Monthly Archives: June 2018

My laptop, a 2015 MacBook Pro that survived being drowned during the Chennai floods that year, went into the ICU today. A service person said the RAM was fried, along with some other adjacent components. When a friend asked if … Continue reading →

Today’s post is just a very interesting tidbit I found when conducting research for a piece for #GRIT – about how, in the 19th century, the White House had a sewer gas problem so severe that Chester A. Arthur, the … Continue reading →

Nagraj Gollapudi on the yo-yo fitness test, ESPN Cricinfo: A yo-yo test involves a player shuttling between two cones that are set 20 metres apart on flat ground. He starts on a beep and needs to get to the cone … Continue reading →

Here’s another instance of an unsound university press release exaggerating the conclusions of a study. The headline goes “Children in India demonstrate religious tolerance, study finds”. According to the 2011 Census, 182 million people in India are between the ages … Continue reading →

There’s a formula in thermodynamics 101 called Carnot’s theorem that goes like this: This is a famous equation because it defines the absolute upper limit of efficiency achievable by a heat engine, irrespective of how much its performance is optimised. … Continue reading →

I’ve had migraines since 2006, when I started college. The pain is excruciating, disabling, ruinous, usually on both sides of my head. I can sense a migraine coming 12-24 hours beforehand, in the form of a small sphere of ache … Continue reading →

There are many similarities between Kaala, Pa Ranjith’s second flick with Rajinikanth, and their first film together, Kabali (2016). The thematic one is the most obvious, where Ranjith focuses on class mobility, caste discrimination and social welfare and brings them into … Continue reading →

I’m no artist, nor a scholar of art. I can’t analyse images to pick out patterns. Heck, I think an image is well-crafted only because those commentators I trust have said it. My admiration of formal art is only by … Continue reading →

I received an email from a fellow journalist last week with the following subject: Banks wont recover even half of the Rs 4,000,000,000,000 bad loans of 37 companies That number with all those zeroes is four trillion. It’s a large … Continue reading →