Pranav Minasandra

Since OpenAI came out with ChatGPT last year, and especially since Elon Musk made Twitter the favourite shouthole for a certain unique breed of humans, Artificial Intelligence has entered the zeitgeist, and it looks like it’s here to stay for a while. Prof Melanie Mitchell dives into AI with a perspective that lies somewhere between historical, pedagogical, introspective, and speculative.

Varoufakis has had first-hand experience watching economies collapse—an insider perspective, as the Greek Minister of Finance during its attempts at recovery from a catastrophic debt crisis in 2015. In this book (the only book on economics that I’ve actually been able to read end-to-end), he starts at the very beginning, when people became people. Varoufakis takes us through where money and currency originated, why banking is relevant, how stock markets emerged from the ash and smoke of the industrial revolutions, and how bitcoins will never work as a major currency. It’s one of the most readable popular economics books, and makes a lot of sense out of an evolved, and ever-evolving, concept.

It’s surprising how much connects the dynamics and the statics of all kinds of real world systems. For years now, we have been trying our best to get at why—why do cities, asteroids, and animal groups have the same patterns in the distributions of their sizes? Why do the intervals between earthquakes, neuronal avalanches, and behavioural transitions all follow the same distributions as well? What connects general, universal phenomena like regime shifts, chaos, and synchronisation?

Disclaimer: This piece was written after reading plenty of material, and losing plenty of friends to Mr. Ravi Shankar’s cult. We do not intend to hurt anyone, and thus are not liable for hurt feelings, misaligned cosmic vibrations, or other unwanted experiences that you might experience if you already have an opinion about this article without reading it.

What is the best kind of science? Is it the science that is most rigorous? The science that is most applicable? Or maybe, some might argue, the science that is most entertaining? I feel the best kind of science is that which is most easy to do, which requires the least equipment, and the laboratory for which is all around us. Numbers, music, the sky, language… these constitute laboratory equipment accessible to everyone.

I have always been unsettled by Arundhati Roy’s writing. Reading The God of Small Things back in college, at a time when I was beginning to find my place in India’s accursed political spectrum, was a crucial event in my life. I was understandably a bit hesitant to pick up The Ministry of Utmost Happiness a few months ago. But then, running away from issues just because they make one uncomfortable is exactly what is not needed, especially when the writing is from a famously no-nonsense person like Roy.

Switching to a linux operating system and using the command-line day-to-day might seem intimidating at first. However, not only does it open up a host of creative and career avenues, it also changes the way you interact with your computer; ending up at a point where you finally feel in-control. Recent experiences with many scientific projects has convinced many of my friends of how easy linux Operating Systems (OSes) can make your life. William Shotts’ book, The Linux Command Line, is an excellent starting point to familiarise oneself with the shell and start using linux software freely.

It is hard to not be completely absorbed by a paper that begins with the sentence “Imagine a circular lily pond.” In this seminal essay, Hamilton introduces, perhaps for the first ever time in a coherent manner, the idea of individualistic natural selection leading to the formation of animal groups.

If someone comes up to you one fine day, when you’re strolling though a park, and starts talking to you about a book written by Steven Strogatz, you probably imagine something like `Non-linear Dynamics and Chaos’, Strogatz’s masterpiece that is used for teaching undergrad and grad level courses on dynamics everywhere. Sync is not such a book. Sync is a phenomenon in itself, a book as easily accessible to the layperson as it is unputdownable to the scientist.