How an amoral technocracy powers Modi’s India… For the engineers of Bengaluru and their allies in neoliberal think tanks, the BJP’s Hindutva politics is the necessary condition to put their designs to work. In 2023, this ideology has become the common sense of how India should be governed, shared by all major political forces in… Read More The Bangalore Ideology
Ibn Sina, known in the West as ‘Avicenna,’ and his contemporary Biruni set out to redefine law, medicine and philosophy in the 11th century The Genius of their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni, and the Lost Enlightenment; By S. Frederick Starr Reviewed by Maxwell Carter I never realized quite how idle and inadequate I was until reading… Read More Central Asia’s Big Thinkers
William Egginton As history’s bloodiest war metastasised from Europe outward, two men – a world apart from each other, and coming from profoundly different disciplines – converged on one fundamentally similar idea. One of the men was a poet and short-fiction writer with middling success in his own country but virtually unknown outside its borders.… Read More Quantum poetics: Borges and Heisenberg on language and reality
First posted January 05, 2016 NB: This interview taken by Dr K. Sohail with Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy was dated February 2000; but the link at which I first pocured it is now inactive. Those capable of searching for it could start with this link. DS Sohail: When I read your book “Islam and Science’, I was… Read More How difficult it is to help people change their thinking: Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy (Canada 2000)
The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed colorful new portraits of the iconic Ring Nebula. Smithsonian Magazine The new images capture the complex details of the planetary nebula, an enormous cloud of cosmic gas and dust that’s home to the remnants of a dying star. The two images were taken in different wavelengths of infrared… Read More Ring Nebula in unprecedented detail
As the climate warms, scientists have suggested that “time-traveling pathogens” unleashed by thawing Arctic permafrost may pose a risk to modern ecosystems. Permafrost is a hard layer of frozen ground made of soil, sand and rocks in high-latitude or high-altitude areas such as Greenland, Alaska, Siberia, the Tibetan Plateau and northern Canada. This icy layer traps microbes that… Read More New study warns against risks of ‘time-traveling pathogens’
About one in seven people in the UK now take medication to treat depression but some say they are not being given appropriate advice about the potential side-effects of the drugs they have been prescribed. By Anton Ferrie Seonaid Stallan’s son Dylan was a teenager when he began receiving treatment for body dysmorphia and depression.… Read More Antidepressants: I wasn’t told about the side-effects
Air pollution is helping to drive a rise in antibiotic resistance that poses a significant threat to human health worldwide, a global study suggests. The analysis, using data from more than 100 countries spanning nearly two decades, indicates that increased air pollution is linked with rising antibiotic resistance across every country and continent. It also… Read More Air pollution linked to rise in antibiotic resistance that imperils human health
The deadly effects of ideological extremism in the Middle East for the past few decades have caused governments and journalists to focus on it. The Arabic word is al-taṭarruf. I was interested, however, to see the word put to a different purpose in a Sky News Arabia article , where it is used to refer to extremely high… Read More Climate Change: the New Mideast Extremism / Severe Consequences of new Oil, Gas and Coal Production
First posted April 17, 2012 “In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war,… Read More The Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955
After the truth-shower 