Month: February 2022

• ‘Aatmanirbharta through science’

  The Week magazine distinguished itself last year by picking Indian Council of Medical Research chief Balram Bhargava as its ‘person of the year’ for 2021. And now, ahead of National Science Day tomorrow, The Week has conducted an “exclusive” interview with science minister Jitendra Singh. Long Small story short, it’s rubbish.

  

  I discovered the term ‘Gish gallop’ in a 2013 blog post by David Gorsky, in which he wrote about the danger of acquiescing to cranks’ request for experts to debate them on a public stage. While such invitations may appear to legitimate experts to be an opportunity to settle the matter once and for all, it never works that way: the stage and the debate become platforms on which the cranks can spew their bullshit, in the name of having the right in the limited context of the event to do so, and use the inevitably imperfect rebuttal – limited by time and other resources – as a way to legitimise some or all of their claims. (Also read in this context: ‘No, I Will Not Debate You’.)

  One particular tactic to which cranks resort in these circumstances is, Gorsky wrote, “to Gish gallop”: to flood their rhetoric with new terms, claims, arguments, etc. with little regard for their relevance or accuracy, in an effort to inundate their opponents with too many points on which to push back.

  In their ‘interview’, with the help of kowtowing questions and zero push-back, The Week has allowed Jitendra Singh to Gish gallop. In this case, however, instead of Singh drawing credibility from his ‘opponent’ being an expert who couldn’t effectively refute his contentions, he derives his upper-hand from his interlocutor being a well-known, once-reputed magazine, and secretly from its (possibly enforced) supinity.

  The penultimate question is the best, to me: “Yet, India’s good work gets shadowed by pseudoscience utterances. Somehow, your government has not been able to quieten the mumbo jumbo.” Dear interviewer, the government itself is the origin of a lot of the mumbo jumbo. Any question that isn’t founded on that truth will always ignore the problem, and will not elicit a solution.

  Overall, the interview is a press release worded in the form of a Q&A, with a healthy chance that the opportunity to publish it was dangled in front of The Week in exchange for soft questions. Yet its headline may be accurate in a way the magazine didn’t intend: this government is going to achieve its mythical goal of perfect ‘Aatmanirbharta’ only by boring a hole through science, and reason and common sense.

  Happy national science day!

  Featured image: Jitendra Singh, May 2014. Photo edited (see original here). Credit: Press Information Bureau/GoI, GODL – India.

  2022.02.27

• NSD II

  That the Modi government has been able to coopt National Science Day as well as it has speaks only to the occasion’s moral vacuity. India’s National Science Day is the day on which physicist C.V. Raman discovered the optical effect named for him, and the government zeroed in on this discovery, over numerous others, because it won Raman a Nobel Prize. (If another scientist wins another science Nobel Prize in future, will the day be changed?) The Day’s foundation in effect has nothing to say about the spiritual, moral and aspirational scaffolding of science’s practice in the country. It doesn’t encourage, for example, the ethical practice of science, or that science must as a duty inform politics and governance, or that the scientific publics must in all contexts strive to uphold the spirit of critical thinking.

  National Science Day has no prescriptions attached to it; it simply commemorates one man’s one achievement at one time. (The theme ascribed to each science day is equally purposeless.) So its coattails can be easily hitched to any wagon, even to pseudoscience – as the BJP in power at the Centre has done, by celebrating National Science Week and having its ministers talk in the press about National Science Day while calling the inclusion of Ayurveda and homeopathy within the national healthcare system “integrated science” and talking about misinformation and disinformation as if everyone else but itself produces them. “Integrated Approach in S&T for Sustainable Future” is, incidentally, the theme for National Science Day 2022.

  Much as I dislike the concept, I do believe we need a National Science Day – but not the one that exists. The latter is a container, a receptacle that is only too happy to hold anything poured inside, whether an elixir or sewage. Instead, we need a National Science Day to remember what we have lost as a result of the occasion’s current character. For one, we have lost an opportunity for an occasion that reaffirms a science-related thing to which we can all aspire.

  For example, we can renew a vow every year on this day to keep considerations of caste, class and creed out of our universities and research facilities. (So that when one scientist does, others understand in a simple way why they have to stand up and speak up.) We can promise to keep science from contributing to any form of violence – physical, mental, economic, structural. (So that when the government develops “chilli grenades”, both scientists and the non-scientists at large have a simple justification for resistance.) We can attach scientific success to open knowledge and open access so that the fruits of scientists’ labour are available for everyone to enjoy. (So an administrator doesn’t withhold a scientist’s promotion because the latter didn’t publish peer-reviewed papers that would end up behind a paywall.) And so forth. There are many virtues to be had through the honest practice of science, and a national festival – such as it is – is a phenomenal opportunity to formalise them for science’s benefit.

  We also need a National Science Day that skips over the obsession with the scientific temper, or at least combines scientific temper with social responsibility. But one goose step at a time.

  2022.02.27

• Art is something for cryptocurrencies to con

  Joe Dunthorne penned an amusing article in London Review earlier this month about encountering a fake account of him on Instagram, whose user promoted the real Dunthorne’s poems and book. Dunthorne begins by citing Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double, in which a doppelgänger usurps the life of a nondescript young man named Yakov Golyadkin by taking over his life and social circles. The original is eventually confined to an asylum because everyone in his life, such as it was, prefers the new fellow.

  Dunthorne himself quests for the identity of the person impersonating him, only to find, through many twists and turns, that it is a guy who constantly changes his identity as he goes about scamming people to invest in cryptocurrencies by posing as someone whose work doesn’t directly involve these digital entities in the first place.

  It’s a fascinating con – although not the one Dunthorne may believe it is, as he writes: “Then there was the one where scammers tricked people into investing $2.7 million in cartoons of apes. In fact, this was a double scam, convincing buyers first that the images were timeless works of digital art and then that they should pay huge amounts of money to an organisation that didn’t exist.” Dismissing these investments because they’re directed at companies that “don’t exist” in the physical realm is naïve. Nonetheless, while Dunthorne ponders if a random stranger has done a Yakov Golyadkin on him, there is a con here – one that brings to mind a post by a user named kevbrinx on Tumblr:

  Tumblr is known for being a place where creativity happens because it’s cool, it’s fun, it’s different and difficult! “I will make it because I can”.

  The majority of NFT artists I’ve seen don’t share the same mentality. And that is worrying.

  I’m sure out there are many works of art that aren’t made by a computer and have been created with the intention to inspire. However, just like it has been demonstrated on Twitter, who buys wouldn’t do it just to showcase their precious possessions?

  Where is the value in that?

  It might be not what NFTs have been created for originally, but right now they represent vanity and greed to many. Expecially when there are other safer ways to support artists economically.

  …

  “The focus of NFTs is not actually the art”.

  The post is addressed to Matt Mullenweg, the cofounder of WordPress. Mullenweg’s response is ambiguous, noncomittal:

  The list of things to do before we got to anything NFT-related is super-duper long. I don’t share all your worries about NFTs, but I am not fanboying them. The only NFTs I hold myself right now are Wapuu related: https://web3wp.com/

  If Mullenweg doesn’t see the problem that already exists, he’s not going to solve it.

  Cryptocurrencies have emerged as a (disagreeable) way to fund art, and therefore supposedly support artists, using the Trojan horse of NFTs. (For a detailed yet accessible detailed explanation of this concept, see here.) Dunthorne’s story illustrates that cryptocurrency evangelists – including scammers – are looking for ways to promote it without letting their prospects be tainted by the conflict of interest of how much they have to gain: lots of money, and the advantage of being invisible to law enforcement – in exchange for allowing struggling artists to enter the cool cryptocurrencies circuit.

  But what Dunthorne leaves unsaid is that the modus operandus of his scammer is indistinguishable from those who claim they’re legitimately supporting artists by trading their work using cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

  Separating the item in question from the value of it that’s being traded may seem virtuous, but it’s really the essence of the scam: art becomes another financial asset, one that the rich and the powerful are already familiar with. Art here is being used to give cryptocurrencies something to do, and to look any bit respectable while doing it. But breaking into this art-trading system only legitimises the rituals of the moneyed and renders art, and its makers, inseparable from their limited representation in the plutosphere.

  The purpose is money, and profiteering, not the art itself or the issues embedded therein. The antics of the cryptocurrency-proponent Metakovan last year, buying an NFT of a collage of pictures for $69 million, popularised the concept and set this ship sailing, but in his case itself, as I wrote:

  Metakovan’s move was ostensibly about getting the world’s attention and making it think about racism in, for some reason, art patronage. And it seems opportunistic more than anything else, a “shot fired” to be able to improve one’s own opportunities for profit in the crypto space instead of undermining the structural racism and bigotry embedded in the whole enterprise. This is a system which owes part of its current success to the existence of social and economic inequalities, which has laboured over the last few decades to exploit cheap labour and poor governance in other, historically beleaguered parts of the world to entrench technocracy and scientism over democracy and public accountability.

  To quote Rosanna McLaughlin of The White Review:

  The most shocking aspect of the NFT to the art intelligentsia is its brazen entanglement with finance. Trading art has always been a pastime of the wealthy. Much of what counts for art history consists of flattering portrayals of the rich and powerful, and artists have long been expected to perform what Tom Wolfe called the Art Mating Ritual – attracting the interest of wealthy patrons and conservative institutions, while simultaneously presenting as Bohemians and renegades. Yet with the NFT, the distinction between art and asset seems to have disappeared. In place of the curated exhibition is the auction website; symbols of the market have seeped into the aesthetic language of the art itself. Prices, not ideas, dominate.

  Despite the promise of “art for everyone”, the final destination of the NFT might not actually be art. Art may simply be a useful way to advertise the possibilities of a new technology. “I’ve done everything from fashion, fragrances to endorsements,” Paris Hilton says, adding that NFTs are another way for “fans to have a piece of me”. As well as working with the rapper Ice Cube, Jones recently made an NFT for the whisky company Macallan, to be auctioned alongside a very expensive cask of scotch. This, it seems, is a taste of where NFTs may be heading: not a radical new model for trading art, but a digital marketing bauble.

  Anil Dash, the CEO of Glitch:

  Meanwhile, most of the start-ups and platforms used to sell NFTs today are no more innovative than any random website selling posters. Many of the works being sold as NFTs aren’t digital artworks at all; they’re just digital pictures of works created in conventional media.

  …

  There’s only one exception to the lack of interest in blockchain apps today: apps for trading cryptocurrencies themselves. What results is an almost hermetically sealed economy, whose currencies exist only to be traded and become derivatives of themselves. If you squint, it looks like an absurd art project.

  After a decade of whiplash-inducing changes in valuation, billions of dollars are now invested in cryptocurrencies, and the people who have made those bets can’t cash in their chips anywhere. They can’t buy real estate with cryptocurrency. They can’t buy yachts with it. So the only rich-person hobby they can partake in with their cryptowealth is buying art. And in this art market, no one is obligated to have any taste or judgment about art itself. If NFT prices suddenly plunge, these investors will try buying polo horses or Davos tickets with cryptocurrencies instead. Think of a kid who’s spent the day playing Skee-Ball and now has a whole lot of tickets to spend. Every toy looks enticing. NFTs have become just such a plaything.

  Finally, Laurie Rojas, cofounding editor of Caesura, on the inevitability of NFTs because of art’s foregone relationship with capitalism:

  Commentators, however, actively neglect the lesson learned since the late ’60s that trying to escape art’s commodification is futile, or merely a pretense, and rarely reflect on the artwork’s connection to capitalist social relations. The connection between these two tendencies — that art’s value is determined/critiqued by commodity “fetishism” or that art’s value is determined/critiqued by socio-political position-taking — is deeper than it appears at first glance. These “critical” tendencies express how much Art has become caught between being an end in itself and a means to an end. NFTs are the latest phenomenon to express this.

  Even with all the financial speculation around NFTs, the point that Art’s value is determined within the parameters of a society in which commodification is the dominant form of social relations (i.e., capitalism) has too easily been abandoned for poorly defined neologisms. Rarely is there a reflection on the relation of the artwork — its form, technique, beauty, contemplativeness, incomprehensibility, and what have you — to the increasingly barbaric commodity form.

  Has the art world gone mad? No. This is business as usual.

  Featured image credit: Karolina Grabowska/Pexels.

  2022.02.22

• For colours, dunk clay in water

  It’s not exactly that simple, but it’s still a relatively simple way to produce a lovely palette of colours. Researchers from Norway and Germany have reported that when a synthetic clay called Na-fluorohectorite is suspended in water, the material separates out in thin nanosheets – i.e. nanometre-thick layers of Na-fluorohectorite separated by water. And these sheets produce structural colours.

  Colour is the frequency of light that we see, after other objects have absorbed all the other frequencies of light. For example, if you have a green-coloured bottle in front of you in a well-lit room, you see that it’s green because the bottle has absorbed all other frequencies in the visible light, leaving only the green frequency to reach your eyes. On the other hand, structural colours are produced when the structure of an object manipulates the incoming light to pronounce some frequencies and screen others.

  When light enters between the Na-fluorohectorite layers in water, it bounces between the layers even as some beams of light interfere with other beams. The layer’s final colours are the colours that survive these interactions.

  The amazing thing here is that class 10 physics allows you to glean some useful insights. As the researchers wrote in their paper, “The constructive interference of white light from individual nanosheets is described by the Bragg-Snell’s law”. The equation for this law:

  2d(n² − sin²θ)^1/2 = mλ

  d is the distance between the nanosheet layers. θ is the angle of observation of the layers. m is a constant. λ is the wavelength of the light “enhanced by constructive interference”, according to the paper.

  When the colour visible changes according to the angle of observation, θ, the phenomenon is called iridescence. However, the researchers found that Na-fluorohectorite layers were non-iridescent, i.e. the colour of each layer looked the same from different angles of observation. They attributed this to bends and wrinkles in the nanosheets, and to turbostratic organisation: the layers are slightly rotated relative to each other.

  Similarly, the effective refractive index of the light, interacting with two distinct materials, is given by this equation:

  n = (n₁²Φ₁ + n₂²Φ₂)^1/2

  n₁ is the refractive index of one material and Φ₁ is the amount of that material in the overall setup (by volume). So also for n₂ and Φ₂.

  Taking both equations together, by controlling the values of n and d, they researchers could control the colour of light that survives its interaction with the water-clay composite. In fact, as we’ll see later, the volume of clay suspended in the water is very low (around 1% at a time), so the effective refractive can be approximated to be the refractive index of water – around 1.33. So if n is fixed, the researchers would only have to change d – the distance between the – to change the structural colours that the clay produced!

  Here’s a short video of the team’s efforts:

  The researchers found that some white light still survives and dulls the colours on display, which is why they’ve used a dark substrate (in the background). It absorbs the white light, accentuating the other colours.

  This is a simple workaround – but it’s also inefficient and limits the applications of their discovery. So they found another way. The researchers dunked Na-fluorohectorite in water along with atoms of caesium. Within “seconds to minutes”, the Na-fluorohectorite formed double sheets – two layers of Na-fluorohectorite sandwiched together by a thin layer of caesium atoms. And these double layers produced bright colours.

  

  The double layers form so rapidly because of a phenomenon called osmotic swelling. The surfaces of the Na-fluorohectorite single-layers are negatively charged. The caesium ion is positively charged, and gets attracted to these surfaces. If two layers, called L1 and L2, are closer to each other than to other layers, then the concentration of caesium ions between these two layers will be significantly higher than in the rest of the water. This prevents the water from entering the gap between L1 and L2, and allows them to practically stick to each other.

  

  There’s more: the researchers also found that they could change the colours by adding or removing water. This is wonderfully simple, but also to be expected. The separation between two nanosheets – i.e. between L1 and L2 – is affected by the concentration of caesium ions in the water. So if you add more water, the concentration of ions drops, the separation increases and the colour changes.

  An edited excerpt from the paper’s discussion section, on the findings’ implications:

  Because of the sustainability and abundance of clay minerals, the present system carries considerable potential for upscaled applications in various areas ranging from pigments in cosmetics and health applications to windows and tiles. The results and understanding obtained here on synthetic clays should be transferred to natural clays, where vermiculite … presents itself as the most suitable candidate for upscaling the concept presented here. … our results could break new ground when embedding appropriate amounts of these clay nanolayers into transparent but otherwise mechanically weak matrices, providing structural coloration, mechanical strength, and tunable stability at the same time.

  Featured image credit: Tim Mossholder/Pexels.

  2022.02.22

• Streaming now: the 24/7 human centipede

  You could be easily forgiven for not having watched, or even knowing about, the 2009 film The Human Centipede. If you hadn’t heard about this film earlier, its title can be a reverse-spoiler: you probably think a ‘human centipede’ is a twisted metaphor for some detestable aspect of the human condition, only to discover that it is in fact grossly literal. In the film, a surgeon kidnaps three people and stitches them together, anus to mouth, to form a centipede, each segment of which is an adult human. The film’s writer and director Tom Six released two more films with the same premise in 2011 and 2015, each more deranged than the last. A friend who managed to watch the third film, simply called The Human Centipede: Final Sequence, said the centipede itself might have been the least objectionable thing about it.

  I had occasion to recall these films when, late last month, the Bigg Boss franchise launched Bigg Boss Ultimate (in Tamil), a reality TV show that follows the usual template of a bunch of celebrities being confined in a purpose-built house fit with cameras, supplied with all amenities, and directed by the unseen ‘Bigg Boss’ to perform various tasks together as viewers watch and vote to evict celebrities they dislike from the house. The last person still in the house wins a lot of money. But Bigg Boss Ultimate has an additional ‘feature’: instead of being edited into 60-minute episodes that are released in one or two installments every week, it is live-streamed 24/7 (with a day’s deference) on the OTT platform Disney+ Hotstar. It’s an offset but continuous relay of the participants’ lives, with everything from them lazing around chit-chatting to having loud arguments being watched by lakhs of viewers in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere. The mind boggles at what so many people consider to be entertainment, but it boggles more at one factoid that I learnt many years ago and its odd, unsettling resonance the premise of Bigg Boss Ultimate.

  The parent concept for the ‘Bigg Boss’ franchise is the Dutch TV franchise ‘Big Brother’, conceived in 1997 by Dutch media tycoon Johannes de Mol, Jr. and produced and aired as a TV show from 1999. And one of the very first directors of this show, which ran for six seasons, was Tom Six. Six has called his three centipede films First Sequence, Full Sequence and Final Sequence. In 2016, he stitched the three films together together and released what he called Complete Sequence – a “movie centipede” in which each film followed the next while being able to stand alone in its own right. Paralleling his efforts, the ‘Bigg Boss’ franchise has now evolved (or devolved?) into an unending broadcast from the house of celebrities. What might have been a single weekly episode earlier now blends seamlessly into the next one, stretching into a 1,700-hour centipede of celebrity culture and voyeurism.

  Make no mistake: as vapid as the show is, it’s also a pinnacle of consumerism. It’s hard to watch any segment of Complete Sequence without at least retching, a reaction honed by evolution to keep our bodies away from things that might make us sick or kill us. But Bigg Boss Ultimate has created an analogous centipede for the human psyche, and has convinced people that it’s’ a harmless, even desirable, way to bide their time.

  Featured image: Tom Six in June 2013. Credit: Nigeldehond/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

  2022.02.19

• If WordPress supports NFTs, should I boycott it?

  I’m a blogger, an amateur coder and an employee at a nonprofit organisation. My experience in these realms of endeavour is such that, taken together, keeping my blog online means a) using a trustworthy web host, b) using a simple as well as moderately featureful content management system, c) achieving this at a reasonable monthly cost, and d) not having to spend any time whatsoever thinking about the setup’s availability or security. Currently WordPress.com is fulfilling (a), (b), (c) and (d).

  The next best alternative is a shared host offering WordPress hosting followed by a VPS managed through a control panel and with WordPress. If I drop WordPress, the options available to me dwindle rapidly. There’s Ghost, of course, but not much else. There are very many content management systems out there but the vast majority don’t have an option to import WordPress posts and also have either fewer features or too many for my limited programming chops to handle.

  (I should stress here the extent to which I’m out of sorts in this area. I don’t understand all the differences between cloud hosting and VPS hosting. I kinda know what shared hosting is but I don’t know why its problems don’t assail other forms of hosting. It took me years to get the hang of static-site generators and what web-servers really do. I barely get Docker now and have no frigging idea what Kubernetes is or does. My sense of what is good is simply some better-informed people’s sense of good.)

  In this scenario, can I afford to boycott all platforms and services that are interested in, or whose leaders are interested in, incorporating NFTs into their products?

  The answer I think is a distinct and discomfiting ‘no’. WordPress cofounder Matt Mullenweg is pro-NFTs, as are Ghost’s John O’Nolan, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Twitch’s Justin Kan, as well as Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Services, Akamai (for blockchain in finance) and many, many others. Hosting companies like Amazon Web Services and Digital Ocean ban the use of their services to mine cryptocurrencies, but I doubt they will assume a similarly hardline position against the storage of NFTs.

  When you’re interested in boycotting the work of people who favour the use of a technology you distrust and dislike, but then find yourself having boycotted every platform, service and/or product you’ve needed and/or admired thus far, what do you do?

  This conundrum is largely already real. Many of our internet-based tools today are the brainchildren of people and companies operating primarily out of that American white Democratic libertarian tech space (although I’m bearing in mind only the worst of this group here, principally Zuckerberg). I really like my smartphone but I have many problems with the practices of the company that made it. The same thing goes for my laptop, Kindle, debit card, WhatsApp account, Fire Stick, a vision-impaired aunt’s voice-activated phone, my neighbour’s electric scooter, etc.

  My (first) point is that a certain geographically restricted demographic has monopolised innovation in the information technology sector worldwide. As a result, the best tools we have available to use (in this category) to do the work we’d like to do are often made by people and companies doing other technological things with which we’re often likely to disagree yet from which we can’t ever fully divest ourselves, and whose products we can’t readily replace with those of alternative provenance either.

  At the same time the builders of these tools have accrued more decision-making power than the tools’ users, the result of which is that – for one example – we’re all contemplating the possibility of a “web3” erected on blockchain technology even though the population of people interested in that future is eminently minuscule. Another is that WordPress powers 43% of all websites on the web while Mullenweg has the single-most say on whether this mass will one day became NFT-friendly.

  The second point is that of quality and scale, which taken together ensure a good user experience at a relatively low (monetary) cost. For example, if the best American cloud-hosting companies today start to offer pro-NFT services, my hosting options will suddenly be limited to Asian competitors with shady business practices and pricier European ones that, while being better with user privacy and such, also charge more as a result. (I’m neither aware of nor know how to evaluate hosting companies in other parts of the world). I get the philosophy of “either pay or be the product”, but here’s the thing: I work in journalism in India and don’t have much money to spare, not to mention neither the time nor the inclination to spend becoming a better technologist.

  The third and final point is about the act of boycotting itself. Why has it been meaningful? It has been meaningful because it has had the power to force managers to change their minds in favour of consumers’ demands. Would it be as meaningful as it has been before to boycott WordPress or Twitter or Google? No, because boycotting does not have that power against companies whose breadth of innovation is so diverse that they build the tools with which to organise protests against tree-cutting as well as – to slip into a metaphor here – manufacture the axes with which they will be cut.

  At this point, a quote from Elementary (2:21), the TV show on Amazon Prime – another behemoth, wouldn’t you say? – comes to mind: “Piffle. They want an army of drones keeping tabs on all of us.” Since when do you care about other people’s privacy? someone else asks. “I make use of the tools available to me. That doesn’t mean to say I have to applaud every advance in the field.”

  I suppose this is my conclusion… for now. I think this will allow me to continue to use WordPress while retaining the moral authority to criticise Mullenweg’s support for, or even his equivocation on, NFTs… for now.

  2022.02.17

• Marie Curie: An icon or ‘in the way’?

  Who would have been the most iconic woman physicist of all time if the Nobel Prizes didn’t exist? In 2017, Science published an article by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Marie Curie. I got to it today because of this tweet:

  Marie Sklodowska Curie was the first woman to receive a #NobelPrize and first person to receive the honor twice. In 2017, @SciMagBooks explored the dynamics that established Curie as "the most iconic of all female scientists." https://t.co/dYA8ifRDqg

  — Science Magazine (@ScienceMagazine) February 16, 2022

  One of the most well-known woman physicists and scientists – if not the most well-known – of the post-industrial era is Marie Curie. This is due in large part to the fact that she became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (physics, 1903), the first woman to win any Nobel Prize, the first person as well as the first woman to win the Nobel Prize twice (chemistry, 1911) and in two different fields.

  As awesome as this roster of accomplishments sounds, they were all manufactured. The Nobel Prizes create prestige by being selective: they pick awardees for a prize after rejecting hundreds of equally eligible candidates for arbitrary reasons. One important reason is that potential laureates have to be nominated and are then considered by a committee of ‘luminaries’ behind closed doors. Both the nomination and the deliberation have historically been dominated by men, so as such few women were nominated in the first place and even fewer made it to the shortlist, if at all.

  Ultimately, using the Nobel Prizes to describe “iconic” scientists forces us to inherit the Nobel Prizes’ prejudices. As a people, do we want to assemble a list of iconic scientists – members of society that were shaped by our collective morals and aspirations, and worked among us, often struggling through shared problems – that is assailed by the flaws that beset the Nobel Prizes? I assume the answer is ‘no’.

  While Marie Curie may deserve her laurels for all the notable work that she did, we must remember that notability is like a fraction: the numerator is that individual’s contribution and the denominator is the background of achievements against which we examine it. The Nobel Prizes have horribly skewed the denominator in favour of men and of pseudo-signifiers of notability, like publishing in certain journals at certain times from certain countries.

  Marie was the first woman to record a clutch of achievements vis-à-vis the Nobel Prizes, and all of them were the prize-giving committee’s failures – not Marie’s success. We don’t know how many other women everyone from the first nominators to the final committee overlooked. More importantly, we don’t know how many more women, and scientists of other genders, we the people ourselves overlooked, because we were too busy paying attention to the Nobel Prizes.

  I can’t claim to speak for Marie Curie but I know it’s not fair to call her the “most iconic” on the back of a false distinction. As Hemmungs Wirtén wrote in her article:

  Curie’s track record is well known. So far, the only woman twice awarded the Nobel Prize – her 1903 and 1911 distinctions in physics and chemistry, respectively – ensure her a permanent seat on the Mount Olympus of science. … The material that transformed Curie from person to persona comes to us largely via Eve Curie’s famous hagiography of her mother, Madame Curie. …

  Recent years have seen this idealized version of Curie challenged by less-celebratory interpretations. In Julie Des Jardin’s The Madame Curie Complex, Curie is described as “a superhuman anomaly,” one who causes female scientists frustration by establishing unrealistic expectations of scientific accomplishment, rather than inspiring them to excel. … For some, Curie is simply in the way. “Stop talking about Marie Curie,” suggested Rachel Swaby in a piece in Wired in 2015. She casts too big a shadow, is too well known, and has become the one and only female scientist in the public imagination, Swaby argues. There is some merit to this argument.

  Featured image: An edited photo of Marie Curie, c. 1920. Credit: Public domain.

  2022.02.16

• A nominal milestone

  In 2018, I discovered that my blog posts since mid-2014 had taken on a somewhat different character than those before, becoming more critical and paralleling my increasing, and increasingly nagging, questions about what it means to be a journalist – particularly a science journalist – in India at this time. So I reorganised my blog at that point to support this character more, including to truncate the archives at June 2014. And I discovered a short while ago that on this new blog, I have published 1,000 posts. The milestone to me is nominal (references to such round numbers always bring to mind a comment by physicist Kip Thorne, that to celebrate multiples of 10 is mostly to celebrate our choice of a decimal system). This said, it’s gratifying that such a large number of posts have had readers and subscribers – sometimes one, sometimes a few thousands, but never zero. So thank you all for reading along. It means a lot to me. 🙂 Take care.

  2022.02.15

• PTI, celebrating scientists, and class/caste

  SpaceX announced a day or two ago that the crew of its upcoming Polaris Dawn mission will include a space operations engineer at the company named Anna Menon. As if on cue, PTI published a report on February 15 under the headline: “SpaceX engineer Anna Menon to be among crew of new space mission”. I’ve been a science journalist for almost a decade now and I’ve always seen PTI publish reports pegged on the fact that a scientist in the news for some reason has an Indian last name.

  In my view, it’s always tricky to celebrate scientists for whatever they’ve done by starting from their nationality. Consider the case of Har Gobind Khorana, whose birth centenary we marked recently. Khorana was born in Multan in pre-independence India in 1922, and studied up to his master’s degree in the country until 1945. Around 1950, he returned to India for a brief period in search of a job. He didn’t succeed, but fortunately received a scholarship to return to the UK, where he had completed his PhD. After that Khorana was never based in India, and continued his work in the UK, Canada and the US.

  He won a Nobel Prize in 1968, and India conferred him with the Padma Vibhushan in 1969, and India’s Department of Biotechnology floated a scholarship in his name in 2007 (together with the University of Wisconsin and the India-US S&T Forum). I’m glad to celebrate Khorana for his scientific work, or his reputation as a teacher, but how do I celebrate Khorana because he was born in India? Where is the celebration-worthy thing in that?

  To compare, it’s easy for me to celebrate Satyendra Nath Bose for his science as well as his nationality because Bose studied and worked in India throughout his life (including at the University of Dhaka in the early 1920s), so his work is a reflection of his education in India and his struggles to succeed, such as they were, in India. An even better example here would be that of Meghnad Saha, who struggled professionally and financially to make his mark on stellar astrophysics. But Khorana completed a part of his studies in India and a part abroad and worked entirely abroad. When I celebrate his work because he was Indian, I’m participating in an exercise that has no meaning – or does in the limited, pernicious sense of one’s privileges.

  The same goes for Anna Menon, and her partner Anil Menon, a flight surgeon whom NASA selected to be a part of its astronaut crew earlier this year. According to Anil’s Wikipedia page, he was in India for a year in 2000; other than that, he studied and worked in the US from start to today. I couldn’t find much about Anna’s background online, except that her last name before she got married to Anil in 2016 was Wilhelm, that she studied her fourth grade and completed her bachelor’s and master’s studies in the US, and that there is nothing other than her partner’s part Indian heritage (the other part is Ukrainian) to suggest she has a significant India connection.

  So celebrating Anna Menon by sticking her name in a headline makes little sense. It’s not like PTI has been reporting on her work over time for it to single her out in the headline now. The agency should just have said “SpaceX announces astronaut crew for pioneering Polaris Dawn mission” or “With SpaceX draft, Anna Menon could beat her partner Anil to space”. There’s so much worth celebrating here, but gravitating towards the ‘Menon’ will lead you astray.

  This in turn gives rise to a question about one’s means, and in turn one’s class/caste (historically as well as today, both the chance to leave the country to study, work and live abroad and the chance to conduct good work and have it noticed has typically accrued and accrues to upper-caste, upper-class peoples – Saha’s example again comes to mind; such chances have also been stacked against people of genders other than cis-male).

  When we talk about a scientist who did good work in India, we automatically talk about the outcomes of privileges that they enjoy. Similarly, when we talk of a scientist doing good work in a different country, we also talk about implicit caste/class advantage in India, the country of origin, that allowed them to depart and advantages they subsequently came into at their destination.

  But when we place people who are doing something noteworthy in the spotlight for no reason other than because they have Indian last names, we are celebrating nothing except this lopsided availability of paths to success (broadly defined) – without critiquing the implied barriers to finding similar success within India itself.

  We need to think more critically about who we are celebrating and why: if there is no greater reason than that they have had a parent or a family rooted in India, the story must be dropped. If there is a greater reason, that should define the headline, the peg, etc. And if possible the author should also accommodate a comment or two about specific privileges not available to most scientists and which might have made the difference in this case.

  This post benefited from valuable feedback from Jahnavi Sen.

  2022.02.15

• ‘Steps in the right direction’ are not enough

  This is a step in the right direction, and the government needs to do more.

  You often read articles that have this sentence, typically authored by experts who are writing about some new initiative of the Indian government. These articles are very easy to find after the government has made a slew of announcements – such as during the Union budget presentation.

  These articles have the following structure, on average: introducing the announcement, a brief description of what the announcement is about, comments about its desirability, and finally what the government should do to improve (often the bottom 50% of the article).

  There was a time when such articles could have been understood to be suggestions to the government. Some news publications like The Hindu and Indian Express have traditionally prided themselves on counting influential lawmakers among the readers of their op-ed pages and editorials. But almost no one could think this is still the case, at least vis-à-vis the national government.

  The one in power since 2014, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has always done only what it wants, frequently (and perhaps deliberately, if its actions during the COVID-19 pandemic are anything to go by) to the exclusion of expert advice. And this government has launched many schemes, programmes, missions, etc. that are steps in the right direction, and that’s it. They have almost never become better with time, and certainly not because bona fide experts demanded it.

  Some examples: Ayushman Bharat, KISAN, Swachh Bharat, Mudra Yojana and ‘Smart Cities’ (too many instances to cite). Most of these initiatives have been defined by lofty, even utopian, goals but lack the rigorous, accountable and integral implementation that these goals warrant. As such, the government’s PR and troll machineries simply spin the ministers’ announcements at the time they are made for media fodder, and move on.

  To be sure, the government has some other initiatives it has worked hard to implement properly, such as ‘Make in India’ and the GST – a courtesy it has reserved for activities that contribute directly to industrialisation and economic growth, reflected in the fact that such growth has come in fits and starts, and has been limited to the richer.

  So at this time, to laud “steps in the right direction” followed by suggestions to improve such initiatives is worse than a mistake: it is to flout an intentional ignorance of the government’s track record.

  Instead, an article would be better if it didn’t give the government the benefit of the doubt, and criticised it for starting off on a weak note or for celebrating too soon.

  Apart from making suggestions to the government, such articles have served another purpose: to alert their readers, the people, to what needs to happen for the initiatives in question to be deemed successful. So the experts writing them could also consider pegging their statements on this purpose – that is, communicating to their readers as to what components an initiative lacks and why, therefore, it would be premature to hope it will do good.

  2022.02.14