justify Varadharajan’s and Maharaja’s actions later. And yet they fail when they refuse to admit a rape once is heinous enough and then fail again when they conclude people who commit heinous crimes deserve vigilante justice.

Such justice is an expression of anger, an attempt to deter future crimes with violence. But we should know by now it fails utterly when directed against sexual violence, which erupts most often in intimate settings: when the perpetrator and the survivor are familiar with each other, more broadly when the men think they can get away with it. And most of all vigilante justice fails because it punishes once the (or a rumoured) perpetrator is caught, yet most perpetrators aren’t, which led to the dismal upwelling of voices during #MeToo. The sexual crimes we hear about constitute a small minority of all such crimes out there, which is why the best way to mitigate them has been to improve social justice.

Yet films like Maharaja persist with a vengeful narrative that concludes once the violence is delivered. I fear the only outcome might be more faith in “encounter” killings. Visaranai claimed to be fact-based but the brutality in the film served no greater purpose than to illustrate such things happen. If the film was responding to a fourth estate that had failed to highlight the underlying police impunity and the powerlessness of those at society’s margins to defend themselves, it succeeded — yet it also failed when it didn’t bother to attempt any sort of triumph, of spirit if not of will. That’s why Paatal Lok and in fact Jai Bhim (2021) were better. But Maharaja is cut from Visaranai’s cloth, and worse for being a work of imagination.

In fact, Maharaja has a ‘second’ climax during which we discover Jothi is really Ammu, Selvam’s biological daughter, and whom Maharaja has been raising since his daughter, his wife, and Selvam’s wife were killed in the same accident. There are some clues at the film’s beginning as to these (intra-narrative) facts but they're ambiguous at best and in fact just disingenuous — another lie like the other plot twist.

But further yet: why? So we can watch Selvam have his lightbulb moment when he realises Jothi was Ammu and feel bad about what he did? (This was also the climax of 2023's Iratta.) Or that men should desist from such crimes because they could be harming their own daughters? Or that viewers might be duped into thinking any kind of justice has been done when Jothi shames Selvam with boilerplate lines? Consider it a third failure.

It was a Sunday. Around 7 am, I was woken by the sound of an auto idling outside my house. It had one of those loud put-putting engines, and the driver had parked the vehicle there waiting for one of my neighbours to step out. The noise echoed sharply around my block and was audible from everywhere within my house three floors above. Just as I prepared to step out and have a word with the driver, the idling stopped.

Just across the road from my house is a vendor of construction materials. Its proprietor runs a loud business. His resupply trucks arrive in the dead of night to offload sand and bricks. During the day, his employees are often heard shouting at each other as they work. During the weekends, they bring out a wood-cutting machine that shrieks loudly as they use it for several hours in the afternoon.

As the day wears on, the occasional canine screaming match breaks out nearby. At just around 10 am, another neighbour up the street revs his silencer-less motorcycle up before leaving for wherever he does at 10 am every day. The hawkers turn up one by one, blaring their wares and services — tender coconut water, fresh vegetables, “sofa repair”, spices, flowers, iron-whetting, and of course the kabadiwalas — in recorded voices blaring through small yet boisterous loudspeakers. These sounds are all crisscrossed by horn and engine noises from other vehicles passing by.

Often the only way to find silence here is for the Sun to beat down hard. That way no one steps out in the afternoon. I don’t even find birds on the pea tree outside. That’s also a cruel thing to wish for, but even if it’s just a little cloudy, the hawkers keep coming and going. The pea tree is a popular local source of shade: come 4 pm and a bunch of Swiggy delivery guys gather underneath for a chat, maybe a glass of tea. Their voices can be comforting, a reminder that you’re around other people. When you’re looking for just a minute of silence, however, it's yet another irritant.

The day is a continuous drizzle of sounds but you’re probably thinking it’s an essential, even desirable part of city life — especially life in Chennai, with its oft-village-like vibes. But listening to them in isolation, as the government often seems to do, misses the point. There are of course the sounds we need, even desire: birds chirping at dawn, a fan creaking on a hot summer day, laughter from the neighbours' houses, children making their way to school (and the sounds of band practice in the distance), voice lifting into the wind from the tea stall nearby… One of my neighbours practices playing the flute at night and he's already very good at it. Another goes to bed listening to old Tamil film songs. I love them all.

These are sounds. Then there's noise. Imagine it is raining constantly, relentlessly where you are and then one day there’s a storm. You haven’t worn dry clothes in a long time. The storm subsides soon after yet the pitter-patter rain continues. I expect you’d be quite irritable and just wishing the Sun breaks out soon. Noise, constant noise is like this — sounds born of a social order that has long forgotten their intrusive nature. You don’t have a moment’s peace. Your ears, and heart and mind, are constantly responding to something. Unless you’re really, really good at spacing out or can afford noise-cancelling earphones, there is no escape.

Even so, it might have been easier to deal with if the drizzle was all there was, but no. The evenings are the worst. There are two temples nearby. On any auspicious day — and there are about a dozen in a single month — devotional songs blare on loudspeakers. If the day is particularly auspicious, there are motorised floats bearing large idols lit by hundreds of LED lamps that, for some reason, face straight ahead. On Vinayak Chathurthi, a few such lamps lit up every front-facing apartment in our building through thick curtains at 4 am. Almost every Sunday evening there’s devotional karaoke on loudspeakers. Their only grace is to wind up at 10.30 pm, except of course if the occasion is, again, particularly auspicious.

My house is near those of two well-known Kollywood actors and about 200 metres away from a Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam bigwig. There’s almost always a police car patrolling the neighbourhood, yet the cops never question the noise or when it begins or ends. Even on Vinayak Chathurthi, these weren’t the folks to respond when a loud drum-beating procession set off from the temple at 12.40 am. The devotees piped down only after two policemen paid them a visit after I'd given them a ring on phone numbers the Greater Chennai Police had tweeted.

Even on less auspicious days, the ordeal isn’t done yet. The users of our local public dustbin don’t segregate waste. When the trash-collection vehicle rolls around at 11.30 pm, the workers attach each bin to its handles, and the driver then has the mechanism smash the bin against the rim of the container to ensure the bin yields its jumble of contents no matter how mucilaginous they’ve become. That slow-mo bang-bang-bang is in fact how the whole neighbourhood knows it’s nearly midnight.

Then finally there’s quiet, unless of course another barking match hasn’t already broken out.

India has a right to noise

Excerpt from ‘More light, less sound: On firecrackers and a festival of light’, an editorial in The Hindu on November 7, 2023: The Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules 2000 stipulate that firecrackers cannot be burst in ‘silence zones’, designated by State governments, and anywhere after 10 p.m. From

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Deepavali is coming up, and since the first week of September I’ve been enveloped with dread. The noise from firecrackers in the city — whichever city — has graduated from being part fun, part nuisance to just harmful. The Supreme Court’s mandate to firecracker manufacturers and consumers to switch to ‘green’ crackers did nothing to mitigate the demand itself, which is to say the kind of pollutants entering the air has changed — from more to less toxic — but the quantities may not have.

The court required these green firecrackers to be less noisy as well, but the new noise range is ironically no less harmful. They emit an estimated 100-130 dB, whereas research has registered harmful effects due to noise from 50 dB onwards and often considers 120 dB to be the threshold of human hearing — the point from which more sound pressure on the ears leads to pain more than perception.

A meta-analysis of studies with people from Canada, Europe, Japan, and the UK reported in 2014 that every 10 dB increase in traffic noise hiked the risk of developing heart disease by 8%. In a statement published in 2016, the American Academy of Nursing called noise “a public health hazard”. Other studies have linked extended noise exposure to stress, anxiety, cognitive difficulties, and depression. Some small studies in Indian cities, including Chennai, Jammu, and Vadodara, have reported an elevated prevalence of hearing loss among traffic police and auto-drivers.

All these effects, but stress in particular, is compounded when people are exposed to loud sounds when they least expect it — such as in the middle of the day, near a place of worship or a school, or at any time after 10 pm. Likewise, a very loud noise that lasts only for a brief moment may not be reason enough for a complaint, but it could still damage humans’ auditory apparatus and send stress levels soaring, yet there are no noise-based sanctions when such events occur.

On September 4, the Government of Tamil Nadu sanctioned funds for a project to produce a “noise map” of four cities in the State with more than a million inhabitants: Chennai, Madurai, Coimbatore, and Tiruchi. The project will install noise monitors near airports, railway stations, high-traffic roadways and intersections, and areas with industrial and construction activity, as well as in spots that require quiet, like near schools, places of worship, and hospitals.

Following the announcement, the Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic) for Chennai, R. Sudhakar, told The Hindu that based on the project’s findings the city may adopt a system in which “decibel meters are installed at traffic signals. If noise levels exceed a certain threshold due to honking when the signal is red, the signal will reset and remain red for longer.”

I have every confidence in my compatriots to find ways to render such social engineering meaningless, if not counterproductive. What if there is a lone miscreant among the drivers waiting for a signal to change who wastes others’ time by blaring his horns at the last second? What if there is an ambulance or cop car that really needs to make its way to the front? The noise monitor may just falter in Chennai’s incessant heat and humidity. Or an informal market may erupt in each city for horns emitting sounds at frequencies that evade the monitor yet are still audible to vehicles nearby.

The State’s new noise-mapping exercise is (currently) restricted to permanent or semi-permanent sources of noise and doesn’t address the more common transient ones. Such sources include all those that haunt my neighbourhood and presumably most neighbourhoods in large cities. Their principal threat isn’t their isolated loudness per se — although that’s bad enough — but their interminability. By populating every moment with sound, they exacerbate the absence of quiet and heighten the consequences that other particularly loud sounds provoke.

Noise pollution in India is no joke but given the wildly varying realities with which the country often confronts its own laws, the Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules 2000 are amusing. The Rules demarcate the hours of daytime (6 am to 10 pm) and nighttime (10 pm to 6 am) and four kinds of spatial areas. In daytime, the noise limit in industrial areas is 75, in commercial areas 65, in residential areas 45, and in “silence zones” 50.

In all cases the unit is dB(A) L_eq, which has an important physical meaning. ‘dB’ stands for decibel, a unit that expresses not an absolute value but the ratio between two values. When used to measure the loudness of sound, a dB denotes how many times more a given sound is louder than the threshold at which human hearing begins (a sound pressure of 20 micropascal). The ‘A’ in brackets refers to the use of a weight scale that combines a given amount of loudness with a constant that represents the perception of the human ear. L_eq means the decibel value is a time-average — but this isn’t equal to adding up all the dB(A) values and dividing by the number of values. Because the decibel is a logarithmic measure, computing the L_eq requires us to convert the dB(A) figures to sound-pressure levels first, calculate their average, and finally convert back to dB(A).

This mathematical exercise throws up a crucial perspective. The Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules 2000 allow people to register a complaint if some activity breaches the specific threshold by more than 10 dB(A) L_eq. If, say, there is a loud sound of 80 dB(A) L_eq for 20 seconds every minute, and this plays out for an hour, the average noise level comes to 75.22 dB(A) L_eq in this period — which is just enough to lodge a complaint in a “silence zone”, a residential area or a commercial area, and not in an industrial area. But it will not be enough if the average is calculated throughout daytime. In any case, the police is unlikely to admit a complaint against the simple hawker responsible for that 20-second blip.

To make matters worse, Chennai and most other cities are haphazardly planned. Residential and commercial areas often spill into each other — assuming there has been a noise-wise zonation exercise. Even if they are chockablock, sounds carry over. It is thus a Kafkaesque challenge to register a complaint for violating the Rules unless the violation is altogether egregious. Even then, however, the damage to human (and animal) health is already done.

(The US National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health recommends its Sound Level Meter app — simply called NIOSH SLM — for smartphones. It “ measures workplace noise to determine if workers are exposed to hazardous noise. The free app combines the best features of professional sound levels meters and noise dosimeters into one simple tool.”)

Measuring loudness on Deepavali nights

The Indian festival of Deepavali gets its name from the Sanksrit for “display of lights”, “Deepaanaam aavali“. These days, the festival is anything but about lights, especially in urban centers where the bursting of loud firecrackers has replaced the gentler display of lamps. Sometimes, Bangalore – where I live – sounds like

Close ReadVasudevan Mukunth

I spent many of my childhood years in my grandparents' house in T Nagar, opposite Ranganathan Street — a very crowded and noisy part of Chennai. There was always some sound around us. If it lapsed we'd know something was very wrong. It never did, of course. When I first travelled to Dubai, Sweden, and New York, I found the lack of ambient sounds unsettling, but over time I also got used to it, especially once I moved to Bengaluru in 2018, where my house was relatively secluded. Since then noises have frightened me, especially sudden ones, but I don't feel badly about it. In fact I'm happy I lost the ability to be okay with it, an ability repeatedly souped up by less-than-ideal living conditions normalised by others around me.

If there is noise everywhere in space and time, the question of who can afford quiet becomes important. When I lived in Delhi, it was readily apparent that only a certain class of people could access clean air and the benefits for well-being such access conferred. The air is on paper a part of the commons but in the national capital, especially during winter, there were only three ways to find clean air: live in the upper parts of a high-rise building, live near or in places with access to large green parks, or get an air-purifier or two. All of these things are expensive, so the poorer and the more marginalised had less access to clean air.

In much the same way, quiet is becoming synonymous in Chennai with the upper-class, upper-caste experience of life given that it requires homes located far from thoroughfares, sound-proofing material, and expensive consumer electronics. Even on the road, quiet exists inside cars but is lost to every other mode of transport. Many of us are familiar with parents allowing their children to throw loud and protracted tantrums on public transport, but if shushing them is taboo, what of those with the deafening cellphone ringtones, those who speak loudly no matter where they are, and those who see fit to watch videos on full volume while you’re trying to sleep on the next seat?

In a country in which pollution of some form is almost everywhere, noise pollution appears to be the most acceptable and tolerated. Deepavali is now less than a month away, but then it is also the storm amid the drizzle that just won’t abate.

Paris Marx's recent experience on the Canadaland podcast alerted me to the importance of an oft-misunderstood part of journalism in practice. When Paris Marx and his host Justin Ling were recording the podcast, Marx said something about Israel conducting a genocide in Gaza. After the show was recorded, the publisher of Canadaland, a fellow named Jesse Brown, edited that bit out. When Marx as well as Ling complained, Brown reinstated the comment by having Marx re-record it to attribute that claim to some specific sources. Now, following Marx’s newsletter and Ling’s statement about Brown’s actions, Brown has been saying on Twitter that Marx's initial comment, that many people have been saying Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza, wasn't specific enough and that it needed to have specific sources.

Different publications have different places where they draw the line on how much they'd like their content to be attributed. And frankly, there’s nothing wrong, unfair or unethical about this. As the commentary and narratives around Israel’s violence in West Asia have alerted us, the facts as we consider them are often not set in stone even when they have very clear definitions. We’re seeing in an obnoxious way (from our perspective) many people disputing the claim that Israel is conducting a genocide and contesting whether Israel's actions can be constituted a genocide is a fact. Depending on the community to and for which you are being a journalist, it becomes okay for some things to be attributed to no one and just generally considered true, and for others not so much.

This is fundamentally because each one of us has a different level of access to all the relevant information as well as because the existence of facts other than those that we can experience through our senses (i.e. empirically) is controlled by some social determinants as well.

This whole Canadaland episode alerted me the people trying to repudiate the allegation that Israel is conducting a genocide — especially many who are journalists by vocation — by purporting to scrutinise the claims they are being presented with. Now, scrutiny in and of itself is a good thing; it's one of the cornerstones of scepticism, especially a reasonable exercise of scepticism. But what they’re scrutinising also matters, and which is a subjective call. I use the word ‘subjective’ with deliberate intent. Scrutiny in journalism is a good thing (I’m treating Canadaland as a journalistic outlet here), yet it’s important to cultivate a good sense of what can and ought to be scrutinised versus a scrutiny of something that only suggests the scrutiniser is being obstinate or intends to waste time.

Many, if not all, journalists would have started off being told it's important to be alert, to be aware of scrutinising all the claims they encounter. Many journalists also cultivate this sense over time, and the process by which they do so allows subjective considerations to seep in — and that is not in and of itself a bad thing. In fact it's good. I have often come across editors who have predicted a particular story's popularity where others only saw a dud based solely on their news sense. This is not a clinical scientific technique, it's by all means a sense. Informing this sense are, among other things, the pulse of the people to whom you're trying to appeal, the things they value, the things they used to value but don’t any more, and so forth. In other words this sense or pulse has an important socio-cultural component to it, and it is within this milieu that scrutiny happens.

Scrutinising something in and of itself is not always a virtue for this reason: in the process of scrutinising something, it’s possible for you to end up appealing to things that people don’t consider virtues or, worse, which they could interpret to mean you’re vouching for something they consider antithetical to their spirit as a people.

This Marx-Ling-Brown incident is illustrative to the extent that it spotlights the many journalists waking up to a barrage of statements, claims, and assertions both on and off the internet that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza. These claims are stinging them, cutting at the heart of something they value, something they hold close to their hearts as a community. <>So they're responding by subjecting these claims to some tough scrutiny. Many of us have spent many years applying the same sort of tests to many, many other claims. For example, science journalists had to wade through a lot of bullshit before we could surmount the tide of climate denialism and climate pacifism to get to where we are today.

However, now we're seeing these other people, including journalists, subjecting of all things the claim that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza to especial scrutiny. I think they're waking up to the importance of scepticism and scrutiny through this particular news incident. Many of us woke up before, and many of us will wake up in future, through specific incidents that are close to us, that we know more keenly than most others will have a sort of very bad effect on society. These incidents are a sort of catalyst but they are also more than that — a kind of awakening.

You learn how to scrutinise things in journalism school, you understand the theory of it very quickly. It's very simple. But in practice, it's a different beast. They say you need to fact check every claim in a reporter's copy. But over time, what you do is you draw the line somewhere and say, "Beyond this point, I'm not going to fact check this copy because the author is a very good reporter and my experience has been that they don't make any statements or claims that don't stand up to scrutiny beyond a particular level." You develop and accrue these habits of journalism in practice because you have to. There are time constraints and mental bandwidth constraints, so you come up with some shortcuts. This is a good thing, but acknowledging this is also important and valuable rather than sweeping it under the rug and pretending you don't do it.

Fact-checking in science journalism

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has helped produce a report on fact-checking in science journalism, and it is an eye-opening read. It was drafted by Deborah Blum and Brooke Borel; there is a nice summary here. The standout findings for me, as a science editor working with journalists for

Close ReadVM

If you want to be a good journalist, you have to cultivate for yourself the right conduits of awakening — and by "right" I mean those conduits that will awaken you to the pulses of the people and the beats you’re responsible for rather than serve some counterproductive purpose. These conduits should specifically do two things. One: they should awaken you as quickly and with as much clarity as possible to what it means to fact check or scrutinise something. It should teach you the purpose of it, why you do it. It should teach you what good scrutiny looks like and where the line is between scrutiny and nitpicking or pedantry. Two: it should alert you to, or alert others about, your personal sense of right and wrong, good and bad. That's why it's a virtue to cultivate as many conduits as possible, that is to have diverse interests.

When we're interested in many things about the world, about the communities and the societies that we live in, we are over time awakened again and again. We learn how to subject different claims to different levels of scrutiny because that experience empirically teaches us what, when, and how to scrutinise and, importantly, why. Today we’re seeing many of these people wake up and subject the tests that we've administered to climate denialism, the anti-vaccine movement, and various other pseudo-scientific movements to the claim that Israel is conducting a genocide. When we look at them we see stubborn people who won't admit simple details that are staring us in the face. This disparity arises because of how we construct our facts, the virtues to which we would like to appeal, and the position of the line beyond which we say no further attribution is necessary.

Obviously there is no such thing as the view from nowhere, and I'm clear that I'm almost always appealing to the people who are not right-wingers. So from where I'm standing it seems more often than not as if the tests being administered to, say, the anti-vaccine movement are more valid instances of their use than the tests being administered against claims that Israel is conducting a genocide.

Such divisions arise when we don't cultivate ourselves as individuals, when we don't nurture ourselves and the things that we're interested in. Simply, it speaks to the importance of having diverse interests. It's like traveling the world, meeting many people, experiencing many cultures. Such experiences teach us about multiculturalism and why it’s valuable, and they teach us the precise ways in which xenophobia, authoritarianism, and nationalism effect their baleful consequences. In a very similar way, diverse interests are good teachers about the moral landscape we all share and its normative standards that we co-define. They can quickly teach you about how far you stand from where you might really like to be.

In fact, it’s entirely possible for a right-winger to read this post and take away the idea that where they stand is right. As I said, there is no view from nowhere. Right and wrong depend on your vantage point, in most cases at least. I wanted to put these thoughts down because it seemed like people who may not have many interests or who have very limited interests are people also more likely to disengage from social issues earlier than others. Disengagement is the fundamental problem, the root cause. There are many reasons for why it arises in the first place, but getting rid of it is entirely possible, and importantly something we need to do. And a good way to do it is to cultivate many interests, to be interested in many problems, so that over time our experiences navigating those interests inevitably lead to a good sense of what we should and what we needn’t have to scrutinise. It will teach us why some particular points of an argument are ill-founded. And if we're looking for it, it will give us a chance to fix that and even light the way.

Update, September 26, 2024: WordPress.org has banned websites hosted on WP Engine from accessing its resources. As someone put it on X, this is Matt Mullenweg dropping a giant turd into the laps of millions of WordPress users. I can't recommend this software any more in good conscience.

The Matt Mullenweg v. WP Engine dispute seems to be escalating, which is a bit of a surprise because it was so ill-founded to begin with. Yet the escalation has also been exponential.

Mullenweg published his post disparaging WP Engine on the WordPress.org site (from where you can download the open source WordPress CMS) on September 21.

Matt Mullenweg v. WP Engine

Automattic CEO and WordPress co-developer Matt Mullenweg published a post on September 21 calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress”. For the uninitiated: WP Engine is an independent company that provides managed hosting for WordPress sites; WordPress.com is owned by Automattic and it leads the development of WordPress.org.

Close ReadVasudevan Mukunth

On September 23, WP Engine said it had sent WordPress.com parent company and WordPress lead developer Automattic, whose CEO is Mullenweg, a cease and desist letter. Excerpt:

Stunningly, Automattic’s CEO Matthew Mullenweg threatened that if WP Engine did not agree to pay Automattic – his for-profit entity – a very large sum of money before his September 20th keynote address at the WordCamp US Convention, he was going to embark on a self-described “scorched earth nuclear approach” toward WP Engine within the WordPress community and beyond. When his outrageous financial demands were not met, Mr. Mullenweg carried out his threats by making repeated false claims disparaging WP Engine to its employees, its customers,and the world. Mr. Mullenweg has carried out this wrongful campaign against WP Engine in multiple outlets, including via his keynote address, across several public platforms like X, YouTube, and even on the Wordpress.org site, and through the WordPress Admin panel for all WordPress users, including directly targeting WP Engine customers in their own private WordPress instances used to run their online businesses.

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Later on the same day, Automattic sent a cease and desist letter of its own to WP Engine. Excerpt:

As you know, our Client owns all intellectual property rights globally in and to the world-famous WOOCOMMERCE and WOO trademarks; and the exclusive commercial rights from the WordPress Foundation to use, enforce, and sublicense the world-famous WORDPRESS trademark, among others, and all other associated intellectual property rights.We are writing about WP Engine’s web hosting and related services that improperly use our Client’s WORDPRESS and WOOCOMMERCE trademarks in their marketing.We understand that our Client has contacted you about securing a proper license to use its trademarks, yet no such agreement has been reached. As such, your blatant and widespread unlicensed use of our Client’s trademarks has infringed our Client’s rights and confused consumers into believing, falsely, that WP Engine is authorized, endorsed, or sponsored by, or otherwise affiliated or associated with, our Client. WP Engine’s unauthorized use of our Client’s trademarks also dilutes their rights, tarnishes their reputation, and otherwise harms the goodwill they have established in their famous and well-known trademarks, and has enabled WP Engine to unfairly compete with our Client, leading to WP Engine’s unjust enrichment.

Now it's a trademark dispute. Automattic is alleging people at large are confusing WP Engine with WordPress itself and that that's leading to loss of revenue for Automattic. Hang on to this thought while we move on to the next detail. At 10.34 pm IST on September 4, Mullenweg shared this tidbit in a Reddit comment:

[WP Engine] had the option to license the WordPress trademark for 8% of their revenue, which could be delivered either as payments, people (Five for the Future .org commitments), or any combination of the above.

Put all these details together and we understand Mullenweg is alleging via Automattic that people are confusing WP Engine with WordPress itself to Automattic's detriment, that WP Engine has wrongfully used the WordPress trademark, that what WP Engine is selling isn't WordPress but something it has reportedly "butchered", and that WP Engine's enrichment is unjust.

I think it's starting to stink for Mullenweg. As detailed in the previous post, WP Engine didn't "butcher" WordPress. In fact they didn't change anything about WordPress's core composition. They turned off a setting, didn't hide it, and offered a way to get around it by other means. WordPress is open source software provided under a GPL license, which means others are allowed to modify it (and subsequently avail it under the same license). So even if WP Engine modified WordPress — which it didn't — it would've been operating within its rights.

An opportunity to understand the GPL license

Featured image: Matt Mullenweg, 2009. Credit: loiclemeur/Flickr, CC BY 2.0. Every December, I wander over to ma.tt, the blog of WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, to check what he’s saying about how the CMS will be shaping up in the next year. Despite my cribbings as well

Close ReadVM

Second, WP Engine was founded in 2010. Why is Automattic alleging a trademark violation after 14 years of being okay with it? Even if consumers are currently confusing WP Engine with WordPress itself — which I doubt — that Automattic didn't pursue a legal dispute in all this time is very fishy. It also creates new uncertainty for all the many other WordPress hosting companies that have "WP" in their names. On a related note, WP Engine is selling WordPress hosting and not WordPress itself as well as claims to have emails from Automattic staff saying using the "WP" short form is okay.

Another point of note here is whether 'WP' is covered by trademark. At some point in the recent past, the wordpressfoundation.org website updated its 'Trademark Policy' page to include an answer as well as some gratuitous remarks:

The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.

Third, Mullenweg's demand that WP Engine cough up 8% of their revenue amounts to a demand for $40 million (Rs 334.5 crore). Considering Automattic has now pinned this demand to the wobbly allegation of wrongful trademark use, WP Engine seems increasingly in the right to dispute and not entertain his demands. Moreover, WP Engine's lawyers' letter suggests Mullenweg gave WP Engine a very small window within which to comply with this demand and, for added measure, allegedly threw in a threat. But then at 10.38 pm on September 24, Mullenweg said this on Reddit:

I would have happily negotiated from there, but they refused to even take a call. Their entire strategy has been to obscure and delay, which they tried to do on Friday. "Can we get the right folks together early next week?" They've been stringing us along for years, I'm the dummy for believing that they actually wanted to do anything. But making it right, now.

The reply to this comment by Reddit user u/ChallengeEuphoric237 is perfect:

If they don't believe they needed to pay, then why would they?

1/ If the fees were for the trademark, why weren't they going to the WordPress Foundation instead of Automattic?

2/ Why do they need to license the WordPress trademark? Stating they allow hosting as a product isn't a violation of trademark law, neither is using WP. You guys used to be an investor in the company for crying out loud.

WordPress and Automattic seem incredibly petty in all of this. Why did you *need* to do it during the keynote? Why did you *need* to make a huge stink at the booth? If this was a legal issue, let the lawyers sort it out instead of dragging the community through the mud. Everyone expected much more from you. I don't use WP Engine's products, but if someone came to me trying to extort 8% of my revenue on some flimsy trademark issue, I wouldn't be very responsive either.

"Can we get the right folks together early next week?"

Did you honestly expect them to agree to a nearly 40 million dollar annual charge via text message when you literally gave them what seems like an hour notice right before your keynote? Would you agree to that? I'm no lawyer, but that whole exchange seems like an exercise in extortion - threatening to destroy someones reputation unless they agree to something monetarily, which is a felony.

Let's see what the courts say, but you've lost a ton of clout in the community over this.

The subtext of Mullenweg's September 21 post seemed to be that private equity is cutting costs in a way that's eating into the aspirations and dues of open source software development. Then again, as many observers in the sector have said, this couldn't be the real issue because private equity is almost everywhere in the WordPress hosting space and singling out WP Engine made little sense. So the sub-subtext seemed to be that Mullenweg was unhappy about WP Engine eating into the revenue streams of WordPress.com and WordPress VIP (Automattic's elite hosting service). But after the events of the three days that followed, that sub-subtext seems likelier to be the whole issue.

On a final note, many people are kicking back with 🍿 and speculating about how this dispute could escalate further. But it's difficult for me personally to be entertained by this. While Mullenweg's September 21 post didn't in hindsight do a good job of communicating what his real argument was, he did suggest there was a problem with a model in which for-profit entities could springboard off the efforts of open-source communities that have volunteered their time and skills without the entities giving back. But dovetailing to u/ChallengeEuphoria237's concluding remark, conversations about that issue vis-à-vis WP Engine are now more unlikely to happen than they were before Mullenweg launched into this "making it right" campaign.

Automattic CEO and WordPress co-developer Matt Mullenweg published a post on September 21 calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress”. For the uninitiated: WP Engine is an independent company that provides managed hosting for WordPress sites; WordPress.com is owned by Automattic and it leads the development of WordPress.org. WP Engine’s hosting plans start at $30 a month and it enjoys a good public reputation. Mullenweg’s post however zeroed in on WP Engine’s decision to not record the revisions you’ve made to your posts in your site’s database. This is a basic feature in the WordPress content management system, and based on its absence Mullenweg says:

What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.

The first thing that struck me about this post was its unusual vehemence, which Mullenweg has typically reserved in the past for more ‘extractive’ platforms like Wix whose actions have also been more readily disagreeable. WP Engine has disabled revisions but as Mullenweg himself pointed out it doesn’t hide this fact. It’s available to view on the ‘Platform Settings’ support page. Equally, WP Engine also offers daily backups; you can readily restore one of them and go back to a previous ‘state’.

Second, Mullenweg accuses WP Engine of “butchering” WordPress but this is stretching it. I understand where he’s coming from, of course: WP Engine is advertising WordPress hosting but it doesn’t come with one of the CMS’s basic features, and which WP Engine doesn’t hide but doesn’t really advertise either. This isn't just really far removed from “butchering” (much less in public), it's also dishonest: WP Engine didn't modify WordPress's core, it simply turned off a setting that was available to turn off.

WP Engine’s stated reason is that post revisions increase database costs that the company would like to keep down. Mullenweg interprets this to mean WP Engine wants “to avoid paying to store that data”. Well, yeah, and that’s okay, right? I can’t claim to be aware of all the trade-offs that determined WP Engine’s price points but turning off a feature to keep costs down and reactivating it upon request for individual users seems fair.

In fact, what really gets my goat is Mullenweg’s language, especially around how much WP Engine charges. He writes:

They are strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem, giving our users a crappier experience so they can make more money.

WordPress.com offers a very similar deal to its customers. (WordPress.com is Automattic’s platform for users where they can pay the company to host WordPress sites for them.) In the US, you’ll need to pay at least $25 a month (billed yearly) to be able to upload custom themes and plugins to your site. All the plans below that rate don’t have this option. You also need this plan to access and jump back to different points of your site’s revision history.

Does this mean WordPress.com is “strip-mining” its users to avoid paying for the infrastructure required for those features? Or is it offering fewer features at lower price points because that’s how it can make its business work? I used to be happy that WordPress.com offers a $48 a year plan with fewer features because I didn’t need them — just as well as WP Engine seems to have determined it can charge its customers less by disabling revision history by default.

(I’m not so happy now because WordPress.com moved detailed site analytics — anything more than hits to posts — from the free plan to the Premium plan, which costs $96 a year.)

It also comes across as disingenuous for Mullenweg to say the “cancer” a la WP Engine will spread if left unchecked. He himself writes no WordPress host listed on WordPress.org’s recommended hosts page has disabled revisions history — but is he aware of the public reputation of these hosts, their predatory pricing habits, and their lousy customer service? Please take a look at Kevin Ohashi’s Review Signal website or r/webhosting. Cheap WordPress in return for a crappy hosting experience is the cancer that’s already spread because WordPress didn’t address it.

(It’s the reason I switched to composing my posts offline on MarsEdit, banking on its backup features, and giving up on my expectations of hosts including WordPress.com.)

It’s unfair to accuse companies of “strip-mining” WordPress so hosting providers can avail users a spam-free, crap-free hosting experience that’s also affordable. In fact, given how flimsy many of Mullenweg’s arguments seem to be, they’re probably directed at some other deeper issue — perhaps what he perceives to be WP Engine not contributing enough back to the open source ecosystem?

On September 29, 2021, The Third Eye published an interview with Milind Sohoni, a teacher at the Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas and at IIT Bombay. (Thanks to @labhopping for bringing it into my feed.) I found it very thought-provoking. I’m pasting below some excerpts from the interview together with my notes. I think what Prof. Sohoni says doesn’t build up to a coherent whole. He is at times simplistic and self-contradictory, and what he says is often descriptive instead of offering a way out. Of course I don’t know whether what I say builds up to a coherent whole either but perhaps you’ll realise details here that I’ve missed.

… I wish the textbooks had exercises like let’s visit a bus depot, or let’s visit a good farmer and find out what the yields are, or let’s visit the PHC sub-centre, talk to the nurse, talk to the compounder, talk to the two doctors, just getting familiar with the PHC as something which provides a critical health service would have helped a lot. Or spend time with an ASHA worker. She has a notepad with names of people in a village and the diseases they have, which family has what medical emergency. How is it X village has so much diabetes and Y village has none?

I’m sure you’ll agree this would be an excellent way to teach science — together with its social dependencies instead of introducing the latter as an add-on at the level of higher, specialised education.
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… science education is not just about big science, and should not be about big science. But if you look at the main central government departments populated by scientists, they are Space, Atomic Energy and Defence. Okay, so we have missile men and women, big people in science, but really, so much of science in most of the developed world is really sadak, bijli, pani.

I disagree on three counts. (i) Science education should include ‘big science’; if it doesn’t we lose access to a domain of knowledge and enterprise that plays an important role in future-proofing societies. We choose the materials with which we will build buildings, lay roads, and make cars and batteries and from which we will generate electric power based on ‘big science’. (ii) Then again, what is ‘big science’? I’m not clear what Sohoni means by that in this comment. But later in the interview he refers to Big Science as a source of “certainty” (vis-à-vis life today) delivered in the form of “scientific things … which we don’t understand”.

If by “Big Science” he means large scientific experiments that have received investments worth millions of dollars from multiple governments, and which are churning out results that don’t inform or enhance contemporary daily life, his statement seems all the more problematic. If a government invests some money in a Big Science project but then pulls out, it doesn’t necessarily or automatically redirect those funds to a project that a critic has deemed more worthwhile, like say multiple smaller science projects. Government support for Big Science has never operated that way. Further, Big Science frequently and almost by design inevitably leads to a lot of derivative ‘Smaller Science’, spinoff technologies, and advances in allied industries. Irrespective of whether these characteristics — accidental or otherwise — suffice to justify supporting a Big Science project, wanting to expel such science from science education is still reckless.

You’re allowed to be interested in particle physics

This page appeared in The Hindu’s e-paper today. I wrote the lead article, about why scientists are so interested in an elementary particle called the top quark. Long story short: the top quark is the heaviest elementary particle, and because all elementary particles get their masses by interacting with

DisagreeVM

(iii) Re: “… so much of science in most of the developed world is really streets, electricity, water” — Forget proving/disproving this and ask yourself: how do we separate research in space, atomic energy, and defence from knowledge that gave rise to better roads, cheaper electricity, and cleaner water? We can’t. There is also a specific history that explains why each of these departments Sohoni has singled out were set up the way they were. And just because they are staffed with scientists doesn’t mean they are any good or worth emulating. (I’m also setting aside what Sohoni means by “much”. Time consumed in research? Money spent? Public value generated? Number of lives improved/saved?).

Our science education should definitely include Big Science: following up from the previous quote, teachers can take students to a radio observatory nearby and speak to the scientists about how the project acquired so much land, how it secured its water and power requirements, how administrators negotiated with the locals, etc. Then perhaps we can think about avoiding cases like the INO.
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India-based neutrino oblivion

In a conversation with science journalist Nandita Jayaraj, physicist and Nobel laureate Takaaki Kajita touched on the dismal anti-parallels between the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) and the Japanese Kamioka and Super-Kamiokande observatories. The INO’s story should be familiar to readers of this blog: a team of physicists led by

DisagreeVM

The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers Act came along ago, and along with it came a list of 42 [pieces of] equipment, which every municipality should have: a mask, a jetting machine, pumps and so on. Now, even IIT campuses don’t have that equipment. Is there any lab that has a ‘test mask’ even? Our men are going into talks and dying because of [lethal] fumes. A ‘test mask’ is an investment. You need a face-like structure and an artificial lung exposed to various environments to test its efficacy. And this mask needs to be standard equipment in every state. But these are things we never asked IITs to do, right?

This comment strikes a big nail on the head. It also brings to mind an incident on the Anna University campus eight years ago. To quote from Thomas Manuel’s report in The Wire on the incident: “On June 21, 2016, two young men died. Their bodies were found in a tank at the Anna University campus in Chennai. They were employees of a subcontractor who had been hired to seal the tank with rubber to prevent any leakage of air. The tank was being constructed as a part of a project by the Ministry of Renewable Energy to explore the possibilities of using compressed air to store energy. The two workers, Ramesh Shankar and Deepan, had arrived at the site at around 11.30 am and begun work. By 3.30 pm, when they were pulled out of the tank, Deepan was dead and Ramesh Shankar, while still breathing at the time, died a few minutes later.”

This incident seemed, and still seems, to say that even within a university — a place where scientists and students are keenly aware of the rigours of science and the value it brings to society — no one thinks to ensure the people hired for what is casually called “menial” labour are given masks or other safety equipment. The gaps in science education Sohoni is talking about are evident in the way scientists think about how they can ensure society is more rational. A society rife with preventable deaths is not rational.
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I think what science does is that it claims to study reality. But most of reality is socially administered, and so we need to treat this kind of reality also as a part of science.

No, we don’t. We shouldn’t. Science offers a limited set of methods and analytical techniques with which people can probe and describe reality and organise the knowledge they generate. He’s right, most of reality is socially administered, but that shouldn’t be an invitation to forcibly bring what currently lies beyond science to within the purview of science. The scientific method can’t deal with them — but importantly it shouldn’t be expected to. Science is incapable of handling multiple, equally valid truths pertaining to the same set of facts. In fact a few paras later Sohoni ironically acknowledges that there are truths beyond science and that their existence shouldn’t trouble scientists or science itself:

… scientists have to accept that there are many things that we don’t know, and they still hold true. Scientists work empirically and sometimes we say okay, let’s park it, carry on, and maybe later on we will find out the ‘why’. The ‘why’ or the explanation is very cultural…

… whereas science needs that ‘why’, and needs it to be singular and specific. If these explanations for aspects of reality don’t exist in a form science can accommodate, yet we also insist as Sohoni did when he said “we need to treat this kind of reality also as a part of science”, then we will be forced to junk these explanations for no fault except that they don’t meet science’s acceptability criteria.

Perhaps there is a tendency here as if to say we need a universal theory of everything, but do we? We can continue to use different human intellectual and social enterprises to understand and take advantage of different parts of human experience. Science and for that matter the social sciences needn’t be, and aren’t, “everything”.
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Science has convinced us, and is delivering on its promise of making us live longer. Whether those extra five years are of higher quality is not under discussion. You know, this is the same as people coming from really nice places in the Konkan to a slum in Mumbai and staying there because they want certainty. Life in rural Maharashtra is very hard. There’s more certainty if I’m a peon or a security guard in the city. I think that science is really offering some ‘certainty’. And that is what we seem to have accepted.

This seems to me to be too simplistic. Sohoni says this in reply to being asked whether science education today leans towards “technologies that are serving Big Business and corporate profits, rather than this developmental model of really looking critically at society”. And he would have been fairer to say we have many more technological devices and products around us today, founded on what were once scientific ideas, that serve corporate profits more than anything else. The French philosopher Jacques Ellul elucidated this idea brilliantly in his book The Technological Society (1964).

It’s just that Sohoni’s example of ageing is off the mark, and in the process it is harder to know what he’s really getting at. Lifespan is calculated as the average number of years an individual in a particular population lives. It can be improved by promoting factors that help our bodies become more resilient and by dissuading factors that cause us to die sooner. If lifespan is increasing today, it’s because fewer babies are succumbing to vaccine-preventable diseases before they turn five, because there are fewer road accidents thanks to vehicle safety, and because novel treatments like immunotherapy are improving the treatment rates of various cancers. Any new scientific knowledge in the prevailing capitalist world-system is susceptible to being coopted by Big Business but I’m also glad the knowledge exists at all.

Hair conditioners and immortality

I’m not a fan of cosmetic products whatsoever. The most I use is a bar of soap, a bottle of shampoo, a smaller bottle of coconut oil and the occasional earbud. Maybe a bottle of deodorant when I’ve been out in the sun overlong. But recently, when I

DisagreeVM

Sure, we can all live for five more years on average, but if those five years will be spent in, say, the humiliating conditions of palliative care, let’s fix that problem. Sohoni says science has strayed from that path and I’m not so sure — but I’m convinced there’s enough science to go around (and enough money for it, just not the political will): scientists can work on both increasing lifespan and improving the conditions of palliative care. We shouldn’t vilify one kind of science in order to encourage the other. Yet Sohoni persists with this juxtaposition as he says later:

… we are living longer, we are still shitting on the road or, you know, letting our sewage be cleaned by fellow humans at the risk of death, but we are living longer. And that is, I think, a big problem.

We are still shitting on the road and we are letting our sewage be cleaned by fellow humans at the risk of death. These are big problems. Us living longer is not a big problem.
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Big Technology has a knack of turning us all into consumers of science, by neutralising questions on ‘how’ and ‘why’ things work. We accept it and we enjoy the benefits. But see, if you know the benefits are divided very unevenly, why doesn’t it bother us? For example, if you buy an Apple iPhone for Rs. 75,000 how much does the actual makers of the phone (factory workers) get? I call it the Buddhufication Crisis: a lot of people are just hooked on to their smartphones, and live in a bubble of manufactured certainty; and the rest of society that can’t access smartphones, is left to deal with real-world problems.

By pushing us to get up, get out, and engage with science where it is practised, a better science education can inculcate a more inquisitive, critical-thinking population that applies the good sense that comes of a good education to more, or all, aspects of society and social living. This is why Big Technology in particular does not tempt us into becoming “consumers” of science rather than encouraging us to pick at its pieces. Practically everything does. Similarly Sohoni’s “Buddhufication” description is muddled. Of course it’s patronising towards the people who create value — especially if it is new and/or takes unexpected forms — out of smartphones and use it as a means of class mobility, and seems to suggest a person striving for any knowledge other than of the scientific variety is being a “buddhu”. And what such “buddhufication” has to do with the working conditions of Apple’s “factory workers” is unclear.
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Speaking of relationships:

Through our Public Health edition, we also seem to sit with the feeling that science is not serving rural areas, not serving the poor. In turn, there is also a lower expectation of science from the rural communities. Do you feel this is true?

Yes, I think that is true to a large extent. But it’s not to do with rural. You see, for example, if you look at western Maharashtra — the Pune-Nashik belt — some of the cleverest people live there. They are basically producing vegetables for the big urban markets: in Satara, Sangli, that entire irrigated area. And in fact, you will see that they are very careful about their future, and understand their place in society and the role of the state. And they expect many things from the state or the government; they want things to work, hospitals to work, have oxygen, etc. And so, it is really about the basic understanding of cause and effect of citizenship. They understand what is needed to make buses work, or hospitals function; they understand how the state works. This is not very different from knowing how gadgets work.

While the distinction to many others may be trivial, “science” and “scientists” are not the same thing. This equation is present throughout the interview. At first I assumed it was casual and harmless but at this point, given the links between science, science education, technology, and public welfare that Sohoni has tried to draw, the distinction is crucial here. Science is already serving rural areas — Sohoni says as much in the comment here and the one that follows. But many, or maybe most, scientists may not be serving rural areas, if only so we can also acknowledge that some scientists are also serving rural areas. “Science is not serving rural areas” would mean no researcher in the country — or anywhere, really — has brought the precepts of science to bear on the problems of rural India. This is just not true. On the other hand saying “most scientists are not serving rural areas” will tell us some useful scientific knowledge exists but (i) too few scientists are working on it (i.e. mindful of the local context) and (ii) there are problems with translating it from the lab bench to its application in the field, at ground zero.

This version of this post benefited from inputs from and feedback by Prathmesh Kher.

If you get your space news from the website businesstoday.in, this post is for you. Business Today has published several articles over the last few weeks about the Starliner saga with misleading headlines and claims blown far out of proportion. I’d been putting off writing about them but this morning, I spotted the following piece:

Business Today has produced all these misleading articles in this format, resembling Instagram reels. This is more troubling because we know tidbits like this are more consumable as well as are likely to go viral by virtue of their uncomplicated content and simplistic message. Business Today has also been focusing its articles on the saga on Sunita Williams alone, as if the other astronauts don’t exist. This choice is obviously of a piece with Williams’s Indian heritage and Business Today’s intention to maximise traffic to its pages by publishing sensational claims about her experience in space. As I wrote before:

… 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. … 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…

But something more important than the cynical India connection is at work here: in these pieces, Business Today has been toasting it. This my term for a shady media practice reminiscent of a scene in an episode of the TV show Mad Men, where Don Draper suggests Lucky Strike should advertise its cigarettes as being “toasted”. When someone objects that all cigarettes are toasted, Draper says they may well be, but by saying publicly that its cigarettes are toasted, Lucky Strike will set itself out without doing anything new, without lying, without breaking any rules. It’s just a bit of psychological manipulation.

Similarly, Business Today has been writing about Williams as if she’s the only astronaut facing an extended stay in space (and suggesting in more subtle ways that this fate hasn’t befallen anyone before — whereas it has dozens of times), that NASA statements concern only her health and not the health of the other astronauts she’s with, and that what we’re learning about her difficulties in space constitute new information.

None of this is false but it’s not true either. It’s toasted. Consider the first claim: “NASA has revealed that Williams is facing a critical health issue”:

* “NASA has revealed” — there’s nothing to reveal here. We already know microgravity affects various biochemical processes in the body, including the accelerated destruction of red blood cells.

* “Williams is facing” — No. Everyone in microgravity faces this. That’s why astronauts need to be very fit people, so their bodies can weather unanticipated changes for longer without suffering critical damage.

* “critical health issue” — Err, no. See above. Also, perhaps in a bid to emphasise this (faux) criticality, Business Today’s headline begins “3 million per second” and ends calling the number “disturbing”. You read it, this alarmingly big number is in your face, and you’re asking to believe it’s “disturbing”. But it’s not really a big number in context and certainly not worth any disturbance.

For another example, consider: “Given Williams’ extended mission duration, this accelerated red blood cell destruction poses a heightened risk, potentially leading to severe health issues”. Notice how Business Today doesn’t include three important details: how much of an extension amounts to a ‘bad’ level of extension, what the odds are of Williams (or her fellow Starliner test pilot Barry Wilmore) developing “health issues”, and whether these consequences are reversible. Including these details would deflate Business Today’s ‘story’, of course.

If Business Today is your, a friend’s and/or a relative’s source of space news, please ask them to switch to any of the following instead for space news coverage and commentary that’s interesting without insulting your intelligence:

* SpaceNews

* Jeff Foust

* Marcia Smith

* Aviation Week

* Victoria Samson

* Jatan Mehta

* The Hindu Science

“First, a clarification: Unlike in Gravity, the 2013 film about two astronauts left adrift after space debris damages their shuttle, Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore are not stuck in space.”

This is the first line of an Indian Express editorial today, and frankly, it’s enough said. The idea that Williams and Wilmore are “stuck” or “stranded” in space just won’t die down because reports in the media — from The Guardian to New Scientist, from Mint to Business Today — repeatedly prop it up.

Why are they not “stuck”?

First: because “stuck” implies Boeing/NASA are denying them an opportunity to return as well as that the astronauts wish to return, yet neither of which is true. What was to be a shorter visit has become a longer sojourn.

This leads to the second answer: Williams and Wilmore are spaceflight veterans who were picked specifically to deal with unexpected outcomes, like what’s going on right now. If amateurs or space tourists had been picked for the flight and their stay at the ISS had been extended in an unplanned way, then the question of their wanting to return would arise. But even then we’d have to check if they’re okay with their longer stay instead of jumping to conclusions. If we didn’t, we’d be trivialising their intention and willingness to brave their conditions as a form of public service to their country and its needs. We should think about extending the same courtesy to Williams and Wilmore.

And this brings us to the third answer: 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?

Fourth: “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.

In fact, the very reason the world has the ISS and NASA (and other agencies capable of human spaceflight) has its protocol means this particular outcome — of the crew capsule malfunctioning during a flight — needn’t be a crisis. Let’s respect that.

Finally: “Stuck” is an innocuous term, you say, something that doesn’t have to mean all that you’re making it out to be. Everyone knows the astronauts are going to return. Let it go.

Spaceflight is an exercise in control — about achieving it to the extent possible without also getting in the way of a mission and in the way of the people executing it. I don’t see why this control has to slip in the language around spaceflight.

This tweet is spot-on…

… and we’re seeing it play out somewhat in the aftermath of Vinesh Phogat being disqualified from the Paris Olympics for not staying within the stipulated weight limit for two straight days. It was a tough task and Phogat and her team did their best, but alas. Yet India’s lack of a sporting culture beyond cricket, to which Pradeep Magazine had alluded, raised its ugly head in the form of brainless comments from Hema Malini and Kangana Ranaut, just as it did last year when the wrestlers’ protests against Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh elicited nary a peep from India’s current crop of cricketers.

There is something of a parallel between the Phogat incident — which is still unravelling in some political circles in North India — and l’affair Khelif. Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was forced to brave a shitstorm online after her match against Italian boxer Angela Carini ended in 46 seconds, with Carini allegedly claiming Khelif’s strength was “not fair”. The incident was the invitation various boneheads, especially on the internet, needed to raise baseless questions about Khelif’s gender, questions that many other sportswomen have had to face before and likely will in future.

Curiously, none of these questions were relevant while Khelif was losing boxing matches, which she was in other tournaments before the Olympics. It became a problem the moment she won, and won well. As Rose Eveleth has said, none of Khelif not losing, not being white, and not being from a rich country is coincidental — just as much as the people raising the ruckus aren't really interested in “women’s sports. They’re not out here trying to advocate for the things that female athletes actually want and need, like equal pay.”

In fact, now that crude populist impulses have begun spinning the circumstances of Phogat’s loss and Khelif’s triumph into divisive political narratives, the evil really haunting both women — and many others like them — becomes clear: damn the sports, it’s ‘us versus them’.

Tweets like this seem on point…

… but I’ve started to wonder if we’re missing something in the course of expressing opinions about what we thought climate deniers would say and what they’re actually saying. That is, we expected to be right about what we thought they’d say but we’ve found ourselves wrong. Should we lampoon ourselves as well? Or, to reword the cartoon:

How we imagined we could react when ‘what we imagined deniers would say when the climate catastrophes came’ came true: “I was so right! And now everyone must pay for their greed and lies! May god have mercy on their soul!”

Followed by:

How we expect we’ll react when we find out ‘what they actually are saying’: “I was so wrong! And now everyone must pay for my myopia and echo chambers! May god have mercy on my soul!”

And finally:

How we actually are reacting: “We’re just using these disasters as an excuse to talk about climate change! Like we did with COVID! And 9/11! And the real moon landings! Screw you and your federal rescue money! You need to take your electric vegan soy beans now!”

People (myself included) in general aren’t entirely effective at correcting others’ attitudes so it may not seem fair to say there’s a mistake in us not having anticipated how the deniers would react, that we erred by stopping short of understanding really why climate denialism exists and addressing its root cause. But surely the latter sounds reasonable in hindsight? ‘Us versus them’ narratives like the one in the cartoon describe apparent facts very well but they also reveal a tendency, either on the part of ‘us’ or of ‘them’ but often of both, to sustain this divide instead of narrowing it.

I’m not ignorant of the refusal of some people to change their mind under any circumstances. But even if we couldn’t have prevented their cynical attitudes on social issues — and consensus on climate change is one — maybe we can do better to anticipate them.

Yesterday, July 25, was a big day. Ironhide Games released the long-awaited fifth edition of their tower-defence game ‘Kingdom Rush’. I bought it as soon as it launched and completed its primary campaign in one sitting of several hours. Called ‘Alliance’, the game combines the gameplay of ‘Kingdom Rush: Vengeance’ and Ironhide’s ‘Junkworld’, together with aspects of ‘Legends of Kingdom Rush’. The game also continues a long storyline that began with the first ‘Kingdom Rush’ game, released in 2011, and last updated in ‘Vengeance’. For what it’s worth, it’s a good story, too.

In ‘Kingdom Rush: Origins’, Ironhide introduced Vez’nan as a powerful wizard who becomes corrupted by a gem called the Tear of Elynie to become a malevolent power threatening the kingdom of Linirea. In the games that followed, heroes and towers from several parts of the kingdom, ultimately including King Denas, were tasked with defeating Vez’nan and his allies. In ‘Vengeance’, Vez’nan returned to exact revenge against King Denas — or so it seemed. ‘Alliance’ describes Denas’s return as well as Vez’nan’s efforts against a greater evil called the Overseer, who is also the ultimate boss in ‘Legends of Kingdom Rush’.

I love tower-defence games and among them ‘Kingdom Rush’ is my favourite by far. I own all editions of it as well as have unlocked most towers and heroes in each one. At more than a few points during a work day, I like to break one of these games out for a quick and hairy skirmish or — time permitting — a full-on campaign on a high difficulty setting.

But while I like to play as often as I can, tower-defence doesn’t fit all moods. I have 13 games on my phone: the five ‘Kingdom Rush’ games, ‘Junkworld’, ‘Monument Valley’ I and II (and the expansion packs), ‘Loop’, ‘1010!’, ‘Idle Slayer’, ‘Rytmos’, and ‘Lost in Play’. They’re all great but I’d single out ‘Idle Slayer’, ‘Loop’, and ‘Monument Valley’ for particular praise.

‘Idle Slayer’ is a top-notch incremental game (a.k.a. idle game): the game will continue irrespective of whether you interact with the player-character, the player-character can’t perish, and gameplay is restricted to tapping on the screen to make the character jump. The whole point is to slay monsters — which the character will if she/flies runs into them, automatically pulling out an omnipotent sword when she gets close — and collect slayer points and to pick up coins and gems, which the character also does if she runs/flies into them. ‘Idle Slayer’ thus eliminates the player (you, me, etc.) having to be challenged in order to reap rewards. It’s just a matter of time, although occasional bursts of speed and character abilities purchased with slayer points can make things exciting.

I agree with what journalist Justin Davis wrote in 2013:

“Idle games seem perfectly tuned to provide a never-ending sense of escalation. They’re intoxicating because upgrades or items that used to seem impossibly expensive or out of reach rapidly become achievable, and then trivial. It’s all in your rearview mirror before you know it, with a new set of crazy-expensive upgrades ahead. The games are tuned to make you feel both powerful and weak, all at once. They thrive on an addictive feeling of exponential progress.”

Right now, this is where I’m at: 209 decillion coins in my kitty and racking up 110 octillion coins per second, plus whatever I pick up as I keep running…

Second is the amazing ‘Loop’, an endless series of puzzles in each of which your task is to link up some open-ended elements on a screen such that they form a large closed loop. You can tap on each element to rotate it; when the open ends of two elements line up in this way, they link up. The game is minimalist: each level has a plain monotone background and elements of a contrasting colour, and there’s beautiful, low-key instrumental music to accompany your thoughts. ‘Loop’ is the game to get lost in. I’ve played more than 3,500 levels so far and look forward every day to the next one.

Third comes ‘Monument Valley’, but in no particular order because it’s the game I love the most. I don’t play it as often as I play ‘Kingdom Rush’, ‘Idle Slayer’ or ‘Loop’ because its repeatability is low — but it’s the game that redefined for a younger and less imaginative me what a smartphone product could look and feel like when you play it. ‘Monument Valley’ is an ode to the work of the Dutch artist MC Escher, famed for his depiction of impossible objects that toy with the peculiarities of human visual perception. The player-character is a young lady named Ida navigating a foreboding but also enchanting realm whose structures and vistas are guided by the precepts of a mysterious “sacred geometry”. The game’s visuals are just stunning and, as with ‘Loop’, there’s beautiful music to go with. The objects on the screen whose geometries you change to create previously impossible paths for Ida take time to move around, which means you can’t rush through levels. You have to wait, and you have to watch. And ‘Monument Valley’ makes that a pleasure to do.

It should be clear by now that I love puzzles, and ‘1010!’ is perhaps the most clinical of the lot. It’s Tetris in pieces: you have a 10 x 10 grid of cells that you can fill with shapes that the game presents to you in sets of three. Once you’ve placed all three on the grid, you get the next three; once a row or a column is filled with cells, it empties itself; and once you can no longer fit new shapes in the grid, it’s game over. ‘1010!’ takes up very little of your cognitive bandwidth, which means you have something to do that distracts you enough to keep you from feeling restless while allowing you to think about something more important at the same time.

‘Rytmos’ and ‘Lost in Play’ are fairly new: I installed them a couple weeks ago. ‘Rytmos’ is just a smidge like ‘Loop’ but richer with details and, indeed, knowledge. You link up some nodes on a board in a closed loop; each node is a musical instrument that, when it becomes part of the loop, plays a beat depending on its position. Suddenly you’re making music. There are multiple ‘planets’ in the game and each one has multiple puzzles involving specific instruments. You learn something and you feel good about it. It’s amazing. I’ve only played a few minutes of ‘Lost in Play’ thus far, and I’m looking forward to more because it seems to be of a piece with ‘Monument Valley’, from the forced-slow gameplay to the captivating visuals.

Aside from these games, I also play ‘Entanglement’ in the browser and ‘Factorio’ on my laptop. ‘Factorio’ is the motherlode, an absolute beast of a game for compulsive puzzle-solvers. In the game, you’re an engineer in the future who’s crash-landed on an alien planet and you need to build a rocket to get off of it. The gameplay is centred on factories, where you craft the various pieces required for more and more sophisticated components. In parallel, you mine metals, pump crude oil, extract uranium, and dig up coal; you smelt, refine, and burn them to get the parts required to build as well as feed the factories; you conduct research to develop and enhance automation, robotics, rocketry, and weapons; you build power plants and transmission lines, and deal with enormous quantities of waste; and you defend your base from the planet’s native life, a lone species of large, termite-like creatures.

I’ve been playing a single game for three years now. There’s no end in sight. Sometimes, when ‘Factorio’ leaves me enough of my brain to think about other things, I gaze with longing as if out of a small window at a world that has long passed me by…