OPINION

I grew up in rural Kerala reading each morning ‘Mathrubhumi’-a Malayalam newspaper. Over those years, I remember seeing small box advertisements on top-corners of the front page; every day I would see different incarnations of similar ads. The ads would read like “scientifically prepared magic amulets to ward off evil spirits” and so on. Even after two full decades, similar ads can still be found in Mathrubhumi and other newspapers of Kerala (and presumably other states as well). The question here is straight forward, what is science? Simply put, science is an evidence-based pursuit of knowledge discovery. Let us consider the example of the previous advertisement, the amulet. The question is how effective the amulet is to ward off evil spirits. Before answering this issue, one has to ascertain the validity of a thing called ‘evil spirit’. Of course, this question evades a fundamental principle in science known as ‘falsifiability’, put forth first by the British philosopher of s...

This comment is in response to “ The march from yesterdays ” by Sundar Sarukkai, published on 10 th August 2017. I am surprised to read a comment from a philosopher colleague that suffer from the logical fallacy of ad ignorantiam in its entirety, that too in the same newspaper issue with an excellent politics article full of profound scientific insights from a non-scientist colleague ( When the Paradigm Shifts , Happymon Jacob). The ignorance stems in part from the author’s poor understanding of what construes the science and how it is different from non-science, erroneous science and pseudoscience- three totally unrelated concepts. Non-scientific disciplines like history, sociology, art, literature and so on are of course not pseudoscientific or erroneous science, and the author’s such a claim suffers from a logical fallacy known universally as ‘false dichotomy’. I am a scientist, and I also work on linguistics and evolutionary socio-politics, I have authored an English fictio...

Of course, I am not apolitical; I do not have, however, a lifelong allegiance to a particular political party. I also refuse to be someone like the one author Elbert Hubbard satirically idolises: “To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” I have been vocal about various policy-related decisions of successive governments at different levels in India, mostly through social media. Among the things that I appreciated include good governance by Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, effective managerial skills of PM Modi and his decision to replace flowers for books as souvenirs, austere way of life of Tripura CM Manik Sarkar, Yogi Adityanath’s decision to distribute backpacks with Akhilesh Yadav’s images, social welfare decisions of Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan, and so on. While I love the personal freedom, free economy and other libertarian policies of advanced capitalism, I also love pro-multicultural, pro-science and egalitarian policies of socialism.  In a way, the...

With a good brand value of Lenovo (I am a satisfied customer of their smartphone and tablet) and budget price tag (approx Rs. 1799 through phonepe- Flipkart offer) with one-year warranty I decided to give it a try (it looks way beautiful than Mi bands too, yet another reason). It came with heart rate sensor too, nifty! This is what happened: This band (and most of the other smartbands) support no biking; so if you are planning to do some biking as part of your overall fitness schedule, this band is of no use. HW01 lasts for a day with its heart rate continuous sensor (continuous doesn't mean full time, but one reading every 15 minutes). PLUS, it works on bluetooth, so it drains out phone's battery quite fast. That would mean you are caught up with a dying phone and a dying smartband most of the days . If you disable HR function of the band, it lasts for 2 days. (Compare this with Mi Band 2, which last for a week or so, but again, read the whole story; smartbands ar...

1. Install Philips GoGear Device Manager (Which is available inside your GoGear drive, use explorer to locate and then install) In case the device manager do not open, try other, older computer (I had this issue) 2. Second tab of device manager, repair, has all instructions. In summary, connect or re-connect GoGear in OFF position, while pressing and holding volume up key. It says + key, while no such key can be found, it is just volume up key . 3. The MIX will now start recovering/firmware updation 4. You may need to reformat the drive before you can use it; reformat it from windows explorer like how you reformat USB pen drives. Now try syncing!

A group of scientists from India and Austria have discovered that the red colored “blood” rain phenomenon sporadically happened at various locations across South India and Sri Lanka was due to the spores of terrestrial microscopic green alga, Trentepohlia annulata . Spells of weird red colored rain –the so-called “blood rain”- across South India had been reported since 1896; the latest one happened in Kerala during December, 2013. Rain droplets were so red that the sun-dried white laundry turns dark-red after drenching in the rain. Since then a number of purported causes for this mysterious phenomenon have been circulating, including divine spell and alien involvement. For example, an American newspaper The Huffington Post reported in 2012 that this was caused by extraterrestrial life (aliens). The present study compared microscopic morphology and DNA sequence data of locally abundant microalgae of the area where the red rain phenomenon happened and confirmed that it was a European s...