Alcohol Use and Burden: Lancet

Alcohol consumption is a loaded topic. Most people know that it is probably not very good for your health, but how bad can it be? We know that some people die due to alcohol consumption, but that probably happens only to drunkards in old age. Moderation is the key. Moreover, there’s been a notion in

So how does Google work, exactly?

How do we decide which movie to watch on a given weekend? We could google “latest movies”, and then take a random pick. However, that throws up both good and bad results. How do we pick a “good movie” from this list? We go to Rottentomatoes, IMDB or the “Reception” section of Wikipedia, and see

Gravitational Wave Detection with LIGO

The paper that I’ll be reviewing today is the famous Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger by B.P. Abott et al. This paper records the detection of gravitational waves for the first time in human history, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2017. Introduction What are gravitational waves, and how

The Bitcoin Revolution

The paper that I’ll be discussing today is perhaps the most famous that has come out in recent years- Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, by Satoshi Nakamoto. It was a surprisingly short paper packed with the most amazing ideas for creating an alternate banking system. This paper has gone a long way in upending

Google’s Quantum Supremacy

The paper that I’m going to talk about today is the famous Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Conducting Processor. This was published in Nature in 2019, and demonstrated Quantum supremacy for the first time in human history. It is one of the best-written papers I’ve ever read, and is more helpful for understanding the definitions

Origins of Astrology in India

The paper that I will be discussing today is On the Philosophical and Cosmological Foundations of Indian Astrology, by Audrius Beinorius. I’ve always been fascinated with Astrology, and am glad that I got the time and opportunity to study it. This article is not paywalled. The Bible says that God created man in his image.

Deep Learning through bad analogies

The paper that I will be reviewing today is Deep Learning by YeCun, Bengio and Hilton. It was published in Nature in 2015, and is one of the most highly cited papers in the field with 16,750 citations. The authors of the paper went on to win the Turing Award in 2018. I did not

Of mountain passes and migration in the olden days

The paper that I read today is Why Mountain Passes are Higher in the Tropics by Daniel H. Janzen. I found this paper by browsing the paper “100 articles every ecologist should read”, which was published in Nature in 2017. What were the obstructions to the migration of species of animals in the ancient world,

Capacitors and making complicated shapes simpler

The paper that I intend to blog about is: Parallel-Plate Capacitor by the Schwartz-Christoffel Transformation by Harlan B. Palmer. I intend to read some research papers in various academic fields, and, perhaps amateurishly, blog about them. We could all be better about what is happening outside of our narrow fields of interest. Although I hope