Since Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman's announcement last week that India's Goods and Services Tax (GST) rates will be rationalised anew from September 22, I've been seeing a flood of pieces all in praise — and why not?
The GST regime has been somewhat controversial since its launch because, despite simplifying compliance for businesses and industry, it increased the costs for consumers. The Indian government exacerbated that pain point by undermining the fiscal federalism of the Union, increasing its revenues at the expense of states' as well as cutting allocations.
While there is (informed) speculation that the next Finance Commission will further undercut the devolution of funds to the states, GST 2.0 offers some relief to consumers in the form of making various products more affordable. Populism is popular, after all.
However, increasing affordability isn't always a good thing even if your sole goal is to increase consumption. This is particularly borne out in the food and nutrition domain.
For example, under the new tax regime, from September 22, the GST on pizza bread will slip from 5% to zero. This means both sourdough pizza bread and maida (refined flour) pizza bread will go from 5% to zero. However, because there is more awareness of maida as an ingredient in the populace and less so of sourdough, and because maida as a result enjoys a higher economy of scale and is thus less expensive (before tax), the demand for maida bread is likely to increase more than the demand for sourdough bread.
This is unfortunate: ideally, sourdough bread should be more affordable — or, alternatively, the two breads should be equally affordable as well as have threshold-based front-of-pack labelling. That is to say, liberating consumers to be able to buy new food products or more of the old ones without simultaneously empowering consumers to make more informed choices could tilt demand in favour of unhealthier foods.
Ultimately, the burden of non-communicable diseases in the population will increase, as will consumers' expenses on healthcare, dietary interventions, and so on. I explained this issue in The Hindu on September 9, 2025, and set out solutions that the Indian government must implement in its food regulation apparatus posthaste.
Without these measures, GST 2.0 will likely be bad news for India's dietary and nutritional ambitions.
In science, paradoxes often appear when familiar rules are pushed into unfamiliar territory. One of them is Parrondo’s paradox, a curious mathematical result showing that when two losing strategies are combined, they can produce a winning outcome. This might sound like trickery but the paradox has deep connections to how randomness and asymmetry interact in the physical world. In fact its roots can be traced back to a famous thought experiment explored by the US physicist Richard Feynman, who analysed whether one could extract useful work from random thermal motion. The link between Feynman’s thought experiment and Parrondo’s paradox demonstrates how chance can be turned into order when the conditions are right.
Imagine two games. Each game, when played on its own, is stacked against you. In one, the odds are slightly less than fair, e.g. you win 49% of the time and lose 51%. In another, the rules are even more complex, with the chances of winning and losing depending on your current position or capital. If you keep playing either game alone, the statistics say you will eventually go broke.
But then there’s a twist. If you alternate the games — sometimes playing one, sometimes the other — your fortune can actually grow. This is Parrondo’s paradox, proposed in 1996 by the Spanish physicist Juan Parrondo.
The answer to how combining losing games can result in a winning streak lies in how randomness interacts with structure. In Parrondo’s games, the rules are not simply fair or unfair in isolation; they have hidden patterns. When the games are alternated, these patterns line up in such a way that random losses become rectified into net gains.
Say there’s a perfectly flat surface in front of you. You place a small bead on it and then you constantly jiggle the surface. The bead jitters back and forth. Because the noise you’re applying to the bead’s position is unbiased, the bead simply wanders around in different directions on the surface. Now, say you introduce a switch that alternates the surface between two states. When the switch is ON, an ice-tray shape appears on the surface. When the switch is OFF, it becomes flat again. This ice-tray shape is special: the cups are slightly lopsided because there’s a gentle downward slope from left to right in each cup. At the right end, there’s a steep wall. If you’re jiggling the surface when the switch is OFF, the bead diffuses a little towards the left, a little towards the right, and so on. When you throw the switch to ON, the bead falls into the nearest cup. Because each cup is slightly tilted towards the right, the bead eventually settles near the steep wall there. Then you move the switch to OFF again.
As you repeat these steps with more and more beads over time, you’ll see they end up a little to the right of where they started. This is Parrando’s paradox. The jittering motion you applied to the surface caused each bead to move randomly. The switch you used to alter the shape of the surface allowed you to expend some energy in order to rectify the beads’ randomness.
The reason why Parrondo’s paradox isn’t just a mathematical trick lies in physics. At the microscopic scale, particles of matter are in constant, jittery motion because of heat. This restless behaviour is known as Brownian motion, named after the botanist Robert Brown, who observed pollen grains dancing erratically in water under a microscope in 1827. At this scale, randomness is unavoidable: molecules collide, rebound, and scatter endlessly.
Scientists have long wondered whether such random motion could be tapped to extract useful work, perhaps to drive a microscopic machine. This was Feynman’s thought experiment as well, involving a device called the Brownian ratchet, a.k.a. the Feynman-Smoluchowski ratchet. The Polish physicist Marian Smoluchowski dreamt up the idea in 1912 and which Feynman popularised in a lecture 50 years later, in 1962.
Picture a set of paddles immersed in a fluid, constantly jolted by Brownian motion. A ratchet and pawl mechanism is attached to the paddles (see video below). The ratchet allows the paddles to rotate in one direction but not the other. It seems plausible that the random kicks from molecules would turn the paddles, which the ratchet would then lock into forward motion. Over time, this could spin a wheel or lift a weight.
In one of his physics famous lectures in 1962, Feynman analysed the ratchet. He showed that the pawl itself would also be subject to Brownian motion. It would jiggle, slip, and release under the same thermal agitation as the paddles. When everything is at the same temperature, the forward and backward slips would cancel out and no net motion would occur.
This insight was crucial: it preserved the rule that free energy can’t be extracted from randomness at equilibrium. If motion is to be biased in only one direction, there needs to be a temperature difference between different parts of the ratchet. In other words, random noise alone isn’t enough: you also need an asymmetry, or what physicists call nonequilibrium conditions, to turn randomness into work.
Let’s return to Parrondo’s paradox now. The paradoxical games are essentially a discrete-time abstraction of Feynman’s ratchet. The losing games are like unbiased random motion: fluctuations that on their own can’t produce net gain because the gains become cancelled out. But when they’re alternated cleverly, they mimic the effect of adding asymmetry. The combination rectifies the randomness, just as a physical ratchet can rectify the molecular jostling when a gradient is present.
This is why Parrondo explicitly acknowledged his inspiration from Feynman’s analysis of the Brownian ratchet. Where Feynman used a wheel and pawl to show how equilibrium noise can’t be exploited without a bias, Parrondo created games whose hidden rules provided the bias when they were combined. Both cases highlight a universal theme: randomness can be guided to produce order.
The implications of these ideas extend well beyond thought experiments. Inside living cells, molecular motors like kinesin and myosin actually function like Brownian ratchets. These proteins move along cellular tracks by drawing energy from random thermal kicks with the aid of a chemical energy gradient. They demonstrate that life itself has evolved ways to turn thermal noise into directed motion by operating out of equilibrium.
Parrondo’s paradox also has applications in economics, evolutionary biology, and computer algorithms. For example, alternating between two investment strategies, each of which is poor on its own, may yield better long-term outcomes if the fluctuations in markets interact in the right way. Similarly, in genetics, when harmful mutations alternate in certain conditions, they can produce beneficial effects for populations. The paradox provides a framework to describe how losing at one level can add up to winning at another.
Feynman’s role in this story is historical as well as philosophical. By dissecting the Brownian ratchet, he demonstrated how deeply the laws of thermodynamics constrain what’s possible. His analysis reminded physicists that intuition about randomness can be misleading and that only careful reasoning could reveal the real rules.
In 2021, a group of scientists from Australia, Canada, France, and Germany wrote in Cancers that the mathematics of Parrondo’s paradox could also illuminate the biology of cancerous tumours. Their starting point was the observation that cancer cells behave in ways that often seem self-defeating: they accumulate genetic and epigenetic instability, devolve into abnormal states, sometimes stop dividing altogether, and often migrate away from their original location and perish. Each of these traits looks like a “losing strategy” — yet cancers that use these ‘strategies’ together are often persistent.
The group suggested that the paradox arises because cancers grow in unstable, hostile environments. Tumour cells deal with low oxygen, intermittent blood supply, attacks by the immune system, and toxic drugs. In these circumstances, no single survival strategy is reliable. A population of only stable tumour cells would be wiped out when the conditions change. Likewise a population of only unstable cells would collapse under its own chaos. But by maintaining a mix, the group contended, cancers achieve resilience. Stable, specialised cells can exploit resources efficiently while unstable cells with high plasticity constantly generate new variations, some of which could respond better to future challenges. Together, the team continued, the cancer can alternate between the two sets of cells so that it can win.
The scientists also interpreted dormancy and metastasis of cancers through this lens. Dormant cells are inactive and can lie hidden for years, escaping chemotherapy drugs that are aimed at cells that divide. Once the drugs have faded, they restart growth. While a migrating cancer cell has a high chance of dying off, even one success can seed a tumor in a new tissue.
On the flip side, the scientists argued that cancer therapy can also be improved by embracing Parrondo’s paradox. In conventional chemotherapy, doctors repeatedly administer strong drugs, creating a strategy that often backfires: the therapy kills off the weak, leaving the strong behind — but in this case the strong are the very cells you least want to survive. By contrast, adaptive approaches that alternate periods of treatment with rest or that mix real drugs with harmless lookalikes could harness evolutionary trade-offs inside the tumor and keep it in check. Just as cancer may use Parrondo’s paradox to outwit the body, doctors may one day use the same paradox to outwit cancer.
On August 6, physicists from Lanzhou University in China published a paper in Physical Review E discussing just such a possibility. They focused on chemotherapy, which is usually delivered in one of two main ways. The first, called the maximum tolerated dose (MTD), uses strong doses given at intervals. The second, called low-dose metronomic (LDM), uses weaker doses applied continuously over time. Each method has been widely tested in clinics and each one has drawbacks.
MTD often succeeds at first by rapidly killing off drug-sensitive cancer cells. In the process, however, it also paves the way for the most resistant cancer cells to expand, leading to relapse. LDM on the other hand keeps steady pressure on a tumor but can end up either failing to control sensitive cells if the dose is too low or clearing them so thoroughly that resistant cells again dominate if the dose is too strong. In other words, both strategies can be losing games in the long run.
The question the study’s authors asked was whether combining these two flawed strategies in a specific sequence could achieve better results than deploying either strategy on its own. This is the sort of situation Parrondo’s paradox describes, even if not exactly. While the paradox is concerned with combining outright losing strategies, the study has discussed combining two ineffective strategies.
To investigate, the researchers used mathematical models that treated tumors as ecosystems containing three interacting populations: healthy cells, drug-sensitive cancer cells, and drug-resistant cancer cells. They applied equations from evolutionary game theory that tracked how the fractions of these groups shifted in different conditions.
The models showed that in a purely MTD strategy, the resistant cells soon took over, and in a purely LDM strategy, the outcomes depended strongly on drug strength but still ended badly. But when the two schedules were alternated, the tumor behaved differently. The more sensitive cells were suppressed but not eliminated while their persistence prevented the resistant cells from proliferating quickly. The team also found that the healthy cells survived longer.
Of course, tumours are not well-mixed soups of cells; in reality they have spatial structure. To account for this, the team put together computer simulations where individual cells occupied positions on a grid; grew, divided or died according to fixed rules; and interacted with their neighbours. This agent-based approach allowed the team to examine how pockets of sensitive and resistant cells might compete in more realistic tissue settings.
Their simulations only confirmed the previous set of results. A therapeutic strategy that alternated between MTD and LDM schedules extended the amount of time before the resistant cells took over and while the healthy cells dominated. When the model started with the LDM phase in particular, the sensitive cancer cells were found to compete with the resistant cancer cells and the arrival of the MTD phase next applied even more pressure on the latter.
This is an interesting finding because it suggests that the goal of therapy may not always be to eliminate every sensitive cancer cell as quickly as possible but, paradoxically, that sometimes it may be wiser to preserve some sensitive cells so that they can compete directly with resistant cells and prevent them from monopolising the tumor. In clinical terms, alternating between high- and low-dose regimens may delay resistance and keep tumours tractable for longer periods.
Then again this is cancer — the “emperor of all maladies” — and in silico evidence from a physics-based model is only the start. Researchers will have to test it in real, live tissue in animal models (or organoids) and subsequently in human trials. They will also have to assess whether certain cancers, followed by a specific combination of drugs for those cancers, will benefit more (or less) from taking the Parrando’s paradox way.
[University of London mathematical oncologist Robert] Noble … says that the method outlined in the new study may not be ripe for a real-world clinical setting. “The alternating strategy fails much faster, and the tumor bounces back, if you slightly change the initial conditions,” adds Noble. Liu and colleagues, however, plan to conduct in vitro experiments to test their mathematical model and to select regimen parameters that would make their strategy more robust in a realistic setting.
Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced sweeping changes to the GST rates on September 3. However, I think the rate for software services (HSN 99831) will remain unchanged at 18%. This is a bummer because every time I renew my WordPress.com site or purchase software over the internet in rupees, the total cost increases by almost a fifth.
The disappointment is compounded by the fact that WordPress.com and many other software service providers provide adjusted rates for users in India in order to offset the country's lower purchasing power per capita. For example, the lowest WordPress and Ghost plans by WordPress.com and MagicPages.co, respectively, cost $4 and $12 a month. But for users in India, the WordPress.com plan costs Rs 200 a month while MagicPages.co offers a Rs 450 per month plan, both with the same feature set — a big difference. The 18% GST however wipes out some, not all, of these gains.
Paying for software services over the internet when they're billed in dollars rather than rupees isn't much different. While GST doesn't apply, the rupee-to-dollar rate has become abysmal. [Checks] Rs 88.14 to the dollar at 11 am. Ugh.
I also hoped for a GST rate cut on software services because if content management software in particular becomes more affordable, more people would be able to publish on the internet.
There’s no denying that there currently prevails a public culture in India that equates criticism, even well-reasoned, with pooh-poohing. It’s especially pronounced in certain geographies where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) enjoys majority support as well as vis-à-vis institutions that the subscribers of Hindu politics consider to be ripe for international renown, especially in the eyes of the country’s former colonial masters. The other side of the same cultural coin is the passive encouragement it offers to those who’d play up the feats of Indian enterprises even if they lack substantive evidence to back their claims up. While these tendencies are pronounced in many enterprises, I have encountered them most often in the spaceflight domain.
Through its feats of engineering and administration over the years, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has cultivated a deserved reputation of setting a high bar for itself and meeting them. Its achievements are the reason why India is one of a few countries today with a functionally complete space programme. It operates launch vehicles, conducts spaceflight-related R&D, has facilities to develop as well as track satellites, and maintains data-processing pipeliness to turn the data it collects from space into products usable for industry and academia. It is now embarking on a human spaceflight programme as well. ISRO has also launched interplanetary missions to the moon and Mars, with one destined for Venus in the works. In and of itself the organisation has an enviable legacy. Thus, unsurprisingly, many sections of the Hindutva brigade have latched onto ISRO’s achievements to animate their own propaganda of India’s greatness, both real and imagined.
The surest signs of this adoption are most visible when ISRO missions fail or succeed in unclear ways. The Chandrayaan 2 mission and the Axiom-4 mission respectively are illustrative examples. As if to forestall any allegations that the Chandrayaan 2 mission failed, then ISRO chairman K. Sivam said right after its Vikram lander crashed on the moon that it had been a “98% success”. Chandrayaan 2 was a technology demonstrator and it did successfully demonstrate most of those onboard very well. The “98%” figure, however, was so disproportionate as to suggest Sivan was defending the mission less on its merits than on its ability to fit into reductive narratives of how good ISRO was. (Recall, similarly, when former DCGI V.G. Somani claimed the homegrown Covaxin vaccine was “110% safe” when safety data from its phase III clinical trials weren’t even available.)
On the other hand, even as the Axiom-4 mission was about to kick off, neither ISRO nor the Department of Space (DoS) had articulated what Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla’s presence onboard the mission was expected to achieve. If these details didn’t actually exist before the mission, to participate in which ISRO had paid Axiom Space more than Rs 500 crore, both ISRO and the DoS were effectively keeping the door open to picking a goalpost of their choosing to kick the ball through as the mission progressed. If they did have these details but had elected to not share them, their (in)actions raised — or ought to have — difficult questions about the terms on which these organisations believed they were accountable in a democratic country. Either way, the success of the Axiom-4 mission vis-à-vis Shukla’s participation was something of an empty vessel: a ready receptacle for any narrative that could be placed inside ex post facto.
At the same time, raising this question has often been construed in the public domain, but especially on social media platforms, in response to arguments presented in the news, and in conversations among people interested in Indian spaceflight, as naysaying Shukla’s activities altogether. By all means let’s celebrate Shukla’s and by extension India’s ‘citius, altius, fortius’ moment in human spaceflight; the question is: what didn’t ISRO/DoS share before Axiom-4 lifted off and why? (Note that what journalists have been reporting since liftoff, while valuable, isn’t the answer to the question posed here.) While it’s tempting to think this pinched communication is a strategy developed by the powers that be to cope with insensitive reporting in the press, doing so would also ignore the political capture institutions like ISRO have already suffered and which ISRO arguably has as well, during and after Sivan’s term as chairman.
For just two examples of institutions that have historically enjoyed a popularity comparable in both scope and flavour to that of ISRO, consider India’s cricket administration and the Election Commission. During the 2024 men’s T20 World Cup that India eventually won, the Indian team had the least amount of travel and the most foreknowledge on the ground it was to play its semifinal game on. At the 2023 men’s ODI World Cup, too, India played all its matches on Sundays, ensuring the highest attendance for its own contests rather than be able to share that opportunity with all teams. The tournament is intended to be a celebration of the sport after all. For added measure, police personnel were also deployed at various stadia to take away spectators’ placards and flags in support of Pakistan in matches featuring the Pakistani team. The stage management of both World Cups only lessened, rather than heightened, the Indian team’s victories.
It’s been a similar story with the Election Commission of India, which has of late come under repeated attack from the Indian National Congress party and some of its allies for allegedly rigging their electronic voting machines and subsequently entire elections in favour of the BJP. While the Congress has failed to submit the extraordinary evidence required to support these extraordinary claims, doubts about the ECI’s integrity have spread anyway because there are other, more overt ways in which the once-independent institution of Indian democracy favours the BJP — including scheduling elections according to the availability of party supremo Narendra Modi to speak at rallies.
Recently, a more obscure but nonetheless pertinent controversy erupted in some circles when in an NDTV report incumbent ISRO chairman V. Narayanan seemed to suggest that SpaceX called one of the attempts to launch Axiom-4 off because his team at ISRO had insisted that the company thoroughly check its rocket for bugs. The incident followed SpaceX engineers spotting a leak on the rocket. The point of egregiousness here is that while SpaceX had built and flown that very type of rocket hundreds of times, Narayanan and ambiguous wording in the NDTV report made it out to be that SpaceX would have flown the rocket if not for ISRO’s insistence. What’s more likely to have happened is NASA and SpaceX engineers would have consulted ISRO as they would have consulted the other agencies involved in the flight — ESA, HUNOR, and Axiom Space — about their stand, and the ISRO team on its turn would have clarified its position: that SpaceX recheck the rocket before the next launch attempt. However, the narrative “if not for ISRO, SpaceX would’ve flown a bad rocket” took flight anyway.
Evidently these are not isolated incidents. The last three ISRO chairmen — Sivan, Somanath, and now Narayanan — have progressively curtailed the flow of information from the organisation to the press even as they have maintained a steady pro-Hindutva, pro-establishment rhetoric. All three leaders have also only served at ISRO’s helm when the BJP was in power at the Centre, wielding its tendency to centralise power by, among others, centralising the permissions to speak freely. Some enterprising journalists like Chethan Kumar and T.S. Subramanian and activists like r/Ohsin and X.com/@SolidBoosters have thus far kept the space establishment from resembling a black hole. But the overarching strategy is as simple as it is devious: while critical arguments become preoccupied by whataboutery and fending off misguided accusations of neocolonialist thinking (“why should we measure an ISRO mission’s success the way NASA measures its missions’ successes?”), unconditional expressions of support and adulation spread freely through our shared communication networks. This can only keep up a false veil of greatness that crumbles the moment it brooks legitimate criticism, becoming desperate for yet another veil to replace itself.
But even that is beside the point: to echo the philosopher Bruno Latour, when criticism is blocked from attending to something we have all laboured to build, that something is deprived of the “care and caution” it needs to grow, to no longer be fragile. Yet that’s exactly what the Indian space programme risks becoming today. Here’s a brand new case in point, from the tweets that prompted this post: according to an RTI query filed by @SolidBoosters, India’s homegrown NavIC satellite navigation constellation is just one clock failure away from “complete operational collapse”. The issue appears to be ISRO’s subpar launch cadence and the consequently sluggish replacement of clocks that have already failed.
6/6 Root Cause Analysis for atomic clock failures has been completed but classified under RTI Act Section 8 as vital technical information. Meanwhile public transparency is limited while the constellation continues degrading. #NavIC#ISRO#RTI
Granted, rushed critiques and critiques designed to sting more than guide can only be expected to elicit defensive posturing. But to minimise one’s exposure to all criticism altogether, especially those from learned quarters and conveyed in respectful language, is to deprive oneself of the pressure and the drive to solve the right problems in the right ways, both drawing from and adding to India’s democratic fabric. The end results are public speeches and commentary that are increasingly removed from reality as well as, more importantly, thicker walls between criticism and The Thing it strives to nurture.
On February 1, SpaceX launched its Starlink 11-4 mission onboard a Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket's reusable first stage returned safely to the ground and the second stage remained in orbit after deploying the Starlink satellites. It was to deorbit later in a controlled procedure and land somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. But on February 19 it was seen breaking up in the skies over Denmark, England, Poland, and Sweden, with some larger pieces crashing into parts of Poland. After the Polish space agency determined the debris to belong to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was asked about its liability. This was its response:
The FAA determined that all flight events for the SpaceX Starlink 11-4 mission occurred within the scope of SpaceX's licensed activities and that SpaceX satisfied safety at end-of-launch requirements. Per post-launch reporting requirements, SpaceX must identify any discrepancy or anomaly that occurred during the launch to the FAA within 90-days. The FAA has not identified any events that should be classified as a mishap at this time. Licensed flight activities and FAA oversight concluded upon SpaceX's last exercise of control over the Falcon 9 vehicle. SpaceX posted information on its website that the second stage from this launch reentered over Europe. The FAA is not investigating the uncontrolled reentry of the second stage nor the debris found in Poland.
I've spotted a lot of people on the internet (not trolls) describing this response as being in line with Donald Trump's "USA first" attitude and reckless disregard for the consequences of his government's actions and policies on other countries. It's understandable given how his meeting with Zelenskyy on February 28 played out as well as NASA acting administrator Janet Petro's disgusting comment about US plans to "dominate" lunar and cislunar space. However, the FAA's position has been unchanged since at least August 18, 2023, when it issued a "notice of proposed rulemaking" designated 88 FR 56546. Among other things:
The proposed rule would … update definitions relating to commercial space launch and reentry vehicles and occupants to reflect current legislative definitions … as well as implement clarifications to financial responsibility requirements in accordance with the United States Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act.
Under Section 401.5 2(i), the notice stated:
(1) Beginning of launch. (i) Under a license, launch begins with the arrival of a launch vehicle or payload at a U.S. launch site.
The FAA's position has likely stayed the same for some duration before the August 2023 date. According to Table 1 in the notice, the "effect of change" of the clarification of the term "Launch", under which Section 401.5 2(i) falls, is:
None. The FAA has been applying these definitions in accordance with the statute since the [US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act 2015] went into effect. This change would now provide regulatory clarity.
(i) For an orbital launch of a vehicle without a reentry of the vehicle, launch ends after the licensee’s last exercise of control over its vehicle on orbit, after vehicle component impact or landing on Earth, after activities necessary to return the vehicle or component to a safe condition on the ground after impact or landing, or after activities necessary to return the site to a safe condition, whichever occurs latest;
(ii) For an orbital launch of a vehicle with a reentry of the vehicle, launch ends after deployment of all payloads, upon completion of the vehicle's first steady-state orbit if there is no payload deployment, after vehicle component impact or landing on Earth, after activities necessary to return the vehicle or component to a safe condition on the ground after impact or landing, or after activities necessary to return the site to a safe condition, whichever occurs latest; …
In part B of this document, under the heading "Detailed Discussion of the Final Rule" and further under the sub-heading "End of Launch", the FAA presents the following discussion:
[Commercial Spaceflight Federation] and SpaceX suggested that orbital launch without a reentry in proposed §450.3(b)(3)(i) did not need to be separately defined by the regulation, stating that, regardless of the type of launch, something always returns: Boosters land or are disposed, upper stages are disposed. CSF and SpaceX further requested that the FAA not distinguish between orbital and suborbital vehicles for end of launch.
The FAA does not agree because the distinctions in § 450.3(b)(3)(i) and (ii) are necessary due to the FAA's limited authority on orbit. For a launch vehicle that will eventually return to Earth as a reentry vehicle, its on-orbit activities after deployment of its payload or payloads, or completion of the vehicle's first steady-state orbit if there is no payload, are not licensed by the FAA. In addition, the disposal of an upper stage is not a reentry under 51 U.S.C. Chapter 509, because the upper stage does not return to Earth substantially intact.
Reentry vehicle means a vehicle designed to return from Earth orbit or outer space to Earth substantially intact. A reusable launch vehicle that is designed to return from Earth orbit or outer space to Earth substantially intact is a reentry vehicle.
This means Section 450.1 (b) 3(i) under "Streamlined Launch and Reentry License Requirements" of 2020 applies to the uncontrolled deorbiting of the Falcon 9 upper stage in the Starlink 11-4 mission. In particular, according to the FAA, the launch ended "after the licensee’s last exercise of control over its vehicle on orbit", which was the latest relevant event.
Back to the "Detailed Discussion of the Final Rule":
Both CSF and SpaceX proposed “end of launch” should be defined on a case-by-case basis in pre-application consultation and specified in the license. The FAA disagrees, in part. The FAA only regulates on a case-by-case basis if the nature of an activity makes it impossible for the FAA to promulgate rules of general applicability. This need has not arisen, as evidenced by decades of FAA oversight of end-of-launch activities. That said, because the commercial space transportation industry continues to innovate, §450.3(a) gives the FAA the flexibility to adjust the scope of license, including end of launch, based on unique circumstances as agreed to by the Administrator.
The world currently doesn't have a specific international law or agreement dealing with accountability for space debris that crashes to the earth, including paying for the damages such debris wreaks and imposing penalties on offending launch operators. In light of this fact, it's important to remember the FAA's position — even if it seems disagreeable — has been unchanged for some time even as it has regularly updated its rulemaking to accommodate private sector innovation within the spirit of the existing law.
Trump is an ass and I'm not holding out for him to look out for the concerns of other countries when pieces of made-in-USA rockets descend in uncontrolled fashion over their territories, damaging property or even taking lives. But that the FAA didn't develop its present position afresh under Trump 2.0, and that it was really developed with feedback from SpaceX and other US-based spaceflight operators, is important to understand that its attitude towards crashing debris goes beyond ideology, encompassing the support of both Democrat and Republican governments over the years.
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.
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.
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.
While space is hard, there are also different kinds of hardness. For example, on April 15, ISRO issued a press release saying it had successfully tested nozzles made of a carbon-carbon composite that would replace those made of Columbium alloy in the PSLV rocket’s fourth stage and thus increase the rocket’s payload capacity by 15 kg. Just 15 kg!
The successful testing of the C-C nozzle divergent marked a major milestone for ISRO. On March 19, 2024, a 60-second hot test was conducted at the High-Altitude Test (HAT) facility in ISRO Propulsion Complex (IPRC), Mahendragiri, confirming the system’s performance and hardware integrity. Subsequent tests, including a 200-second hot test on April 2, 2024, further validated the nozzle’s capabilities, with temperatures reaching 1216K, matching predictions.
Granted, the PSLV’s cost of launching a single kilogram to low-earth orbit is more than 8 lakh rupees (a very conservative estimate, I reckon) – meaning an additional 15 kg means at least an additional Rs 1.2 crore per launch. But finances alone are not a useful way to evaluate this addition: more payload mass could mean, say, one additional instrument onboard an indigenous spacecraft instead of waiting for a larger rocket to become available or postponing that instrument’s launch to a future mission.
But equally fascinating, and pride- and notice-worthy, to me is the fact that ISRO’s scientists and engineers were able to fine-tune the PSLV to this extent. This isn’t to say I’m surprised they were able to do it at all; on the contrary, it means the feat is as much about the benefits accruing to the rocket, and the Indian space programme by extension, as about R&D advances on the materials science front. It speaks to the oft-underestimated importance of the foundations on which a space programme is built.
Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre … has leveraged advanced materials like Carbon-Carbon (C-C) Composites to create a nozzle divergent that offers exceptional properties. By utilizing processes such as carbonization of green composites, Chemical Vapor Infiltration, and High-Temperature Treatment, it has produced a nozzle with low density, high specific strength, and excellent stiffness, capable of retaining mechanical properties even at elevated temperatures.
A key feature of the C-C nozzle is its special anti-oxidation coating of Silicon Carbide, which extends its operational limits in oxidizing environments. This innovation not only reduces thermally induced stresses but also enhances corrosion resistance, allowing for extended operational temperature limits in hostile environments.
The advances here draw from insights into metallurgy, crystallography, ceramic engineering, composite materials, numerical methods, etc., which in turn stand on the shoulders of people trained well enough in these areas, the educational institutions (and their teachers) that did so, and the schooling system and socio-economic support structures that brought them there. A country needs a lot to go right for achievements like squeezing an extra 15 kg into the payload capacity of an already highly fine-tuned machine to be possible. It’s a bummer that such advances are currently largely vertically restricted, except in the case of the Indian space programme, rather than diffusing freely across sectors.
Other enterprises ought to have these particular advantages ISRO enjoys. Even should one or two rockets fail, a test not work out or a spacecraft go kaput sooner than designed, the PSLV’s new carbon-carbon-composite nozzles stand for the idea that we have everything we need to keep trying, including the opportunity to do better next time. They represent the idea of how advances in one field of research can lead to advances in another, such that each field is no longer held back by the limitations of its starting conditions.
While space is hard, there are also different kinds of hardness. For example, on April 15, ISRO issued a press release saying it had successfully tested nozzles made of a carbon-carbon composite that would replace those made of Columbium alloy in the PSLV rocket’s fourth stage and thus increase the rocket’s payload capacity by 15 kg. Just 15 kg!
The successful testing of the C-C nozzle divergent marked a major milestone for ISRO. On March 19, 2024, a 60-second hot test was conducted at the High-Altitude Test (HAT) facility in ISRO Propulsion Complex (IPRC), Mahendragiri, confirming the system’s performance and hardware integrity. Subsequent tests, including a 200-second hot test on April 2, 2024, further validated the nozzle’s capabilities, with temperatures reaching 1216K, matching predictions.
Granted, the PSLV’s cost of launching a single kilogram to low-earth orbit is more than 8 lakh rupees (a very conservative estimate, I reckon) – meaning an additional 15 kg means at least an additional Rs 1.2 crore per launch. But finances alone are not a useful way to evaluate this addition: more payload mass could mean, say, one additional instrument onboard an indigenous spacecraft instead of waiting for a larger rocket to become available or postponing that instrument’s launch to a future mission.
But equally fascinating, and pride- and notice-worthy, to me is the fact that ISRO’s scientists and engineers were able to fine-tune the PSLV to this extent. This isn’t to say I’m surprised they were able to do it at all; on the contrary, it means the feat is as much about the benefits accruing to the rocket, and the Indian space programme by extension, as about R&D advances on the materials science front. It speaks to the oft-underestimated importance of the foundations on which a space programme is built.
Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre … has leveraged advanced materials like Carbon-Carbon (C-C) Composites to create a nozzle divergent that offers exceptional properties. By utilizing processes such as carbonization of green composites, Chemical Vapor Infiltration, and High-Temperature Treatment, it has produced a nozzle with low density, high specific strength, and excellent stiffness, capable of retaining mechanical properties even at elevated temperatures.
A key feature of the C-C nozzle is its special anti-oxidation coating of Silicon Carbide, which extends its operational limits in oxidizing environments. This innovation not only reduces thermally induced stresses but also enhances corrosion resistance, allowing for extended operational temperature limits in hostile environments.
The advances here draw from insights into metallurgy, crystallography, ceramic engineering, composite materials, numerical methods, etc., which in turn stand on the shoulders of people trained well enough in these areas, the educational institutions (and their teachers) that did so, and the schooling system and socio-economic support structures that brought them there. A country needs a lot to go right for achievements like squeezing an extra 15 kg into the payload capacity of an already highly fine-tuned machine to be possible. It’s a bummer that such advances are currently largely vertically restricted, except in the case of the Indian space programme, rather than diffusing freely across sectors.
Other enterprises ought to have these particular advantages ISRO enjoys. Even should one or two rockets fail, a test not work out or a spacecraft go kaput sooner than designed, the PSLV’s new carbon-carbon-composite nozzles stand for the idea that we have everything we need to keep trying, including the opportunity to do better next time. They represent the idea of how advances in one field of research can lead to advances in another, such that each field is no longer held back by the limitations of its starting conditions.
While space is hard, there are also different kinds of hardness. For example, on April 15, ISRO issued a press release saying it had successfully tested nozzles made of a carbon-carbon composite that would replace those made of Columbium alloy in the PSLV rocket's fourth stage and thus increase the rocket's payload capacity by 15 kg. Just 15 kg!
The successful testing of the C-C nozzle divergent marked a major milestone for ISRO. On March 19, 2024, a 60-second hot test was conducted at the High-Altitude Test (HAT) facility in ISRO Propulsion Complex (IPRC), Mahendragiri, confirming the system's performance and hardware integrity. Subsequent tests, including a 200-second hot test on April 2, 2024, further validated the nozzle's capabilities, with temperatures reaching 1216K, matching predictions.
Granted, the PSLV's cost of launching a single kilogram to low-earth orbit is more than 8 lakh rupees (a very conservative estimate, I reckon) – meaning an additional 15 kg means at least an additional Rs 1.2 crore per launch. But finances alone are not a useful way to evaluate this addition: more payload mass could mean, say, one additional instrument onboard an indigenous spacecraft instead of waiting for a larger rocket to become available or postponing that instrument's launch to a future mission.
But equally fascinating, and pride- and notice-worthy, to me is the fact that ISRO's scientists and engineers were able to fine-tune the PSLV to this extent. This isn't to say I'm surprised they were able to do it at all; on the contrary, it means the feat is as much about the benefits accruing to the rocket, and the Indian space programme by extension, as about R&D advances on the materials science front. It speaks to the oft-underestimated importance of the foundations on which a space programme is built.
Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre … has leveraged advanced materials like Carbon-Carbon (C-C) Composites to create a nozzle divergent that offers exceptional properties. By utilizing processes such as carbonization of green composites, Chemical Vapor Infiltration, and High-Temperature Treatment, it has produced a nozzle with low density, high specific strength, and excellent stiffness, capable of retaining mechanical properties even at elevated temperatures.
A key feature of the C-C nozzle is its special anti-oxidation coating of Silicon Carbide, which extends its operational limits in oxidizing environments. This innovation not only reduces thermally induced stresses but also enhances corrosion resistance, allowing for extended operational temperature limits in hostile environments.
The advances here draw from insights into metallurgy, crystallography, ceramic engineering, composite materials, numerical methods, etc., which in turn stand on the shoulders of people trained well enough in these areas, the educational institutions (and their teachers) that did so, and the schooling system and socio-economic support structures that brought them there. A country needs a lot to go right for achievements like squeezing an extra 15 kg into the payload capacity of an already highly fine-tuned machine to be possible. It's a bummer that such advances are currently largely vertically restricted, except in the case of the Indian space programme, rather than diffusing freely across sectors.
Other enterprises ought to have these particular advantages ISRO enjoys. Even should one or two rockets fail, a test not work out or a spacecraft go kaput sooner than designed, the PSLV's new carbon-carbon-composite nozzles stand for the idea that we have everything we need to keep trying, including the opportunity to do better next time. They represent the idea of how advances in one field of research can lead to advances in another, such that each field is no longer held back by the limitations of its starting conditions.
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