Hitchens died two days back fighting oesophageal cancer for over a year now. How many people wished that he would in the last days of his life renounce the acerbity with which he attacked religion of any sort. With the three other horsemen – Dan Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (cf the four horsemen of the apocalypse), the public debates they had with...

It is indeed great days for learners, especially for those who are self-directed, auto-didactic as they are apparently called. With the explosion of those delectable tablets made by that company Lieutenant Dan invested in and the claim that many other products are what evoulutionary biologists would call Batesian mimics, the access and availability to information...

Bessie Braddock (to Winston Churchill): Winston, you’re drunk. Churchill: Bessie, you’re ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober. This exchange (perhaps apocryphal like any other exchange attributed to Churchill) is up there for no particular reason. I find it funny and that quite suits. Well, here’s another poem and like my previous poem blogs, again...

Gracula religiosa is the latin name of the Hill Myna, a beautiful bird seen along the Western Ghats and associated South Indian hills. It is one of the endemic birds here and has recently been elevated to a full species, and rechristened Southern Hill Myna. Not getting into the boring details of why this was done, and how this is relevant to anybody, the above image...

In the winter of 2004, from my abode in BR Hills, where I was dwelling then, I had all the time in the world to philosophize! I was writing about the artist-scientist ‘polarities’ and one of my senior colleagues in BR Hills, responded to my turmoil by throwing some light. Stephen Jay Gould is a wonderful companion through such confusions on lonely...

This post is in response to some very ‘hazy’ topics in the ‘grey zone’ between science and philosophy! The following post by my friend Sudheendra about Black-bellied Terns triggered this response, which led to a wonderful discussion on the same. Sudhee asked “…During my regular birding sessions……i encountered many water...