The perception of India in the West and, indeed, among Indians themselves has never been more amorphous as it is now. – Amartya Sen on his book The Argumentative Indian
Author: Akshat Rathi
Akshat Rathi is a senior reporter for Bloomberg News. He has previously worked at Quartz, The Economist and The Conversation. His writing has appeared in Nature, The Guardian and The Hindu. He has a PhD in chemistry from Oxford University and a BTech in chemical engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai.
Things that don’t make sense: Part I
In this day and age when information travels at the speed of light (well, almost), why is it that some movies get released in the US months before they are released anywhere else in the world? It’s the same with music and books.
Here, here and here are some plausible but not entirely convincing answers.
PS: I’ve noticed that there are somethings which shout “What nonsense!” to me. I’ll be documenting them in this series.
What drove Steve Jobs?
In 1995 in the Lost Interview, Steve Jobs said that an article in Scientific American sparked his passion for building tools for humanity:
I read an article when I was very young, in Scientific American, and in it researchers measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on Earth. So, you know, bears, chimpanzees, racoons, fish…and humans were measured too.
How many kilocalories per kilometer did they spend to move?
The condor won. It was the most efficient. And mankind, the crown of creation, came with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. But someone there had the brilliance of measuring a human riding a bicycle. Blew away the condor. All the way up the charts.
And I remember that this really had an impact on me. Humans are tool builders, and we build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities.
That’s why we ran an ad in the early days at Apple: the personal computer was the bicycle of the mind. I believe that with every bone in my body. The computer will, as history unfolds and we look back, rank at the top among all human inventions.
Despite this, people still doubt the value of science and science magazines.
Akshat Rathi 