Appeal for Vikram Buddhi

For the first time yesterday I heard of Vikram Buddhi who has been incarcerated in the USA under the most mysterious of circumstances. It appears very shocking. I believe the Hon. Minister Mr. S. M. Krishna has now promised help. I would urge you to go and sign the appeal here which was brought to my attention by my sister.

Thomas Henziger is President of new Institute of Science and Technology

Those of you who read my posts from 2008 on my travel-log in Switzerland may rember a brief reference to old friend Thomas Henzinger in this here. Yesterday I received an alert from a friend Japhet Bagilishya that Thomas had moved back to Austria to take up an important post. It turns out that it is not just any old post: he is now the President of the Institute of Science and Technology in Vienna and you can read about it in an article from Nature.

India-Nobel prizes at "Reflections"

Over at "Reflections" Shivanand Kanavi has many posts on the Indian near hits of Nobel prizes (NPs).

While it is sad for those gentlemen, is there not too much talk about NPs among in our science administration?

Magnetic monopoles in spin ice

Part of my duties will be link to interesting science articles and posts. Leading candidate this Thursday is the article in magnetic monopoles in spin ice over at "As I please" which you can find
here.

A blogger is reborn?

I feel impelled (one of my dictionaries warns me against getting impelled and compelled mixed-up incorrectly) to wake up and to become a blogger again. The hiatus in blogging resulted with a general dis-satisfaction with the quality of my own posts, turbulent events in personal and professional life, including serial hospitalizations of near and dear at the time of my last post 10 months or so ago, but a semblance of order seems to be creeping in now. A recently joined colleague asked me if I had stopped blogging because I am now Chairman of my Centre and if that has influenced my decision, while Rahul Basu over at "As I Please" has deleted my blog from his list of blogs he reads, and while Abi at "Nanopolitan" has been decrying the lack of science bloggers, and finally a mail today from some one at the Centre for Society and the Internet wrote to me on my views on open-source or something of that sort, even though I am no longer a regular blogger, etc., has prompted the decision to rise from the ashes. In the meantime, I have been continuing to read blogs. One of the important things that has made an impression on me is the elementary proof of the density Hales-Jewett problem on Timothy Gowers' blog featured very prominently on Nanopolitan which has woken me up to the importance of science/maths blogging. While it is impossible that this humble blog will ever find a niche of that sort, it is the paucity of Indian science blogs which has jolted me out. So let me promise all 3 readers of this blog (are there that many?) that I will make an effort.

Climate change affects Jupiter

After a long long break from blogging I thought it is time to start again. Let us begin with this science story which says that climate change is there on Jupiter also. See here.

Abbas Tyrewala on the Mumbai attacks

I was struck and intrigued at what I read here. This is a story on the reaction of Abbas Tyrewala (I had never heard of him before; I guess I do not follow Bollywood script writers, etc.) to the Mumbai attacks. He talks about his genuine fear of retaliation for the attacks with which he has nothing to do. He admires the Indian people (more precisely the people of Mumbai) for sticking together. The only question he does not ask is what exactly is a backlash? It is my humble submission that one can expect a backlash not from the common people of India, but from the horrid political parties which are known to be behind every one of such backlashes.