UPDATE 22/10/2010: A modified version of the piece below has been published in Current Science, vol 99, no. 8 (pdf of piece). The media, and parts of the blogosphere, have been reporting extensively on the smackdown that the minister of state for environment and forests, Mr Jairam Ramesh, gave to the report prepared for his [...]

I just moved the blog here from its old home. I first thought of doing it some years ago: the annoyances of blogger are too many to list here, but the immediate motivation was the complaint, from a few posters on my previous post, that their comments were not appearing or were appearing in truncated [...]

Last year much excitement and noise occurred, including on this blog [1, 2, 3], when a group of scientists (led by Rajesh Rao at the University of Washington, and including my colleague Ronojoy Adhikari) published a brief paper in Science supplying evidence, on statistical grounds, that the Indus symbols constituted a writing system. In their [...]