‘The Lunacy Of Rebuilding In Disaster-Prone Areas’, Noema, April 25, 2024:
In the months after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans proposed a flood control program unlike any other in U.S. history. Developed by the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, a diverse group of stakeholders appointed by the mayor, the resulting plan called for large parts of the city to be converted from longstanding residential zones to floodable parks. Released to the public in the form of a map, large green circles were positioned over neighborhoods where owners would be forced into buyouts. These were some of the most historic districts in a very historic city … and almost exclusively in majority Black and marginalized neighborhoods.
Christened in the press as the “Green Dot” map, the proposal ranks among the most profoundly unsuccessful plans ever issued by a municipal body and would never be put to a vote in the city council. … The Green Dot map’s remarkably brief tenure can be attributed in part to its proponents’ failure to adhere to the most basic rule of community planning: Never designate the where before building support for the what.
“Building support”. What a quaint idea. Everyone should be doing it the way India’s doing it: don’t ask anyone. That way “building support” is redundant and “where” starts to really mean “anywhere”.
‘Expert committee clears plan to rebuild washed-out Teesta dam in Sikkim’, The Hindu, January 28, 2025:
Fourteen months after a devastating glacier lake outburst flood in Sikkim washed away the Teesta-3 dam – the state’s biggest hydropower project – and killing at least 100, an expert committee of the environment ministry has recommended that the dam be reconstructed.
Instead of the older structure that was part rock and part concrete, the new dam will be entirely concrete – reportedly to increase its strength – and its spillway will be capable of managing a peak flow of 19,946 cubic metres a second (cumecs), thrice the capacity of the former dam, which was 7000 cumecs.
Sounds reasonable, right?
The new design incorporates a “worst-case scenario” – meaning the maximum possible rain in the upstream glacier lake, modelled by the India Meteorological Department, in the South Lhonak region over the next 100 years influencing further downstream modifications.
Now all we have to do is wait for the flood that will show up the IMD’s model — a fate models have often had to contend with this century, especially when dealing with rainfall.
‘The value of attributing extreme events to climate change’, The Hindu, May 24, 2024:
It is worth understanding how these ‘rapid extreme event attributions’ are performed. The most important concept is the change in probability: in this case, climate scientists contrasted the conditions in which the heatwaves occurred against a counterfactual world in which climate change did not happen. The conditions that prevail in the counterfactual world depend on the availability of data from our world. When there isn’t enough data, the researchers run models for the planet’s climate without increasing greenhouse gas emissions and other anthropogenic forcing. Where there is sufficient data, they use trends in the data to compare conditions today with a period from the past in which human effects on the planet were relatively minimal.
[But] the data are hardly ever sufficient, especially for rainfall, and almost never for extreme rainfall events. Climate models are also notoriously bad at properly capturing normal rainfall and worse at extreme ones.
Thus, the environment ministry keeps the gates open to a new dam with a 59,838-cumec spillway in future.
The Hindu has an unusual ad in today’s paper (at least in the Chennai edition, which I get) on the occasion of Republic Day.
At the middle is an ambigram that reads “journalism” one way and “democracy” upside down. Below the way that reads “journalism”, there’s a statement saying:
This Republic Day, we reaffirm our commitment to journalism that strengthens a democracy—today and always.
And below the way that reads “democracy”, the statement goes:
This Republic Day, we reaffirm our commitment to a democracy that strengthens journalism—today and always.
The whole idea is that journalism is the republic’s mirror.
I’m posting this for no reason other than that I found it quite clever. 😀
Place a pot of water on the stove and light the fire. Once the temperature in the pot reaches 100º C or so, the water will boil to vapour. This is an example of a phase transition that occurs every day in our houses. Yet scientists have difficulty predicting whether a bunch of water molecules, like in the pot, will be liquid or gaseous in a given set of conditions.
This is different from your everyday experience with the pot on the stove and has to do with the model a computer can simulate to predict the phase of a group of interacting particles. Models that can make these predictions efficiently are prized in the study of wet surfaces, porous materials, microfluidics, and biological cells. They can also reveal ‘hidden’ phenomena we may not notice at the macroscopic level, i.e. just by looking at the water boil, and which scientists can use to make sense of other things and/or come up with new applications.
Remember your high school practicals notebook? For each experiment, you had to spell out sections called “given”, “to find”, “apparatus”, “methods”, and “results”. A model is an “apparatus” — a computer program — that uses the “given” (some input data) and certain “methods” (model parameters) to generate “results”. For example, the model below shows how a fluid with certain properties, like air, flowing around a spherical obstacle in its path, like a big rock, leads to the formation of vortices.
A popular “method” that models use to predict a phase transition is called classical density functional theory (DFT). Say there are a bunch of particles in a container. These particles can be the atoms of air, molecules of water, whatever the smallest unit of the substance is that you’re studying. Every three-dimensional distribution of these particles has a quantity called the free-energy functional associated with it. (Functionals and functions are the same thing except functionals can also accept functions as inputs.) The free-energy functional calculates the total free energy of a system based on how the density of its particles is distributed in three dimensions.
Classical DFT is a way to find the equilibrium state of a system — when it’s reached a stable state where its macroscopic properties don’t change and it doesn’t exchange energy with its surroundings — by minimising the system’s free energy.
A model can thus simulate a group of particles in a container, varying their distribution until it finds the one with the lowest free-energy functional, and thus the conditions in which the system is at its lowest energy. “Once [the free-energy functional] is specified, consistent and complete investigation of a wide variety of properties can be made,” the authors of a paper published in the journal Physical Review X on January 24 wrote.
While this sounds simple, the problem is that determining the free-energy functional becomes more difficult the more particles there are. And only once the functional has been determined can the model check when its value is lowest. This is why a model using classical DFT to determine the properties of a liquid at specific temperature and pressure, say, will struggle.
In the January 24 study in Physical Review X, scientists from the University of Bayreuth and the University of Bristol made an advance in this process when they replaced the free-energy functional with a neural network that had been trained on simulations of particles-in-a-container in a variety of conditions (e.g. changing the pressure and temperature across a range of values), then used it to model a realistic fluid.
From the abstract of the paper:
Local learning of the one-body direct correlation functional is based on Monte Carlo simulations of inhomogeneous systems with randomized thermodynamic conditions, randomized planar shapes of the external potential, and randomized box sizes.
Monte Carlo simulations are quite cool. You set up a computer to simulate, say, a poker game with five players. As the game progresses, at some point in the game you ask the computer to take a snapshot of the game and save it. This snapshot has information about each player’s cards, what decisions they made in the previous round (fold, call or raise), the stakes, and the cards on the table. Once the game ends, you rerun the simulation, each time freshly randomising the cards handed out to the players. Then again at some point during the game, the computer takes a snapshot and saves it.
Once the computer has done this a few thousand times, you collect all the snapshots and share them with someone who doesn’t know poker. Based on understanding just the snapshots, they can learn how the game works. The more snapshots there are, the finer their understanding will be. Very simply speaking this is how a Monte Carlo simulation operates.
The researchers generated data for the neural network to train on by running around 900 Monte Carlo simulations of “inhomogeneous systems with randomized thermodynamic conditions [including temperature], randomized planar shapes of the external potential, and randomized box sizes”. (The external potential refers to some energy field applied across the system, giving each of the particles inside some potential energy.) Then they used their classical DFT model with the “neural functional” to study a truncated Lennard-Jones system.
Scientists have previously combined machine-learning with classical DFT models to study particles moving randomly, interacting with each other only when they collide. Actual, real fluids aren’t so simple, however. Instead, their behaviour is more closely modelled as a Lennard-Jones system: the particles in a container repel each other at very short distances, are attracted to each other across intermediate distances, and at larger distances don’t have an effect on each other. As the researchers wrote in their paper:
… understanding the physics in such a simple model, which encompasses both repulsive and attractive interparticle interactions, provides a basis for understanding the occurrence of the same phenomena that arise in more complex fluids .
They also added that:
… recent investigations did not address the fundamental issue of how the presence of a phase transition might be accounted for within the framework of a neural density functional.
So they set about studying a truncated Lennard-Jones system with a phase transition. Their model started with predicting how the particles are distributed, the overall system’s thermodynamic properties, the conditions in which liquid and gaseous phases coexist in the container, and the particles’ behaviour at interfaces, like evaporating from the surface of a hard wall. Then, the researchers wrote:
… we focus on the liquid-gas transition which is a basic manifestation of the presence of interparticle attraction and seek to assess whether the neural functional can describe (i) phase coexistence and the approach to the associated critical point, (ii) surface tension and density profiles of the liquid-gas interface, (iii) drying and capillary evaporation transitions that occur at subcritical temperatures, and (iv) how accurately the approach performs for both bulk and interfacial properties.
(Emphasis in the original.)
So could the neural functional describe i-iv?
The answer is emphatically yes.
In fact, the model was able to accurately predict phase transitions even when it was trained only on supercritical states — i.e. when the container contains both liquid and gaseous states. The researchers singled this ability of the model out for especial praise, calling it “one of the most striking results”.
Source: Phys. Rev. X 15, 011013 (2025)
This plot, generated by the model, shows the states of a truncated Lennard-Jones fluid with density on the x-axis and temperature on the y-axis. In the red areas, the substance — the collection of particles in the box — is either liquid or gaseous. In the blue areas, the liquid and gaseous phases become separated. The intensity of the colour denotes the substance’s bulk modulus, i.e. how much it resists being compressed at a fixed temperature, from dark blue at the lower end to dark red at the upper.
Overall, the researchers wrote their “neural functional approach” is distinguished by the fact that “the range of phenomena and results it can describe … far exceed the information provided during training.” They attribute this ability to the information contained in a “single numerical object” that the neural network was tuned to track: 𝑐1(𝐫;[𝜌],𝑇), a.k.a. the one-body direct correlation functional. It’s a functional that describes the variation of the density of particles inside the container in response to the external potential. As they put it:
Inputting only Monte Carlo training data of one-body profiles in planar geometry and then examining 𝑐1(𝐫;[𝜌],𝑇) through the functional lens provides access to quantities which could not be obtained directly from the input data. Indeed, determining these usually requires advanced simulation techniques.
They added their method also required fewer computational resources than a classical DFT setup operating without a neural functional in order to achieve “comparable” accuracy. On the back of this resounding success, the researchers plan to use their model to study interactions in water and colloidal gels. They also wrote that they expect their findings will help solve problems in computational chemistry and condensed matter physics.
ThatVulture piece. If you haven’t already, read it but be warned: it’s just as disturbing as everyone is saying it is.
One paragraph in particular I found more unsettling than the rest — not because it presents one more awful detail but because I just didn’t know, while I was reading the piece, what I was expected to make of it.
In various interviews over the years, Gaiman has called The Ocean at the End of the Lane his most personal book. While much of it is fantastical, Gaiman has said “that kid is me.” The book is set in Sussex, where Gaiman grew up. In the story, the narrator survives otherworldly evil with the help of a family of magical women. As a child, Gaiman had no such friends to call on. “I was going back to the 7-year-old me and giving myself a peculiar kind of love that I didn’t have,” he told an interviewer in 2017. “I never feel the past is dead or young Neil isn’t around anymore. He’s still there, hiding in a library somewhere, looking for a doorway that will lead him to somewhere safe where everything works.”
It paints a fuller picture of Neil Gaiman but the article as a whole says nothing about why that’s necessary. The piece is overall well-composed; the writer and editors have obviously gone to great lengths to produce it. As a result, most parts of the piece justify themselves. But I couldn’t say why they saw fit to include parts like this paragraph, which (re-)humanise Gaiman unto some unclear end. Ultimately, there’s nothing in these narratives to suggest the perpetrators of sexual violence ever lost track of the difference between right and wrong.
Reality is strange and truths pointing at contradicting implications can coexist, but this coexistence defies logic and I find that quite disturbing. This isn’t that abstract, disconnected “cold logic” so much as that it’s not just about the coexistence of truths, that somewhere between the past and the future the fellow had a chance to weigh right and wrong and picked the wrong thing to do. The buck stops there and whatever happened to him in his childhood — as long as it didn’t leave him with schizophrenia, psychosis or any other condition that took away his ability to tell if what he was doing was wrong — ceases to matter.
I realise I might be thinking about this in an incomplete way, but since that big #MeToo wave, I’ve always had in mind those nonsensical statements by some men that they were depressed or anxious and that they’d go to therapy and ‘fix’ themselves. None of these conditions could have interfered with these men’s ability to tell right from wrong (which in some legal systems would have been required to mount an insanity defence), but by blaming them the men stigmatised them in a horrible way. Since then, bad men pointing to bad childhoods, as if the past offers some kind of mitigating background, has only been confusing.
In fact, I wonder if the two truths really do coexist. Maybe they don’t because somewhere in between, these men decided the past doesn’t matter any more.
To me the line that Gaiman hadn’t ever been to therapy was a red flag. When there’s emotional trauma, therapy is useful — as many of us know — to reprogramme emotional pathways that have become hijacked and distorted to respond in harmful ways to even benign stimuli. But there was still an opportunity in front of these men to do the right thing. Self-discipline was still possible and they possessed the agency for it.
Humans are both logical and emotional beings. At times like this, however, in a rush to remind ourselves of how a life of emotion can lead to discomfiting truths — like how a childhood of suffering trauma needn’t preclude an adulthood of inflicting trauma or that antithetical narratives of reality can be equally and simultaneously legitimate — we seem to forget humans are still capable of logic, and thus of restraint and forethought. And well-exercised restraint and forethought often lead to compassionate actions towards others. This logic only comes to the fore when we choose to do the right thing.
Gaiman had this choice, the doorway in the library. Now, he doesn’t get to pretend he didn’t do to his past what he did to his work and what he did to all those women, turning them into his fantasy.
Saying “choosing to do the right thing is easier than done” risks trivialising the difficulty, but again, the right thing here is to look for help before rather than succumb, more so because a man of Gaiman’s tremendous wealth and privileges is also bound to find it.
Self-discipline in this context often reminds me of a piece from a decade ago about how tough the road can be for people with illegal sexual preferences, so to speak, without also being a cul-de-sac. The piece is a long-form deep-dive (trigger warnings: child sexual abuse and discussions of suicide) into the inner lives of people who identify as paedophiles but who also recognise their urges are wrong and refuse to act on them. The narrative is careful enough to be fair to all the dramatis personae (fair of course doesn’t mean nice). Where you draw parallels with the Gaiman story, if it all, is up to you; I found the following passages particularly enlightening:
Dr. Klaus Beier doesn’t believe in sexual reconditioning. He leads the team behind Prevention Project Dunkelfeld, a therapeutic program based in Germany that targets potential offenders. He believes that minor attraction is a fixed part of someone’s makeup, that it’s “fate and not choice.” His program is considered the global gold standard of preventive treatment, and its practitioners help adults manage their attraction to children rather than try to change it. “In my view, it’s not the inclination that’s a problem,” he said. “And I wouldn’t condemn the inclination, I’d condemn the behavior.”
Later:
When [Mike] started his teaching placement, he created a strict set of rules: staying away from the bathroom area where possible and avoiding any physical contact with the children. He said he would tense up when the more playful kids approached him for a hug. This wasn’t so much to keep the children safe, he told me, as to ensure people wouldn’t become wary of him. Which was something his dad warned him about when he first started. “He’s like, ‘People are going to be suspicious of you simply because you’re a guy. Don’t do anything stupid,’” he said. “And, honestly, I wonder if that had anything to do with it, because that kind of freaked me out.”
…
Like Adam, Mike grew increasingly depressed while grappling with his desires. He never made active plans to commit suicide, but told me that he thought about it and knew what to do if the time came. “If I had a sawn-off shotgun, that would be it,” he said. “I don’t want to take pills because I could come back from that.” Ultimately, he felt he couldn’t kill himself and leave his family with no context for what he had done, and instead hoped that God would take care of matters for him. “But at the same time, I was still… It would be nice if I got hit by a car or I got really sick,” he said.
More than anyone else I spoke with, Mike seems like he could benefit from having a professional to talk to, and not just because of his proximity to children. I was taken by his urgent need to disclose information others might have a hard time expressing. Late one afternoon we were sitting in his car in the parking lot of a different shopping mall. After hours of conversation, I suggested that we wrap for the day and he flat-out refused, telling me in an uncharacteristically abrupt tone that he had to get it out. We continued speaking until the encroaching shadows finally met and turned to darkness, stopping only when the center’s cleaning staff began arriving for their night’s work.
Later:
Now the largest pedophile support group in the U.S., [Virtuous Paedophiles’] 318 active members are clear in their belief that sex with children is wrong. The founders, Ethan Edwards and Nick Devin (also pseudonyms), both family men with children, enact this policy with tight moderation. If someone is seen to be voicing the opinion that minor sex is acceptable, he gets a warning. Repeat offenders are ousted from the group. The membership list is also restricted to those aged 18 and over, lest they be accused of wrongdoing.
While Adam contributes to discussions there from time to time, his focus remains on the young men who come to his own group for help. James, for one, speaks with a clear reverence for Adam. Though his status as a sex offender means he must attend court-mandated therapy, it is Adam and the others that he credits with helping keep him on the right path. It’s also not lost on him that, for everyone else, it is the only lifeline they have. “If they want help, if they want to be better, to try and fix their behavior and be a better person, he’s never given up on them,” he said. “He didn’t give up on me, he didn’t give up on Mike, he never gave up on any of us.”
ThatVulture piece. If you haven’t already, read it but be warned: it’s just as disturbing as everyone is saying it is.
One paragraph in particular I found more unsettling than the rest — not because it presents one more awful detail but because I just didn’t know, while I was reading the piece, what I was expected to make of it.
In various interviews over the years, Gaiman has called The Ocean at the End of the Lane his most personal book. While much of it is fantastical, Gaiman has said “that kid is me.” The book is set in Sussex, where Gaiman grew up. In the story, the narrator survives otherworldly evil with the help of a family of magical women. As a child, Gaiman had no such friends to call on. “I was going back to the 7-year-old me and giving myself a peculiar kind of love that I didn’t have,” he told an interviewer in 2017. “I never feel the past is dead or young Neil isn’t around anymore. He’s still there, hiding in a library somewhere, looking for a doorway that will lead him to somewhere safe where everything works.”
It paints a fuller picture of Neil Gaiman but the article as a whole says nothing about why that’s necessary. The piece is overall well-composed; the writer and editors have obviously gone to great lengths to produce it. As a result, most parts of the piece justify themselves. But I couldn’t say why they saw fit to include parts like this paragraph, which (re-)humanise Gaiman unto some unclear end. Ultimately, there’s nothing in these narratives to suggest the perpetrators of sexual violence ever lost track of the difference between right and wrong.
Reality is strange and truths pointing at contradicting implications can coexist, but this coexistence defies logic and I find that quite disturbing. This isn’t that abstract, disconnected “cold logic” so much as that it’s not just about the coexistence of truths, that somewhere between the past and the future the fellow had a chance to weigh right and wrong and picked the wrong thing to do. The buck stops there and whatever happened to him in his childhood — as long as it didn’t leave him with schizophrenia, psychosis or any other condition that took away his ability to tell if what he was doing was wrong — ceases to matter.
I realise I might be thinking about this in an incomplete way, but since that big #MeToo wave, I’ve always had in mind those nonsensical statements by some men that they were depressed or anxious and that they’d go to therapy and ‘fix’ themselves. None of these conditions could have interfered with these men’s ability to tell right from wrong (which in some legal systems would have been required to mount an insanity defence), but by blaming them the men stigmatised them in a horrible way. Since then, bad men pointing to bad childhoods, as if the past offers some kind of mitigating background, has only been confusing.
In fact, I wonder if the two truths really do coexist. Maybe they don’t because somewhere in between, these men decided the past doesn’t matter any more.
To me the line that Gaiman hadn’t ever been to therapy was a red flag. When there’s emotional trauma, therapy is useful — as many of us know — to reprogramme emotional pathways that have become hijacked and distorted to respond in harmful ways to even benign stimuli. But there was still an opportunity in front of these men to do the right thing. Self-discipline was still possible and they possessed the agency for it.
Humans are both logical and emotional beings. At times like this, however, in a rush to remind ourselves of how a life of emotion can lead to discomfiting truths — like how a childhood of suffering trauma needn’t preclude an adulthood of inflicting trauma or that antithetical narratives of reality can be equally and simultaneously legitimate — we seem to forget humans are still capable of logic, and thus of restraint and forethought. And well-exercised restraint and forethought often lead to compassionate actions towards others. This logic only comes to the fore when we choose to do the right thing.
Gaiman had this choice, the doorway in the library. Now, he doesn’t get to pretend he didn’t do to his past what he did to his work and what he did to all those women, turning them into his fantasy.
Saying “choosing to do the right thing is easier than done” risks trivialising the difficulty, but again, the right thing here is to look for help before rather than succumb, more so because a man of Gaiman’s tremendous wealth and privileges is also bound to find it.
Self-discipline in this context often reminds me of a piece from a decade ago about how tough the road can be for people with illegal sexual preferences, so to speak, without also being a cul-de-sac. The piece is a long-form deep-dive (trigger warnings: child sexual abuse and discussions of suicide) into the inner lives of people who identify as paedophiles but who also recognise their urges are wrong and refuse to act on them. The narrative is careful enough to be fair to all the dramatis personae (fair of course doesn’t mean nice). Where you draw parallels with the Gaiman story, if it all, is up to you; I found the following passages particularly enlightening:
Dr. Klaus Beier doesn’t believe in sexual reconditioning. He leads the team behind Prevention Project Dunkelfeld, a therapeutic program based in Germany that targets potential offenders. He believes that minor attraction is a fixed part of someone’s makeup, that it’s “fate and not choice.” His program is considered the global gold standard of preventive treatment, and its practitioners help adults manage their attraction to children rather than try to change it. “In my view, it’s not the inclination that’s a problem,” he said. “And I wouldn’t condemn the inclination, I’d condemn the behavior.”
Later:
When [Mike] started his teaching placement, he created a strict set of rules: staying away from the bathroom area where possible and avoiding any physical contact with the children. He said he would tense up when the more playful kids approached him for a hug. This wasn’t so much to keep the children safe, he told me, as to ensure people wouldn’t become wary of him. Which was something his dad warned him about when he first started. “He’s like, ‘People are going to be suspicious of you simply because you’re a guy. Don’t do anything stupid,’” he said. “And, honestly, I wonder if that had anything to do with it, because that kind of freaked me out.”
…
Like Adam, Mike grew increasingly depressed while grappling with his desires. He never made active plans to commit suicide, but told me that he thought about it and knew what to do if the time came. “If I had a sawn-off shotgun, that would be it,” he said. “I don’t want to take pills because I could come back from that.” Ultimately, he felt he couldn’t kill himself and leave his family with no context for what he had done, and instead hoped that God would take care of matters for him. “But at the same time, I was still… It would be nice if I got hit by a car or I got really sick,” he said.
More than anyone else I spoke with, Mike seems like he could benefit from having a professional to talk to, and not just because of his proximity to children. I was taken by his urgent need to disclose information others might have a hard time expressing. Late one afternoon we were sitting in his car in the parking lot of a different shopping mall. After hours of conversation, I suggested that we wrap for the day and he flat-out refused, telling me in an uncharacteristically abrupt tone that he had to get it out. We continued speaking until the encroaching shadows finally met and turned to darkness, stopping only when the center’s cleaning staff began arriving for their night’s work.
Later:
Now the largest pedophile support group in the U.S., [Virtuous Paedophiles’] 318 active members are clear in their belief that sex with children is wrong. The founders, Ethan Edwards and Nick Devin (also pseudonyms), both family men with children, enact this policy with tight moderation. If someone is seen to be voicing the opinion that minor sex is acceptable, he gets a warning. Repeat offenders are ousted from the group. The membership list is also restricted to those aged 18 and over, lest they be accused of wrongdoing.
While Adam contributes to discussions there from time to time, his focus remains on the young men who come to his own group for help. James, for one, speaks with a clear reverence for Adam. Though his status as a sex offender means he must attend court-mandated therapy, it is Adam and the others that he credits with helping keep him on the right path. It’s also not lost on him that, for everyone else, it is the only lifeline they have. “If they want help, if they want to be better, to try and fix their behavior and be a better person, he’s never given up on them,” he said. “He didn’t give up on me, he didn’t give up on Mike, he never gave up on any of us.”
When I joined The Wire in 2015, the average length of my blog posts increased from around 700 words to around 850 words, and over time to 1,000 words. This wasn’t forced so much as a natural reflection of the average length of pieces that worked on The Wire, also around 1,000 words. The trend held through 2018 and 2019 as well: the average post length dipped in these years because I published a very large number of posts and many of them were short, vignette-like. The same ‘natural forcing’ happened when I joined The Hindu in January 2023, with the average blog post length matching what worked at my workplace. I don’t understand exactly how this happens but I’m glad that it does.
On a related note, I recently discovered this amusing snippet in The Book of Imaginary Beings (1969) by Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero. Now I like to imagine I keep writing to prevent the monkey from drinking whatever is left of the ink…
When I joined The Wire in 2015, the average length of my blog posts increased from around 700 words to around 850 words, and over time to 1,000 words. This wasn’t forced so much as a natural reflection of the average length of pieces that worked on The Wire, also around 1,000 words. The trend held through 2018 and 2019 as well: the average post length dipped in these years because I published a very large number of posts and many of them were short, vignette-like. The same ‘natural forcing’ happened when I joined The Hindu in January 2023, with the average blog post length matching what worked at my workplace. I don’t understand exactly how this happens but I’m glad that it does.
On a related note, I recently discovered this amusing snippet in The Book of Imaginary Beings (1969) by Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero. Now I like to imagine I keep writing to prevent the monkey from drinking whatever is left of the ink…
The Hindu has a new print product out called ‘Surf & Dive’ (S&D), whose first edition the editor Suresh Nambath and Shashi Tharoor launched at the group’s ‘Lit for Life’ event in Chennai on January 18. We’ve been working on this for quite some time and are thrilled it’s finally out. S&D will be fortnightly with 76 pages, priced fully — without any part of it being paid for by ads — at Rs 99 per edition. It will present long-form reads on a variety of topics. Each edition will also feature a special cover story: the first one is an extensive analysis of what the world can expect during Trump 2.0.
One of the topics is science — and in fact it’s the single largest section in S&D, accounting for around 20 pages in each edition, around 24 if I include health. Since which pieces make it to the printed edition is a function of quality alone, I’m hoping to expand the room for science journalism in S&D over time. I’m already given to understand The Hindu’s science journalism output is among the highest in the country; I also know the diversity of topics is fantastic and that science-related articles already enjoy a lot of breathing space online and in print, commensurate with audience engagement. S&D expands this place of pride.
I’m sharing some of the pages from the first edition below. Get your copy here.
Credit: The Hindu (used with permission)Credit: The Hindu (used with permission)Credit: The Hindu (used with permission)Credit: The Hindu (used with permission)Credit: The Hindu (used with permission)Credit: The Hindu (used with permission)Credit: The Hindu (used with permission)
Pick up your copy here. If you’re interested in contributing to The Hindu’s science and environment sections, please write to mukunth dot v at thehindu dot co to in.
The Hindu has a new print product out called ‘Surf & Dive’ (S&D), whose first edition the editor Suresh Nambath and MP Shashi Tharoor launched at the group’s ‘Lit for Life’ event in Chennai on January 18. We’ve been working on this for quite some time and are thrilled it’s finally out. S&D will be fortnightly with 76 pages, priced fully — without any part of it being paid for by ads — at Rs 99 per edition. It will present long-form reads on a variety of topics. Each edition will also feature a special cover story: the first one is an extensive analysis of what the world can expect during Trump 2.0.
One of the topics is science — and in fact it’s the single largest section in S&D, accounting for around 20 pages in each edition, around 24 if I include health. Since which pieces make it to the printed edition is a function of quality alone, I’m hoping to expand the room for science journalism in S&D over time. I’m already given to understand The Hindu’s science journalism output is among the highest in the country; I also know the diversity of topics is fantastic and that science-related articles already enjoy a lot of breathing space online and in print, commensurate with audience engagement. S&D expands this place of pride.
I’m sharing some of the pages from the first edition below. Get your copy here.
Pick up your copy here. If you’re interested in contributing to The Hindu’s science and environment sections, please write to mukunth dot v at thehindu dot co dot in.
From ‘Energy megaproject in Chile threatens the world’s largest telescopes’, Science, January 10, 2025:
The AES project would occupy several sites totaling 3000 hectares, and the plants making hydrogen and ammonia with renewable energy would be sited just 5 kilometers from the VLT. Construction of the complex will create dust, a threat to delicate optics, but that would be manageable and temporary, Barcons says. More worrying is the permanent loss of the area’s remarkable dark skies. ESO has been using light pollution models developed by researchers in Canada to estimate the impact of AES’s plans. “Even if [AES] do a perfect job, using perfect lights that probably don’t even exist and perfect shielding, there will be an impact and that will be significant,” Barcons says.
This story — i.e. this tale involving the VLT, the AES project, Chile, etc. — is a useful reminder that specific places are important resources for some parts of the scientific enterprise. This is something we saw with opposition to the TMT atop Mauna Kea and in a different yet still similar form in the radio astronomy v. Starlink issue as well, but is otherwise something I think we forget, especially when the need arises beyond the bounds of the combined astronomy + geography setting.
For example, one of the major ways in which the world’s countries are responding to climate change is by trading carbon credits. In the framework of the programme in which these credits are valid, they’re generated by ‘projects’ that establish net carbon sinks. Some countries — almost always economically developing, in the tropics, and with low per capita income — have become hotspots of these projects, by their own initiative or at least by their wilful participation, by protecting old forests and selling the resulting credits to net carbon sources elsewhere.
I’m not convinced how the idea of allowing climate pollutants to accumulate in one area by offsetting them against carbon sinks in another, and far-flung, area could be legitimate. But setting that side: one way to look at it is that the international carbon-trading mechanism has created a new incentive structure wherein some less-wealthy countries could make the maintenance of mature flora within their borders a profitable enterprise that contributes to the local economy.
There’s also another way to look at it, especially because the carbon trading mechanism doesn’t have an implicit incentive and/or sanctions structure that discourages emissions over time: the persistence, even flourishing, of net carbon sources in other countries becomes increasingly dependent on the existence of carbon sinks in these other countries and an entitlement arises on the former’s part to the latter maintaining its forests. Would such an expectation be fair?
Fair to the “greater good” perhaps, but if something exists solely for a “greater good”, there’s a good chance it shouldn’t exist at all. Almost all the economically developing countries of the world have argued at multilateral climate fora for a right to continue to emit more and more carbon dioxide before reaching net-zero so that they’re allowed to pay a similar cost to have their economies grow as the world’s economically developed countries did in the past, without incurring the much greater costs today thanks to the (relatively) technologically immature renewable energy sources, their derivatives and downstream products, and their attendant infrastructure.
One way for a country to respond to this pressure is by converting more forest land for agriculture, industry, and residences. But as long as a country has a handle on this strategy (e.g. the way India is doing it is wrong), cutting part of its forests down is its prerogative and not something for businesses or even other countries to be able to control. Yet such control impulses have already been on display in the form of international banks restructuring national debts on the basis of promises to protect local biodiversity as well as governments — especially those of the US and the EU — including the waiver of loan repayments in climate financing commitments.
Now, I’m curious if we can argue the same way about ground-based telescopes. According to the report in Science, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) “chose the summit of Cerro Paranal” in the Atacama Desert, most of which lies in Chile, for its Very Large Telescope (VLT) because the air is almost completely free of moisture (which refracts light) and there’s no stray light, allowing starlight to reach the telescope’s instruments without much distortion. The AES project threatens to disrupt this state of affairs by throwing up more light into the sky and dispelling the valuable darkness.
… or at least that’s how Science has framed the argument. The problem here is that the interest of the Chilean government — which, by virtue of being democratically elected, represents the interests of the Chilean people — doesn’t find mention in the article until the 11th paragraph (out of 13). The ESO’s issues with the AES project take up most of the narrative; even the AES company’s statement appears before the government’s interests. In fact, the AES statement is (ironically?) the one to reveal the ESO’s ire to be misdirected: “The INNA project will be located in an area that the State of Chile has defined for the development of renewable energies…”.
Where’s the Chilean government in all this? If it approved the AES project’s location while being fully aware of the ESO telescopes nearby, what does AES have to do with this kerfuffle? By this point, in the ninth paragraph, an astronomer named Francesco Pepe has alleged that AES didn’t have an “open discussion” when ESO tried do and that “they did not take into account other interests”. This may be true — I trust Science’s credentials — but it’s still puzzling. If the Government of Chile approved both the VLT and the AES projects, why is the narrative erecting the AES as a bad-faith actor here by accusing it of refusing an “open discussion” here?
(The term “open discussion” is also vague. In fact, paint me cynical because I’m familiar with many instances in India where “open discussion” has been a euphemism for the interests of science and/or scientists to be airdropped into a democratic process. Many scientists and their rationalist groupies have often insisted governments adopt scientifically validated solutions to some problem or emergency without considering the tendency of such solutions — in the absence of suitable policy protections — to disenfranchise some social groups and minimise democratic power. See here and here for examples.)
Governments have special powers by definition. In the current context, the Chilean government wilfully abdicated its ability to wield that power, forgot how, couldn’t make up its mind about how or there’s something more happening here that we don’t know. As Pepe says in the 11th paragraph, “There seems to be some tension within the Chilean government between the ministers of energy and so on, on one side, and the ministers of science on the other side,” i.e. the third possibility. However, another scientists claims in the very last paragraph that AES is “a really, really big company and they have a lot of power”, that “it’s not easy to fight someone that has a lot of power.”
No shit — yet even this statement brings us back to the same question: where o where is the government? What does it want, and why? There’s no mention in the Science article of the author having attempted to get a statement from the Chilean government.
Finally, far be it from me to advocate populism. In fact, I’d sooner root for the view that a democratic government should transcend the populism that got it into power and found its decisions on what’s good for the country, in the long-term, and based on consulting a variety of stakeholders — and not simply on the ephemeral interests of the largest mob. (Ironically, I surmise, such thinking and deliberation would serve the interests of astronomy more than those of a clean-energy company since the latter is more likely to have popular support.) But even this sort of articulation is missing from the Science article, which instead leaves readers with an “astronomy above all” narrative.
