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Dilip DsouzaScroll.in |
Some things in our lives are givens. We grow up with them firmly embedded in our brains and consciousness, not questioned to any degree. The shapes of...
On my college campus again after several years, I’m consumed—as you can imagine—with nostalgia. Memories at this corner, that hostel looks so...
Somewhere right in the middle, you’d be weightless. Might feel kind of funky. But certainly privileged too: after all, how many of us get to...
What happens in outer space is a never-ending source of mystery and wonder. Black holes, pulsars, anyone? Cepheid variables, globular clusters,...
Meme that’s making the rounds this week: This New Year, 2024, is tetrahedral. What does that mean? No, it has nothing to do with those containers...
Before writing this, I divided 350,757 by 48. The result? Just over 7,307. Which means 48 people each tossed a coin 7307 times. Give that some...
Every time I meet my good friend Ajay, he is bubbling with fascinating ideas and nuggets. Most recently, he told me of a visit to Chichén Itzá, the...
What is it about sequences and mathematicians, really? You’d be hard-pressed to find a number theorist who isn’t fascinated by sequences of...
There’s a meme making the rounds, an image of a bill somebody paid at a restaurant. The bill is for $26.86. In the space marked “TIP", the...
As I write this, 41 of my fellow-citizens have spent 12 days trapped inside a collapsed tunnel in Uttarakhand. My hope is that by the time you read...
The mind is unable," wrote W. Stanley Jevons, “to estimate any large number of objects without counting them successively." He was right. Think, for...
Something I’ve always wanted to do with this column is to explore a little bit of how science progresses. Not the details of experiments conducted...
There’s something compelling about bird migration. The way birds return to the same spot year after year, the distances they travel, how relatively...
NEW DELHI : Remember your first Möbius strip? I don’t. But I remember, every time I made one, a sense of wonder at what was about to happen. A...
NEW DELHI : Half a century ago, astronauts brought back a total of a few hundred kilograms of rocks from the moon. It generated great excitement,...
Every so often, there’s news that makes me despair that we will ever build a scientific temperament in this country. This column is about some such...
The spacecraft slammed into the asteroid. We got spectacular photos of the crash and the aftermath. Later observations showed that the crash had...