Root Privileges

Month: May 2022

  • Hosting a Ghost blog on Fly.io

    Fly.io is a platform as a service (PaaS) provider. I discovered it after the Heroku hack earlier this year precipitated many discussions on Hacker News about suitable alternatives.

    Among them, I found Render.com and Fly.io to be most suitable (no affiliate links). Railway.app didn’t make the cut because it doesn’t have persistent storage, which imposed certain limitations on how much Ghost could simplify your blogging workflow, e.g. changing themes. I’m sure there are other PaaS cos but these appeared to be the most popular alternatives.

    Between Fly.io and Render.com, the former seemed better because it has more locations and has a generous free tier. This said, you’ll find that hosting on either can be much cheaper and come with more peace of mind than with many other options.

    So without further ado, here’s a noob’s guide to hosting your Ghost blog on Fly.io.

    Install the Fly.io command line interface

    Open the Terminal app on your Mac or its counterpart on Windows/Linux. There…

    On MacOS

    brew install flyctl

    On Windows

    iwr https://fly.io/install.ps1 -useb | iex

    On Linux

    curl -L https://fly.io/install.sh | sh

    Create a folder for your blog and then move into it

    Within the Terminal itself, type:

    mkdir <name-of-your-blog>

    cd <name-of-your-blog>

    Sign up for a Fly.io account

    flyctl auth signup

    This will open a tab in your default browser and start the sign-up process. Fly.io will ask for your card details. You won’t be charged unless you exceed the limits of the free plan; it requires your card to prevent people from abusing the resources in its free plan. Once you’re done signing up, check your Terminal (or its counterpart), where it should say something like “you’re signed from <your-email-ID>”. If you see it, good.

    Launch a Ghost site

    flyctl launch --image=ghost:5-alpine --no-deploy

    You’ll be asked to choose a region at which to situate your site. Use up and down arrows on your keyboard select your region of choice and hit enter.

    This step will generate a TOML file in the folder you’re in, called fly.toml. The contents of this file will dictate what Fly.io needs to do the next time you deploy your site. Become able to edit the file with this command:

    nano fly.toml

    Some checks

    The first line will say app = "<your-app-name>". The name will be something like fiery-shadow-1234. Make sure the url environment variable is equal to "fiery-shadow-1234.fly.dev". Also make sure that internal_port value, under [[services]], is 2368.

    One addition

    In a new line after the one that reads port = 443, add the following:

     [[services.ports]]
    handlers = ["http"]
    port = 80

    Once you’re done, you can exit with ctrl + x.

    Create a volume that will store your site’s database

    Fly.io offers up to 3 GB of storage on its free plan. This proved more than sufficient for my blog, which has 10 years’ worth of posts and images. Going ahead, you could host images on Flickr or Cloudinary (both offer sufficiently ample free plans).

    flyctl volumes create data --size 2

    (‘2’ here refers to the volume’s size in GB.)

    You will be asked to choose a region in which to deploy the volume – choose the same one as for your site.

    Mount the volume

    Open the fly.toml file and check for a section called [mounts]. If there isn’t one, add it.

     [mounts]
    source = "data"
    destination = "/var/lib/ghost/content"

    Exit with ctrl + x.

    You’re ready to fly.

    Launch

    Type the following command and hit enter:

    flyctl deploy

    The Terminal will show you the progress of your deployment. You can also view it on your new Fly.io dashboard, under ‘Monitoring’ on the left sidebar. Your site will be ready if you see a line that says “1 desired, 1 placed, 1 healthy, 0 unhealthy”. If you see it, open a tab on your browser and navigate to fiery-shadow-1234.fly.dev to see your Ghost site.

    If, however, you run into trouble, check out Fly.io’s troubleshooting guide.

    Custom domain

    To use a custom domain for your site, navigate to ‘Certificates’ on the left sidebar on your Fly.io dashboard and click ‘Add certificate’. Follow the instructions that appear on screen to, first, verify that you own the domain you’re using and, second, add the A and AAAA records – both with your domain registrar.

    Say your domain is example.com. Once Fly.io verifies the records, open the fly.toml file and edit the url thus:

    url = "example.com"

    Exit and redeploy your site:

    flyctl deploy

    Importing posts

    If you, have a sizeable JSON file of your exported Ghost posts, the CMS may fail repeatedly to import them. To get around this, go to ‘Scale’ on your dashboard sidebar and set the “Size name” to shared-cpu-1x and “Memory” to 1GB. You should be able to import the JSON file now.

    Once the import is done, you can reset the “Memory” to 256MB, which the free plan offers. You might incur a small charge for this short-lived change (the billing is per-second). You can check Fly.io’s prices on this page. In any case, you should expect to pay lower than if you were to host with Ghost(Pro) or self-host on Digital Ocean. Ghost(Pro) also offers to manage the setup so you can focus on your site, but that’s also the purpose of PaaS.

    To have your (forthcoming) posts backed up, you could set up a Zapier integration that copies the contents of each new post – taken from the RSS feed – into a Doc file in a folder in your Google Drive account. Again, Zapier offers this for free (as long as you’re not the sort of furious blogger who publishes three posts a day every day).

    A final note

    Peace of mind is important, especially if you’re not familiar with the tools you’re using to set up your site. Launching your blog based on instructions from the internet is one thing; putting out a fire when something goes wrong will be something else entirely.

    With PaaS, this worry is lower, but providers like Fly.io, Render.com and Railway.app are still oriented at developers, and so is their support team and documentation. This is to say that even if they help you, they will expect some level of technical chops from you.

    If you’re confident that you can manage, go ahead because there are significant advantages. One of them, for me personally, is that with regular backups I have a relatively risk-free environment in which to learn these things, and I believe that this knowledge will serve me well in the longer term.

    Root Privileges itself will continue to be a WordPress site hosted in a more ‘conventional’ way because it’s too important for me to be experimenting with at this point. But I’ll be changing my publishing workflow to be Fly + Ghost first, meaning I’ll be publishing posts there first and, more importantly, regularly thinking about how I can improve my experience there.

    Sources

    I compiled this guide based on instructions on the following pages:

    The authors of the latter two guides have put together nearly complete instructions. But each of their guides taken separately didn’t work for me whereas a combination did. If my guide didn’t work for you, you can also check out their guides and where they’ve deviated.

    I should also mention that I discovered that a Ghost blog could be hosted on Fly.io after finding that Anil Dash’s blog is.

  • Thoughts on the WordPress.com ‘Starter’ plan

    WordPress.com announced a new ‘Starter’ plan for its users on May 25 after significant backlash from many members of its community of users that a previous price revision had completely disregarded the interests of bloggers – by which I mean those writing to be read and discussed, and not primarily to make money. My own post on the matter blew up on Hacker News and caught the attention of WordPress.com CEO Dave Martin and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg.

    All of it was warranted: the previous price revision eliminated the ‘Personal’, ‘Premium’, ‘Business’ and ‘E-commerce’ plans in favour a single plan that combined all their features into a $15-a-month bundle that, WordPress.com added, users could only pay for 12 months at a time. WordPress.com’s rationale appeared to be that the ‘Pro’ plan was an almost perfect substitute for the ‘Business’ plan but was $10 cheaper.

    But the company management, led by Martin, overlooked a few crucial details in the process: the pricing change was sudden and unannounced, and included an anathematic traffic limit on the free plan (which it removed shortly after); there were no plans between the free and ‘Pro’ plans, forcing even those indifferent towards making money – which was most bloggers including myself – to shell out $180 dollars a year just to add a custom domain; in exchange, these users received a trove of features most of which were useless (e.g. to sell products); and the free plan had its storage decreased by 66%.

    I know “free” doesn’t really mean that when coming from the mouth of an internet platform or provider of internet-related services, but WordPress.com had set up exactly this expectation among its users: that they should never have to pay if they’re on the free plan. Look for Matt Mullenweg saying some version of “we want to democratise publishing on the web” (LMGTFY) and you’ll see what I mean. But it needs to acknowledge that what you get for free is less and less usable. I’m not saying don’t shrink the free plan; I’m saying stop pretending that it’s still just as good.

    Members of the WordPress.com team should in effect stop claiming that they are rooting to improve access to any kind of publishing because the company’s actions on the pricing issue thus far haven’t been the actions of one with that vision. Instead, it should be more honest and recognise the conflict between increasing access to publishing tools and platforms on the one hand and its need to increase its profits on the other, and take cognisance of its apparent struggle to balance these priorities in its products and communicate the changes to its users.

    This brings me back to the new ‘Starter’ plan. It costs $5 a month, also billable only yearly, and has two big changes from its most comparable legacy counterpart, the ‘Personal’ plan: it offers Google Analytics integration and it doesn’t remove ads. The former is confusing because almost none of the people who commented negatively on the WordPress.com post announcing the ‘Pro’ plan and the subsequent forum discussion mentioned wanting access to Google Analytics. The native analytics are pretty good and suffice for bloggers. The latter is more confusing because the ‘Personal’ plan cost $4 a month and removed ads. Why should I pay a dollar more every month and still put up with ads? Unless WordPress.com makes a lot of money through these ads (which I’ve been unable to ascertain with five minutes of googling). The confusion is exacerbated by the fact that most people who wanted a cheaper plan wanted the ability to add a custom domain and to remove ads.

    (Interestingly, WordPress.com has many thousands of blogs lying dormant or unused, all of which also carry ads from WordPress’s WordAds network. If WordPress.com deleted these sites, would their hosting costs drop? Of course, doing so will raise questions about the importance of WordPress.com’s commitment to keeping the sites it hosts online forever.)

    This said, I’m not very particular on this issue, especially after Dave Martin indicated to WPTavern that they need to make more money on subscriptions: “Finding the right balance between the value that we deliver to our customers and the price that we charge in exchange for that value is something that generally has to be iterated towards. We plan to do just that.” Costs are increasing, I understand.

    But I’m still disappointed on three counts:

    1. Importance of monthly pricing – Martin told WPTavern that the company plans to “experiment” with monthly billing, suggesting that it’s no longer on par in terms of importance with the pricing itself. I would have liked to sign up for the ‘Pro’ plan by paying $15 a month to access the ability to add plugins, use premium themes and access the “advanced” SEO and social media tools. This would have been comparable in benefits to managed hosting by Flywheel or LightningBase (no affiliate links), with the bonus that the people who make WordPress also being in charge of my blog’s hosting. But a one-time expense of $180 (or the new India price, Rs 10,800) is not one I can bear, nor, judging by the comments on the ‘Pro’ plan announcement post, most other bloggers who are not in North America or Europe.
    2. India prices – The region-specific price for India for the ‘Starter’ plan is the same as that in NA/EU, and for the ‘Pro’ plan, it hasn’t come down by as much as would be required to make annual payments affordable. I don’t understand how/why the ‘Starter’ plan costs as much in India as it does in NA/EU when the erstwhile ‘Personal’ plan cost 1.5x lower in India – except perhaps if WordPress.com is eyeing big growth in India.
    3. Uncertainty and triumphalism – Martin responded to my post, wrote on the forum and told WPTavern that his team’s communication deserved to be called out. But the ‘Starter’ plan announcement on the WordPress.com blog, which has more than 90 million subscribers, is bereft of any admission of wrong-doing (which Martin spelt out in other fora); together with a triumphalist tone for the announcement itself, issues with the ‘Starter’ plan and no clear roadmap on what comes next (“this was the first of a couple of phases of changes”, Martin told WPTavern), the announcement wasn’t nearly as fulfilling as I expected it to be.

    This brings me to the last and also the most grating issue for me: “we are listening”, both Martin and his support-staff colleagues repeatedly said on the forum, but as one comment pointed out, listening is a passive activity. Listening when people are shouting at you out of frustration, disappointment and confusion is the bare minimum and not a virtue. And it’s because I know WordPress.com can do better that I take the trouble to say that it needs to do better.

    What we wanted, and want, from WordPress.com was/is a constant and intimate awareness of the (not-insubstantial number of) people who don’t give a damn about using WordPress.com to make money but give a big damn about using it to publish posts for the world to read and talk about. We need to know whether WordPress.com intends to maintain this awareness going ahead, and whether it will listen to its bloggers first – as the least common denominators – the next time a big change is around the corner.

    (A similar thing appears to have happened with the proposal of the ‘WordPress performance team’ to make WebP the default image type on hosted sites.)

  • A tale of two myopias, climate change and the present participle

    The Assam floods are going on. One day, they will stop. The water will subside in many parts of the state but the things that caused the floods will continue to work, ceaselessly, and will cause them to occur again next year, and the year after and so on for the foreseeable future.

    Journalists, politicians and even civil society members have become adept at seeing the floods in space. Every year, as if on cue, there have been reports on the cusp of summer of floodwaters inundating many districts in the state, including those containing and surrounding the Kaziranga national park; displacing lakhs of people and killing hundreds; destroying home, crop, cattle and soil; encouraging the spread of diseases; eroding banks and shores; and prompting political leaders to promise all the help that they can muster for the affected people. But the usefulness of the spatial cognition of the Assam floods has run its course.

    Instead, now, we need to inculcate a temporal cognition, whether this alone or a spatio-temporal one. The reason is that more than the floods themselves, we are currently submerged by the effects of two myopias, like two rocks tied around our necks that are dragging us to the bottom. The first one is sustained by the members of our political class, such as Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma and Union home minister Amit Shah, when they say that they will avail all the support and restitution to displaced people and the relatives of those killed directly or indirectly by the floods.

    The floods are not the product of climate change but of mindless infrastructure ‘development’, the construction of dikes and embankments, encroachment of wetlands and plains, destruction of forests and the over-extraction resources and its consequences. A flood happens when the water levels rise, but destruction is the result of objects of human value being in the waters’ way. More and more human property is being located in places where the water used to go, and more and more human property is being rendered vulnerable to being washed away.

    When political leaders offer support to the people after every flood (which is the norm), it is akin to saying, “I will shoot you with a gun and then I will pay for your care.” Offering people support is not helpful, at least not when it stops there, followed by silence. Everyone – from parliamentary committees to civil society members – should follow the utterances of Shah, Sarma & co. (both BJP and non-BJP leaders, including those of the Congress, CPI(M), DMK, TMC, etc.) through time, acknowledge the seasonality of their proclamations, and bring them to book for failing to prevent the floods from occurring every year, instead of giving them brownie points for providing support on each occasion post facto.

    The second myopia exists on the part of many journalists, especially in the Indian mainstream press, and their attitude towards cyclones, which can be easily and faithfully extrapolated to floods as well. Every year for the last two decades at least, there has been a cyclone or two that ravaged two states in particular: Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal (the list included Odisha but it has done well to mitigate the consequences). And on every occasion plus some time, reports have appeared in newspapers and magazines of fisherpeople in dire straits with their boats broken, nets torn and stomachs empty; of coastal properties laid to waste; and, soon after, of fuel and power subsidies, loan waivers and – if you wait long enough – sobering stories of younger fishers migrating to other parts of the country looking for other jobs.

    These stories are all important and necessary – but they are not sufficient. We also need stories about something new – stories that are mindful of the passage of time, of people growing old, the rupee becoming less valuable, the land becoming more recalcitrant, and of the world itself passing them all by. We need the present participle.

    This is not a plea for media houses to commoditise tragedy and trade in interestingness but a plea to consider that these stories miss something: the first myopia, the one that our political leaders espouse. By keeping the focus on problem X, we also keep the focus on the solutions for X. Now ask yourself what X might be if all the stories appearing in the mainstream press are about post-disaster events, and thus which solutions – or, indeed, points of accountability – we tend to focus on to the exclusion of others. We also need stories – ranging in type from staff reports to reported features, from hyperlocal dispatches to literary essays – of everything that has happened in the aftermath of a cyclone making landfall near, say, Nellore or North 24 Parganas, whether things have got better or worse with time, whether politicians have kept their promises to ameliorate the conditions of the people there (especially those not living inside concrete structures and/or whose livelihoods depends directly on natural resources); and whether by restricting ourselves to supporting a people after a storm or a flood has wreaked havoc, we are actually dooming them.

    We need timewise data and we need timewise first-hand accounts. To adapt the wisdom of Philip Warren Anderson, we may know how a shrinking wetland may exacerbate the intensity of the next flood, but we cannot ever derive from this relationship knowledge of the specific ways in which people, and then the country, suffer, diminish and fade away.

    The persistence of these two myopias also feeds the bane of incrementalism. By definition, incremental events occur orders of magnitude more often than significant events (so to speak), so it is more efficient to evolve to monitor and record the former. This applies as much to our memories as it does to the economics of newsrooms. We tend to get caught up in the day-to-day and are capable within weeks of forgetting something that happened last year; unscrupulous politicians play to this gallery by lying through their teeth about something happening when it didn’t (or vice versa), offending the memories of all those who have died because of a storm or a flood and yet others who survive but on the brink of tragedy. On the other hand, newsrooms are staffed with more journalists attuned to the small details but not implicitly able to piece all of them together into the politically and economically inconvenient big picture (there are exceptions, of course).

    I am not sure when we entered the crisis period of climate change but in mid-2022, it is a trivial fact that we are in the thick of it – the thick of a beast that assails us both in space and through time. In response, we must change the way we cognise disasters. The Assam floods are ongoing – and so are the Kosi, the Sabarmati and the Cauvery floods. We just haven’t seen the waters go wild yet.

  • With Gyanvapi article, Abhinav Prakash Singh does logic wapsi

    The national vice-president of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, Abhinav Prakash Singh, published an article on May 22 on the Gyanvapi mosque issue that is from start to finish an exercise in verbal sophistry. But while we have come to expect such nonsense from functionaries of the Bharatiya Janata Party, I was shocked to see this coming from Indian Express. (Some of my friends weren’t, so I am probably behind the curve here.)

    Singh’s argument is not concerned with the historical facts of the case (many of which are gathered here) but with the people calling Gyanvapi a “controversy” hiding behind secularism, which according to him was developed to separate the state only from Abrahamic religions, and that the faux-controversy should nonetheless be allowed to blow through in favour of Hindus because the left is only resorting to “political rhetoric, academic obfuscation and chicanery”, and not because the right doesn’t seem concerned about the burden of proof. This is a defence of malice on the grounds of what it is not (not anti-national, not Islamic, not western, not leftist, not scholarly) over what it is (proofless, perfidious, communal). Oh, what it is also not is violent and riotous, which, in Singh’s telling, the protests against the farm laws and the CAA respectively were.

    A national newspaper that believes it’ i’s okay to amplify lies can’t be on the side of democracy. And while India may be far from a perfect democracy at the moment, its institutions and civil society must still maintain their democratic tendencies, especially in the spirit defined by the constitution. This is more important than to be perfectly democratic at every moment, which is obviously not possible. Challenges will arise and there will be failures, and that is not an implicitly bad thing. When we tend to the best of our abilities, that is good enough. But a democratic nation will lose that character if we altogether stop aspiring in that direction and begin to admit exceptions to favour a political agenda and/or personal gain. It will also lose that character if we don’t employ common sense.

    It will always be a virtue to be more informed (with reasonable exceptions), to keep learning and to value the methods by which we acquire knowledge and establish facts. One popular technique for this, standing on the deceptively simple foundation of logic, is called science – and in most democratic societies today, science and its exponents occupy a place of pride. But the unbridled application of science to solving society’s problems is not a good thing. Such overreach, called scientism but also encompassing hard-line rationalism, attempts to use science to solve problems that its methods and principles were never designed to solve, and eventually produces outcomes that subvert the proper functioning of a democracy in favour of a scientistic or falsely meritocratic agenda.

    This said, scientism is not the only form in which science can get in the way of a functional democracy. Bharatiya Janata Party members’ claims that Ayurveda, yoga, the Vedas, the entangled Hindu state-culture-religion and whatever else anticipated and solved advanced problems that modern natural as well as social sciences still fumble with come first to mind. Ancient India’s feats, in the party’s telling, are a demonstration of its immense prowess and to which we must bow your heads without question. But the evidence for these claims is always, without exception, unfalsifiable: that which can neither be proved nor, more importantly, disproved.

    This may be a carefully designed strategy at work but that doesn’t mean we’re obliged to recognise it as one. To everyone who has been to high school and studied a little bit of logic and set theory, it’s a blooper, and hopefully also a reminder that democracy can and is regularly undermined by our being okay with letting bloopers pass. For example, Abhinav Prakash Singh’s article is rife with pleas to let the Gyanvapi controversy swing in favour of the right-wing, each based on the premise that “what is not offensive is therefore good”. This is the fallacy of affirming the disjunct. It goes like this:

    The left manufactured the Gyanvapi controversy because it has proof or it claims the supremacy of Islam.
    The left is anti-Hindu and pro-Islam.
    Therefore the left has no proof.

    Does it make sense to you? It shouldn’t. It’s just how empty of meaning and substance Singh’s article is. The affirmation of the disjunct might tempt you to ask yourself whether there is something he knows that you don’t. Don’t give in; instead, ask whether there is anything rather than nothing at the heart of his argument. Don’t let his claim pass unchecked; don’t read it and believe that Singh may have a point. He and his colleagues seldom do, and prefer instead the use of kettle logic, as demonstrated in the opening lines of a recent article by Apoorvanand: “Who could have thought that an argument for syncretism and the blurry nature of culture can be used to first enter the religious or sacred places of non-Hindu communities and then lay claim over them?” Most of all, read Singh’s article and conclude, because Singh himself forces us to, that his remarks are foolish. All he has are big words wrapped around a statement that can’t possibly make sense.

    Hat-tip to Jahnavi Sen

  • Nothing cryptic about another ‘crypto’ disaster

    Earlier this month, a cryptocurrency token called Luna crashed in price – an event that also brought down the value of bitcoin, became the biggest crash in cryptocurrency history thus far, earned the person or persons who (probably) orchestrated this fall nearly a billion dollars, and stuck a big-ass wrench in the machinations of the cryptocurrency community. Luna’s originated, a South Korean entrepreneur named Kwon Do-hyung, a.k.a. Do Kwon, has been charged with fraud. Stablegains, a cryptocurrency-based “yield generation project”, lost $44 million and may face a lawsuit from its investors for having misguided them about where the company was storing their wealth – in the “stablecoin” to which Luna was pegged. Money-making algorithms of the Venus Protocol, running on the BNB blockchain, lost $11 million due to Luna’s crash. There have been many more, and worse, repercussions.

    While this fiasco is neither novel nor likely to be the last of its kind, it merits attention for those interested in (the opposition to) cryptocurrencies – for the sort of disaster that only a nascent piece of financial technology backed by the self-delusion of techbros could wreak. A few semi-helpful explainers on Twitter indicated that crash was a repeat in technique of the one George Soros orchestrated against the Bank of England in 1992, leading to the occasion known as ‘Black Wednesday’. Soros shorted the British pound shortly after the currency had become part of the European Rate Mechanism, which required the government to maintain the value of the pound within a fixed range with respect to the Deutsche mark. But Soros foresaw that thanks to inflation and higher interest rates, the pound would drop under this range against the mark and the Bank of England would be forced to buy back pounds on the open market. He eventually built up a short of $10 billion and made a profit of $1 billion. In this current case, replace the pound with the Luna or the bitcoin, as the case may be.

    To put things very simply: Do Kwon, invented two cryptocurrency tokens called Luna and Terra. Terra was an algorithmic stablecoin, meaning a) 1 Terra would always be worth exactly $1 and b) algorithms running on the blockchain on which Terra traded would ensure that 1 Terra could be exchanged for $1’s worth of Luna and vice versa. The 1:1 pegging would be ensured through arbitrage trades. Luna, however, was not a stablecoin and its price could fluctuate. Do Kwon intended for Terra to protect Luna against market volatility. Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine pointed out that Do Kwon wrongly assumed that this financial system – of coins, pegs and algorithms – would remain stable as long as Luna maintained a non-zero value, i.e. that it wouldn’t crash. Or Do Kwon wasn’t wrong and knew that the system had another point of stability: when Luna’s value was zero. (He probably wasn’t wrong: a previous stablecoin experiment that failed to the tune of $54 million was run by two anonymous persons named “Rick” and “Morty”, and ex-Terra employees have alleged that “Rick” was really Do Kwon.)

    On April 1, 2022, Luna had a value of $115. But in May, someone realised that while Terra’s value was pegged 1:1 to the US dollar through arbitrages, they could short Luna itself. (Here’s a simple explanation of how shorting works.) One possibility that some have floated (see here and here) is that the attacker bet in favour of Terra and against bitcoin. This arises because Do Kwon had setup a reserve of 39,897.98 bitcoins to back up Terra. First, the attacker bought a large quantity of Terra and then began to dump it, forcing Do Kwon to start selling bitcoin to keep Terra from becoming depegged from the US dollar. Then the attacker shorted bitcoin. Whether this individual(s) took the simpler route or the more involved one with bitcoins, Luna’s price crashed from $80.84 on May 1 to $0.000169 today. As David Rosenthal, from whose blog post on the topic I’ve benefitted immensely, put it, “By May 11th LUNA was under $1 and BTC was under $29K, down around 17% from before the attack, although it recovered to around $30K. By May 13th [Terra] had transitioned to … under $0.20 and LUNA was under $0.0001, having vanished $41B of “market cap”.”

    On May 12, Terra ‘halted’ its blockchain; since Terra and Luna are/were tokens on the chain, they became worthless to their owners. But Do Kwon has already said that he plans to launch another blockchain.

  • Press releases and public duty

    From ‘Science vs Marketing’, published on In The Dark, on May 20, 2022:

    … there is an increasing tendency for university press offices to see themselves entirely as marketing agencies instead of informing and/or educating the public. Press releases about scientific research nowadays rarely make any attempt at accuracy – they are just designed to get the institution concerned into the headlines. In other words, research is just a marketing tool.

    What astrophysicist and blogger Peter Coles writes here is very true. It is not a recent phenomenon but it hasn’t been widely acknowledged either, especially in the community of journalists. I had reported in 2016 on a study by researchers at the Universities of Cardiff and Wollongong that concluded that university press releases bloated with hype don’t necessarily result in reports in the media that are also bloated with hype. The study was mooted in part by an attempt to find if there was a relationship between the two locations of hype: in press releases and news reports. The study’s finding was a happy one because it indicated that science journalists at large were doing their jobs right, and were not being carried away by the rubbish that universe press offices often printed.

    But this said, the study also highlighted the presence of hype in science news reports and which I have also blogged about on many occasions. It typically exists in two contexts: when journalists turn into stenographers and print press releases either as is or with superficial rephrasing, and when journalists themselves uncritically buy into the hype. I find the former to be more forgivable in the Indian context in particular because there are many hapless science journalists here: journalists who are actually generalists, not bound to any particular beat, and whose editors (or their editors’ bosses) have forced them to write on topics with which they are not at all familiar (I strongly suspected this bizarre article in Indian Express – while not being based on a press release of any sort – to be a good example of some sort of editorial pressure). Such a failure reflects to my mind the state of Indian mainstream journalism more than Indian science journalism, the best versions of which are still highly localised to a single handful of outlets.

    The latter – of science journalists willfully buying into the hype – is a cardinal sin, more so when it manifests among journalists who should self-evidently know better, as with Pallab Ghosh of the BBC. University press releases affect the former group more, and not the likes of Pallab Ghosh, although there are exceptional cases. Journalists of the former group are more populous and are also employed by larger, wealthier newsrooms with audiences orders of magnitude larger than those that have adopted a more critical view of science. As a result, bad claims in bad press releases crafted by university press offices often reach more people than articles that properly interrogate those claims. So in addition to Coles’s charge that universities are increasingly concerned with “income”, “profit” and “marketing” over “education and research”, I’d add that universities that publish such press releases have also lost sight of their duty to the publics, and would rather be part of the problem.

  • Hail the Royal Society

    It’s an underappreciated form of our colonial hangover when a body like the Royal Society appoints its first Brazilian member since 1871 (on May 13) and almost everyone including the appointee talks about why the Society continues to be great instead of facing it with hard questions over why it didn’t elect Brazilian scientists into its ranks for 151 years and rejecting the deceptive honour of its admission. It’s a similar story with the Nobel Prizes: no women or no non-white persons win one for decades on end, so when the first exception appears on the scene, it’s because the prizes are great – not because the scientists were perfectly able to labour without the incentives presented by the prizes and certainly not because the prizes are an assertion of colonial power.

    Why don’t the Royal Society or the Nobel Prizes – and for that matter any award-giving entity in India that coasts for decades without acknowledging the work of scientists of non-Brahmin caste denominations – suffer a reputational crisis when their prejudice is spotlighted by their own feeble and frequently meagre attempts to rectify it instead of enjoying a rhetoric suffused with praise for “doing the right thing”?

    Prestige-awarding institutions like the Royal Society must be torn down as a rule of thumb – and we must simultaneously also strive to move past the idea that such institutions are necessary to move the needle in a world that will ultimately only perceive another reminder that prestige is relevant and valuable. This particular brand of iconoclasm is not easier to say and significantly more not-easier to do in our era of crises, when outspoken scientific consensus is a triply valuable thing and bodies like the Royal Society are seen as being necessary to birth, hold and present that consensus to the elite cadres of both science and society – the movers and shakers, as it were. “Hail the Nobel Prizes,” we say – “Raman has won a Nobel Prize” – “the state listens to Raman” – “let’s let Raman run a science institute” – “the institute is producing good work!” – “hail the Nobel Prizes,” we repeat. For example, the new Brazilian appointee to the Royal Society, climate scientist Carlos Nobre, told Reuters: “The Royal Society is giving international recognition to the risks that the Amazon faces. It’s an enormous risk that we could lose the greatest biodiversity and the biggest tropical forest on the planet.”

    But from where I’m sitting, it’s easier to feel the weight of a history that precipitated the need for a Royal Society to return to the climate scientists of Brazil the self-evident relevance of their voices – as well as an elite institution piggybacking on the urgency of the defining crisis of the Anthropocene epoch to right a wrong that should, in fairness, have destroyed it long ago. Then again, I can’t fault Nobre himself because from his point of view he has acquired access to one more pedestal – one to which no other compatriot of his has access – from which to bring the world’s attention to the ruin of the Amazon. Or maybe I do, but not Nobre himself as much as the community of all scientists for not unionising (whether or not in the traditional sense) against the arbitrary selectivism of the Royal Society, et al.[1] and their campaigns of piecemeal restitution.

    [1] It inherits the problems of everything from admission to well-funded science institutes to one’s ability to publish in ‘top’ journals to appointment in senior positions at research centres.

  • 10 years in journalism

    Thinking about the number ’10’ is hard. It’s the number of years I will have soon been a journalist for (as will my ACJ batchmates). Why commemorate it?

    • In this time, I’ve seen many of my colleagues and peers in different organisations quit journalism for communications jobs in non-journalistic settings, which pay better and are likely easier on the mind and on life. So to be able to persist for so long in this profession, also rendered more treacherous by a vengeful state, is to question one’s privileges on various levels.
    • Ten is a round number, and that roundness has I suspect something uniquely bio-psychological going for it. Our choice of the decimal number system is surely rooted in the number of fingers on our hands, which makes counting in multiples of 10 intuitive. Other than this, the value of 10 – that is, to have 10 of something – seems inscrutable. Do we commemorate six years of something? Or 11 or 4.5? To celebrate 10 often seems to be a privilegement of our own biology – especially when we have achieved little else.
    • When The Wire Science interviewed physicist Kip Thorne in 2017, the interviewer asked him if the discovery of gravitational waves 100 years after Einstein’s development of general relativity meant anything special to him. Thorne said: “Oh no, not particularly. We just happen to use base-10. If we used base-9, it wouldn’t work. Maybe I have faith in our choice of the base.” Modern classical as well as quantum computing use base-2 systems (0s/1s and two-dimensional Hilbert space, respectively). It’s all a matter of convenience – which I only say to conclude that commemorations based on time alone seem inherently meaningless (except when the passage of time is itself a virtue).
    • In December 2018, I wrote to a close friend in an email: “On December 23, 2018, I will be 3.94 galactic seconds old (one galactic year is the time Earth takes to go around the Milky Way, about 240 million years). Isn’t that simply more celestial? On May 26, 2019, I will be 4 galactic seconds old.” A nice, round number – but comfort in what is this? Positive integers? Rational numbers? But most importantly, it’s a reminder that there is no fixed way to measure time.
    • I wrote this post today, May 10, 2022, Tuesday. I’ve developed a habit of making anagrams when I’m bored, and found Anu Garg’s wordsmith.org as a result when I was looking for an anagram animator. I also subscribed to Garg’s newsletter about words and made a donation to support his work on it; you don’t find many newsletters dedicated to words whose authors don’t also bother their readers with too much of their own writing (e.g. Maria Popova). The weekly theme in the newsletter for the week of May 9 is words related to time. Opportune. The word for Monday in particular was timeous: “in good time”. Example: “I knew Bridget always ran out of supplies during a party and thought I should make timeous provision” (source: Andre Brink; Before I Forget; Sourcebooks; 2007).

    My commemoration of having been a professional journalist for 10 years wouldn’t be timeous.

  • Some comments on India’s heat

    On May 5, a couple people from BBC World reached out to me, presumably after reading my piece last week on the heatwave in North India and the wet-bulb temperature, for a few comments on a story they were producing on the topic. They had five questions between them; I’m reproducing my answers roughly verbatim (since I spoke to them on phone) below.

    Are these high temperatures usual?

    A: Yes and no. Yes because while these numbers are high, we’ve been hearing about them for a decade or so now – and reading about them in news reports and hearing anecdotal reports. This isn’t the first such heatwave to hit India. A few years ago, peak summer temperature in Delhi touched 47º C or so and there were photos in the media of the asphalt on the road having melted. That was worse – that hasn’t happened this time, yet. That’s the ‘yes’ part. The ‘no’ part has to do with the fact that India is a large country and some parts of the country that are becoming hotter are probably also reaching these temperatures for the first time. E.g. Bangalore, where I live, is currently daily highs of around 35º C. This is par for the course in Chennai and Delhi but it’s quite hot for Bangalore. This said, the high heat is starting sooner, on this occasion from mid-March or so itself, and lasting for longer. That has changed our experience of the heat and our exposure. Of course, my answers are limited to urban India, especially to major cities. I don’t know off the top of my head what the situation in other parts is like.

    The government has said India has a national heat plan and some cities have adopted heat action plans. Are they effective?

    Hard to say. Only two score or so cities have adopted functional heat action plans plus they’re cities, which is not where most of India lives. Sure, the heat is probably worse in the urban centres because of the heat island effect, but things are quite poor in rural areas as well, especially in the north. The heat also isn’t just heat – people experience its effects more keenly if they don’t have continuous power supply or access to running water, which is often the case in many parts of rural India. The benefits of these action plans accrue to those who are better off, typically those who are upper class and upper caste, which is hardly the point. When North India’s heatwave was underway last week, NDTV interviewed shopkeepers and small scale traders, vendors, etc. about whether they could take time off. All of them without exception said ‘no’. Come rain or shine, they need to work. I remember there being vicious cyclones in Chennai and waking up in the morning to find the roads flooded, trees fallen down and loose electric wires – and the local mobile vegetable vendor doing his rounds. Also, in urban areas, do the heat action plans account for the plights of homeless people and beggars, and people living in slums, where – even if they’re indoors – they have poor circulation and often erratic water and power supply?

    What should the government do?

    That’s a very broad question. Simply speaking, the government should give people who can’t afford to shut their businesses or take time off from work the money they’d lose if they did, and rations. This is going to be very difficult but this is what should be done. But this won’t happen. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian government didn’t plan for the tens of thousands of migrant labourers and daily-wage earners in cities, who, once the lockdown came into effect, slowly migrated back to their home towns and villagers in search of livelihoods. This sector remains invisible to the government.

    [I also wanted to say but didn’t have the time:] the experience of heat is also mediated by gender, geography and caste forces, so state interventions should also be mediated by them. For example, women in particular, in rural India and especially in Central and North India (where literacy is relatively lower) operate in settings where they have few rights and little if any financial and social independence. They can seldom buy or own land and go out to work, and often labour indoors, performing domestic tasks in poorly ventilated residential spaces, venture out to fetch water from often distant sources – a task performed almost exclusively by women and girls –, often have to defecate in the open but do so early in the day or late in the evening to avoid harrassment and shame, which then means they may not drink water to avoid peeing during the day but which would render them vulnerable to heat stress, etc. If state interventions don’t bend around these realities, they will be useless.

    The moment you mention data or figures that you say you obtained from this government, the first thought that comes to mind is that it’s probably inaccurate, and likely an underestimate. Even now, the Indian government has an ongoing dispute with the WHO over the number of people who died during the pandemic in India: India is saying half a million but the WHO as well as many independent experts have said it’s probably 3-5 million. For example, if the government is collecting data of heat-related illnesses at the institutional level (from hospitals, clinics, etc.) you immediately have a bias in terms of which people are able to or intend to access healthcare when they develop a heat-related illness. Daily-wagers don’t go to hospitals unless their conditions are acute – because they’d lose a day’s earnings, because their out of pocket expenses have increased or both.

    Do you think parts of India will become unliveable in your lifetime?

    This is a good question. I’d say that ‘unliveable’ is a subjective thing. I have a friend in Seattle who recently bought a house in what she said was a nice part of the city, with lots of greenery, opportunities to go hiking and trekking on the weekend, with clear skies, clean air and large water bodies nearby. Liveability to her is different from, say, liveability to someone living in New Delhi, where the air is already quite foul, summers are very hot and winters are likely to become colder in future. Liveability means different things to people living in Delhi, London and Seattle. Many parts of India have been unliveable for a long time now, we just put up with it – and many people do because they don’t have any other option – and our bar just keeps slipping lower.

  • The problem with giving “Mother Nature” rights and duties

    Recently, the Madras high court passed a curiously worded order in which Justice S. Srimathy extended the Uttarakhand high court’s 2017 order, granting the rights due to citizens to the Ganga and the Yamuna rivers, to “Mother Nature” in toto.

    It’s hard to say what this means (I haven’t read the order, only some excerpts), especially since “Mother Nature” is hard to define. For example, homosexuality is not proscribed in nature, so do homosexual tendencies qualify as a manifestation of “Mother Nature”? Or is the definition restricted to our natural resources?

    Then there is the question of nature’s gender: it has been routinely cast as a motherly figure to invoke the image of an entity that gives, typically by birthing new life, but its use by a high court needs to be more careful and completely well-defined. That isn’t the case here.

    This confusion is exacerbated by one portion in particular (emphasis added) of the court’s pronouncement:

    It is right time to declare/confer juristic status to the “Mother Nature”. Therefore this Court by invoking “parens patriae jurisdiction” is hereby declaring the “Mother Nature” as a “Living Being” having legal entity/legal person/juristic person/juridical person/moral person/artificial person having the status of a legal person, with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person, in order to preserve and conserve them.

    Apparently, “Mother Nature” has duties. Does it – sorry, ‘she’ – have all 11?

    Consider #6, for example: “To value and preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture”. Last year, the Government of Rajasthan denotified a part of Band Baretha Wildlife Sanctuary to allow builders to mine pink sandstone for use in the Ram temple under construction in Uttar Pradesh. The latter state government, like the one at India’s helm, is led by the BJP, according to which Hinduism is a superposition of religion, culture and economic policy, depending on what’s most convenient at any given moment. But the equation also effectively whitewashes the rituals of Hinduism as a matter of the country’s culture, evading the inconvenient demands of secularism.

    Might these governments and/or that of Rajasthan now be able to argue in court that it was the duty of the trees and animals of Band Baretha to let themselves be cut down and killed in order to “preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture”?

    Similarly, must the mountainsides flanking the Char Dham highway under construction let themselves be blasted off in order to “uphold and protect the sovereignty of India”? Will we be able to sue an avalanching mass of ice, mud, wood and stone for destroying a hydroelectric power project because the belligerent aggregate failed “to safeguard public property and to abjure violence”?

    The possibilities are endless – probably because the high court’s pronouncement personifies what was never intended to be personified. The duty that seemed the oddest to this author vis-à-vis “Mother Nature” was “to strive towards excellence in all spheres of individual and collective activity so that the nation constantly rises to higher levels of endeavor and achievement”. ‘To strive’ implies intent, and here a part of a 2019 essay by philosopher Akeel Bilgrami may provide a useful perspective. Bilgrami writes:

    The idea that nature makes demands on us is a metaphor. Nature contains values but their normative demands are not intentionally made. The reason is straightforward. It is a mark of what we mean by intentionality that subjects who possess intentionality are potentially appropriate targets of a certain form of criticism. I can criticize you for doing something wrong or for having destructive thoughts, as you can me. … I can criticize you for making certain normative demands of me—unreasonable ones, by my lights. But we don’t criticize elements in nature or artifice in the same sense. We may say “a hurricane was destructive” but that is a “criticism” only by courtesy, not the sort of criticism that you and I make of each other’s doings and thoughts and demands.

    Bilgrami, currently a professor at Columbia University, New York, goes on to write that “elements in nature and things do not possess or carry out any such deliberative structure or process, so there is no similar ground for attributing intentionality to them, nor, as a consequence, intelligibly criticizing or punishing such elements”. He also writes that ascribing intent to nature is “unnecessary” because the intentionality can only be captured by a metaphor – that “nature names demands on us” – and that it is not dispensable, or real, as a result.

    Instead, we may be better served by considering the rights of plants and birds and animals in a way, fundamentally, that acknowledges the differences between these domains of life and humans themselves. For example, Indians have rights to life and to free speech with reasonable restrictions. Plants instead might be accorded a right to evolve, to not be cut if they are older than 50 years, and to be planted only in places where they were native until the 20th century. Such rights would be much better than to say polluting rivers is wrong because rivers also have rights. Polluting rivers was wrong even before such pronouncements, so they only kicked the can down the road.

    Giving either individual rivers or the natural universe as a whole the rights given to Indians is at best protection against destruction. But even then, the government has only needed reconstituted responsibilities, verbal gymnastics, suppressed data and research and an absolute majority in Parliament, finally garnished with some fantasies, to claim that the environment ministry is really protecting the environment by nuking environmental safeguards.