Monthly Archives: September 2018
Board games
Every Thursday, a Bangalore-based community called ReRoll organises an evening of boardgames open to all at Lahe Lahe, a café in Indira Nagar. According to the organisers, about 40 people come each time and about 10-15% of them are first-timers … Continue reading
Appeasement v. truth
Late last year, Facebook inducted The Weekly Standard (TWS), an American news outlet, as one of its only five fact-checkers and the sole conservative voice in the group. Earlier this week, TWS raised objections about an article published by Think … Continue reading
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US court settles bitter gene editing patent case
On September 10, a US court settled an increasingly churlish patent dispute between two research institutions in the country, the University of California (UC) in Berkeley and the Broad Institute, Massachusetts, with great consequence for the commercial use of a … Continue reading
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Idea of a country
The short excerpt below from Patriots and Partisans by Ram Guha caught my attention because it offers a simple definition of the idea of India (at the risk of oversimplification). One may have encountered it recently in Amartya Sen’s Argumentative … Continue reading
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Criticism of ISRO
The Statesman‘s editorial on India’s human spaceflight programme ends with the following line: Only after placing the seventh and the last satellite in the NavIC system costing Rs 1,400 crore did ISRO realise the atomic clocks in the satellites had become dysfunctional, … Continue reading
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How do you determine the naturalness of homosexuality?
“Homosexual carnal intercourse between two consenting adults” is legal in India now. It wasn’t for lack of reason or scientific data that the item of legislation that rendered sodomy illegal – Section 377 – had been retained for so long. … Continue reading
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DotA redux – AI loses
What happened An artificially intelligent (AI) gaming system built by a company co-led by Elon Musk took on some of the best human players at a game more complex than chess or Go last week – and lost. AI losing … Continue reading
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