If you thought their publications were freaky get a load of how they look after a ton of plastic surgery. You may remember them from the Bogdanov affair many years ago.  They…

In India mass scale cutting of trees along the roadside, increasing urbanisation, rampant destruction of trees on private land, forest land, panchayat land. has taken place. Cutting trees and selling…

Just a quick update for my fab fans out there.  And by 'fab' I mean 'PCB fabricators'.  For the Calliope satellite, I need 8 printed circuit boards (PCBs) fabricated for the solar cells.…

Equations of Basic Seldon or Prime Radiant Equations of Section 42R254 Equations of Section 33A2D17 or Terminus Equation Psychohistory Psychohistory, a science in Isaac Asimov's Foundation…

Both scientists and non scientists have a tendency to regard science and culture as different and parallel, if not competing things, between which one can or must choose. Science is not conceived of…

First, I have to apologize for my extended absence from both this site and my blog... I've not only been experiencing some career path type crises, but also studying for, taking, and hopefully…

During a visit to Europe one feels its so cold at time of the year. I dint even bring sufficient clothing to face the low temperatures in May in central europe. India is facing 47 degree in Alwar , a…

A crucial aspect of the complexity approach is how interacting elements produce aggregate patterns that those elements in turn react to. This leads to the emergence of aggregate properties and…

The talk will review some of the basic facts about the history and present status of the use of energy and its climatic consequences. It is clear that the world will have to change its way of energy…

The scientific method which provides us with so many technological goodies does not resemble the science of 1600. Ever since Bacon, science has undergone a slow evolution. Landmarks in the history of…

The Cyc knowledge base (KB) is a formalized representation of a vast quantity of fundamental human knowledge: facts, rules of thumb, and heuristics for reasoning about the objects and events of…

I will discuss Leibniz's ideas on complexity (Discours de metaphysique, 1686), leading to modern work on program-size complexity, the halting probability and incompleteness. Leibniz's principle of…

One remarkable aspect of human vision is the ability to understand the meaning of a novel image or event quickly and effortlessly. Within a single glance, we can comprehend the semantic category of a…

Mathematician Ludwig Schläfli talks to us about objects in the fourth dimension and shows us a procession of regular polyhedra in dimension 4, strange objects with 24, 120 and even 600 faces! Watch…

I had a sore throat this afternoon so I came home early to rest (translation: be babied by the wife; she gave birth and it's dismissed as part of a natural cycle but if I get a cold I expect to be…

So I'm a couple of weeks late, but it's worth noting that NY Times science blogger John Tierney is quitting his blog: After three years of experiments, TierneyLab is shutting down. I’ll still be…

This is going to be a short post where I confess my recent troubles with keeping everything going on at full speed in my life, while the workload constantly grows. I believe it is a temporary problem…

This piece about crumbling faith in expertise is making the rounds on the web (see also Becky's comments): The democratization of scientific expertise carries danger with it. If experts cannot be…

You could be forgiven for thinking that the days when flying was a frontier science are well and truly over, but not so, as the Solar Impulse had its maiden flight recently. A flying machine no…

Given I'm a mad scientist building a satellite in my basement, who are my heroes?  Are they Carl Sagan, astronomer populist extraordinaire?  Neil Tyson, a dynamic yet media-saavy heir to…