Teaching History
Why is history taught so badly? A Victorian textbook was criticized for killing all imagination under a mountain of facts that had to be memorized. Little seems to have changed […]
Operation Greif
Since I was on the subject of misinformation yesterday, I thought I’d look at a deliberate case of deception in wartime. On 22 October 1944, Hitler called Waffen SS commando […]
Bayesian Thinking in a Post-Truth World
While higher education rates in India remain abysmal, every Indian is now enrolled in the university of WhatsApp. With a strange reverence for the electronically typed word, people are eagerly […]
Roger Penrose and the Non-Computational Nature of Consciousness
In his 1996 book Shadows of the Mind, Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose argued that consciousness is fundamentally non-computational. This means that no computer or algorithm no matter how powerful or sophisticated […]
Physics and Consciousness for the self-learner
On this page, we attempt to create a one stop reference for people with diverse and non-specialist backgrounds interested in learning physics, quantum computing and consciousness. As far as possible […]
Schrodinger’s Cat
Probably the most misunderstood idea in all physics. Stephen Hawking said, “when I hear of Schrodinger’s cat, I reach for my gun”. Everybody seems to have taken a pot […]
Prisoner’s Dilemma
So here is the famous prisoner’s dilemma, the basic problem which is used to kick off all introductions to game theory and which finds a surprisingly large number of applications. […]
Balance
In school, we were taught that there was balance in nature. But disrupting any part of the ecology could upset this equilibrium and have far reaching effects across the biome. […]
Out of Africa
A new fossil find in Morocco is overturning many notions in human evolution. The new finds are believed to be 300,000 years old. This is about 100,000 years older than […]
Suicide Bombs
On Wednesday, Tehran witnessed its first major terrorist attack in 4 decades. Six attackers opened fire at the parliament and at the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini. The standoff lasted over […]
