Matt Mullenweg v. WP Engine

Automattic CEO and WordPress co-developer Matt Mullenweg published a post on September 21 calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress”. For the uninitiated: WP Engine is an independent company that provides managed hosting for WordPress sites; WordPress.com is owned by Automattic and it leads the development of WordPress.org. WP Engine’s hosting plans start at $30 a month and it enjoys a good public reputation. Mullenweg’s post however zeroed in on WP Engine’s decision to not record the revisions you’ve made to your posts in your site’s database. This is a basic feature in the WordPress content management system, and based on its absence Mullenweg says:

What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.

The first thing that struck me about this post was its unusual vehemence, which Mullenweg has typically reserved in the past for more ‘extractive’ platforms like Wix whose actions have also been more readily disagreeable. WP Engine has disabled revisions but as Mullenweg himself pointed out it doesn’t hide this fact. It’s available to view on the ‘Platform Settings’ support page. Equally, WP Engine also offers daily backups; you can readily restore one of them and go back to a previous ‘state’.

Second, Mullenweg accuses WP Engine of “butchering” WordPress but this is stretching it. I understand where he’s coming from, of course: WP Engine is advertising WordPress hosting but it doesn’t come with one of the CMS’s basic features, and which WP Engine doesn’t hide but doesn’t really advertise either. But I’d hardly call this “butchering”, much less in public and more than a decade after Automattic invested in WP Engine.

WP Engine’s stated reason is that post revisions increase database costs that the company would like to keep down. Mullenweg interprets this to mean WP Engine wants “to avoid paying to store that data”. Well, yeah, and that’s okay, right? I can’t claim to be aware of all the trade-offs that determined WP Engine’s price points but turning off a feature to keep costs down and reactivating it upon request for individual users seems fair.

In fact, what really gets my goat is Mullenweg’s language, especially around how much WP Engine charges. He writes:

They are strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem, giving our users a crappier experience so they can make more money.

WordPress.com offers a very similar deal to its customers. (WordPress.com is Automattic’s platform for users where they can pay the company to host WordPress sites for them.) In the US, you’ll need to pay at least $25 a month (billed yearly) to be able to upload custom themes and plugins to your site. All the plans below that rate don’t have this option. You also need this plan to access and jump back to different points of your site’s revision history.

Does this mean WordPress.com is “strip-mining” its users to avoid paying for the infrastructure required for those features? Or is it offering fewer features at lower price points because that’s how it can make its business work? I used to be happy that WordPress.com offers a $48 a year plan with fewer features because I didn’t need them — just as well as WP Engine seems to have determined it can charge its customers less by disabling revision history by default.

(I’m not so happy now because WordPress.com moved detailed site analytics — anything more than hits to posts — from the free plan to the Premium plan, which costs $96 a year.)

It also comes across as disingenuous for Mullenweg to say the “cancer” a la WP Engine will spread if left unchecked. He himself writes no WordPress host listed on WordPress.org’s recommended hosts page has disabled revisions history — but is he aware of the public reputation of these hosts, their predatory pricing habits, and their lousy customer service? Please take a look at Kevin Ohashi’s Review Signal website or r/webhosting. Cheap WordPress in return for a crappy hosting experience is the cancer that’s already spread because WordPress didn’t address it.

(It’s the reason I switched to composing my posts offline on MarsEdit, banking on its backup features, and giving up on my expectations of hosts including WordPress.com.)

It’s unfair to accuse companies of “strip-mining” WordPress so hosting providers can avail users a spam-free, crap-free hosting experience that’s also affordable. In fact, given how flimsy many of Mullenweg’s arguments seem to be, they’re probably directed at some other deeper issue — perhaps what he perceives to be WP Engine not contributing enough back to the open source ecosystem?

What can science education do, and what can it not?

On September 29, 2021, The Third Eye published an interview with Milind Sohoni, a teacher at the Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas and at IIT Bombay. (Thanks to @labhopping for bringing it into my feed.) I found it very thought-provoking. I’m pasting below some excerpts from the interview together with my notes. I think what Prof. Sohoni says doesn’t build up to a coherent whole. He is at times simplistic and self-contradictory, and what he says is often descriptive instead of offering a way out. Of course I don’t know whether what I say builds up to a coherent whole either but perhaps you’ll realise details here that I’ve missed.

… I wish the textbooks had exercises like let’s visit a bus depot, or let’s visit a good farmer and find out what the yields are, or let’s visit the PHC sub-centre, talk to the nurse, talk to the compounder, talk to the two doctors, just getting familiar with the PHC as something which provides a critical health service would have helped a lot. Or spend time with an ASHA worker. She has a notepad with names of people in a village and the diseases they have, which family has what medical emergency. How is it X village has so much diabetes and Y village has none?

I’m sure you’ll agree this would be an excellent way to teach science — together with its social dependencies instead of introducing the latter as an add-on at the level of higher, specialised education.
—

… science education is not just about big science, and should not be about big science. But if you look at the main central government departments populated by scientists, they are Space, Atomic Energy and Defence. Okay, so we have missile men and women, big people in science, but really, so much of science in most of the developed world is really sadak, bijli, pani.

I disagree on three counts. (i) Science education should include ‘big science’; if it doesn’t we lose access to a domain of knowledge and enterprise that plays an important role in future-proofing societies. We choose the materials with which we will build buildings, lay roads, and make cars and batteries and from which we will generate electric power based on ‘big science’. (ii) Then again, what is ‘big science’? I’m not clear what Sohoni means by that in this comment. But later in the interview he refers to Big Science as a source of “certainty” (vis-à-vis life today) delivered in the form of “scientific things … which we don’t understand”.

If by “Big Science” he means large scientific experiments that have received investments worth millions of dollars from multiple governments, and which are churning out results that don’t inform or enhance contemporary daily life, his statement seems all the more problematic. If a government invests some money in a Big Science project but then pulls out, it doesn’t necessarily or automatically redirect those funds to a project that a critic has deemed more worthwhile, like say multiple smaller science projects. Government support for Big Science has never operated that way. Further, Big Science frequently and almost by design inevitably leads to a lot of derivative ‘Smaller Science’, spinoff technologies, and advances in allied industries. Irrespective of whether these characteristics — accidental or otherwise — suffice to justify supporting a Big Science project, wanting to expel such science from science education is still reckless.

(iii) Re: “… so much of science in most of the developed world is really streets, electricity, water” — Forget proving/disproving this and ask yourself: how do we separate research in space, atomic energy, and defence from knowledge that gave rise to better roads, cheaper electricity, and cleaner water? We can’t. There is also a specific history that explains why each of these departments Sohoni has singled out were set up the way they were. And just because they are staffed with scientists doesn’t mean they are any good or worth emulating. (I’m also setting aside what Sohoni means by “much”. Time consumed in research? Money spent? Public value generated? Number of lives improved/saved?).

Our science education should definitely include Big Science: following up from the previous quote, teachers can take students to a radio observatory nearby and speak to the scientists about how the project acquired so much land, how it secured its water and power requirements, how administrators negotiated with the locals, etc. Then perhaps we can think about avoiding cases like the INO.
—

The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers Act came along ago, and along with it came a list of 42 [pieces of] equipment, which every municipality should have: a mask, a jetting machine, pumps and so on. Now, even IIT campuses don’t have that equipment. Is there any lab that has a ‘test mask’ even? Our men are going into talks and dying because of [lethal] fumes. A ‘test mask’ is an investment. You need a face-like structure and an artificial lung exposed to various environments to test its efficacy. And this mask needs to be standard equipment in every state. But these are things we never asked IITs to do, right?

This comment strikes a big nail on the head. It also brings to mind an incident on the Anna University campus eight years ago. To quote from Thomas Manuel’s report in The Wire on the incident: “On June 21, 2016, two young men died. Their bodies were found in a tank at the Anna University campus in Chennai. They were employees of a subcontractor who had been hired to seal the tank with rubber to prevent any leakage of air. The tank was being constructed as a part of a project by the Ministry of Renewable Energy to explore the possibilities of using compressed air to store energy. The two workers, Ramesh Shankar and Deepan, had arrived at the site at around 11.30 am and begun work. By 3.30 pm, when they were pulled out of the tank, Deepan was dead and Ramesh Shankar, while still breathing at the time, died a few minutes later.”

This incident seemed, and still seems, to say that even within a university — a place where scientists and students are keenly aware of the rigours of science and the value it brings to society — no one thinks to ensure the people hired for what is casually called “menial” labour are given masks or other safety equipment. The gaps in science education Sohoni is talking about are evident in the way scientists think about how they can ensure society is more rational. A society rife with preventable deaths is not rational.
—

I think what science does is that it claims to study reality. But most of reality is socially administered, and so we need to treat this kind of reality also as a part of science.

No, we don’t. We shouldn’t. Science offers a limited set of methods and analytical techniques with which people can probe and describe reality and organise the knowledge they generate. He’s right, most of reality is socially administered, but that shouldn’t be an invitation to forcibly bring what currently lies beyond science to within the purview of science. The scientific method can’t deal with them — but importantly it shouldn’t be expected to. Science is incapable of handling multiple, equally valid truths pertaining to the same set of facts. In fact a few paras later Sohoni ironically acknowledges that there are truths beyond science and that their existence shouldn’t trouble scientists or science itself:

… scientists have to accept that there are many things that we don’t know, and they still hold true. Scientists work empirically and sometimes we say okay, let’s park it, carry on, and maybe later on we will find out the ‘why’. The ‘why’ or the explanation is very cultural…

… whereas science needs that ‘why’, and needs it to be singular and specific. If these explanations for aspects of reality don’t exist in a form science can accommodate, yet we also insist as Sohoni did when he said “we need to treat this kind of reality also as a part of science”, then we will be forced to junk these explanations for no fault except that they don’t meet science’s acceptability criteria.

Perhaps there is a tendency here as if to say we need a universal theory of everything, but do we? We can continue to use different human intellectual and social enterprises to understand and take advantage of different parts of human experience. Science and for that matter the social sciences needn’t be, and aren’t, “everything”.
—

Science has convinced us, and is delivering on its promise of making us live longer. Whether those extra five years are of higher quality is not under discussion. You know, this is the same as people coming from really nice places in the Konkan to a slum in Mumbai and staying there because they want certainty. Life in rural Maharashtra is very hard. There’s more certainty if I’m a peon or a security guard in the city. I think that science is really offering some ‘certainty’. And that is what we seem to have accepted.

This seems to me to be too simplistic. Sohoni says this in reply to being asked whether science education today leans towards “technologies that are serving Big Business and corporate profits, rather than this developmental model of really looking critically at society”. And he would have been fairer to say we have many more technological devices and products around us today, founded on what were once scientific ideas, that serve corporate profits more than anything else. The French philosopher Jacques Ellul elucidated this idea brilliantly in his book The Technological Society (1964).

It’s just that Sohoni’s example of ageing is off the mark, and in the process it is harder to know what he’s really getting at. Lifespan is calculated as the average number of years an individual in a particular population lives. It can be improved by promoting factors that help our bodies become more resilient and by dissuading factors that cause us to die sooner. If lifespan is increasing today, it’s because fewer babies are succumbing to vaccine-preventable diseases before they turn five, because there are fewer road accidents thanks to vehicle safety, and because novel treatments like immunotherapy are improving the treatment rates of various cancers. Any new scientific knowledge in the prevailing capitalist world-system is susceptible to being coopted by Big Business but I’m also glad the knowledge exists at all.

Sure, we can all live for five more years on average, but if those five years will be spent in, say, the humiliating conditions of palliative care, let’s fix that problem. Sohoni says science has strayed from that path and I’m not so sure — but I’m convinced there’s enough science to go around (and enough money for it, just not the political will): scientists can work on both increasing lifespan and improving the conditions of palliative care. We shouldn’t vilify one kind of science in order to encourage the other. Yet Sohoni persists with this juxtaposition as he says later:

… we are living longer, we are still shitting on the road or, you know, letting our sewage be cleaned by fellow humans at the risk of death, but we are living longer. And that is, I think, a big problem.

We are still shitting on the road and we are letting our sewage be cleaned by fellow humans at the risk of death. These are big problems. Us living longer is not a big problem.
—

Big Technology has a knack of turning us all into consumers of science, by neutralising questions on ‘how’ and ‘why’ things work. We accept it and we enjoy the benefits. But see, if you know the benefits are divided very unevenly, why doesn’t it bother us? For example, if you buy an Apple iPhone for Rs. 75,000 how much does the actual makers of the phone (factory workers) get? I call it the Buddhufication Crisis: a lot of people are just hooked on to their smartphones, and live in a bubble of manufactured certainty; and the rest of society that can’t access smartphones, is left to deal with real-world problems.

By pushing us to get up, get out, and engage with science where it is practised, a better science education can inculcate a more inquisitive, critical-thinking population that applies the good sense that comes of a good education to more, or all, aspects of society and social living. This is why Big Technology in particular does not tempt us into becoming “consumers” of science rather than encouraging us to pick at its pieces. Practically everything does. Similarly Sohoni’s “Buddhufication” description is muddled. Of course it’s patronising towards the people who create value — especially if it is new and/or takes unexpected forms — out of smartphones and use it as a means of class mobility, and seems to suggest a person striving for any knowledge other than of the scientific variety is being a “buddhu”. And what such “buddhufication” has to do with the working conditions of Apple’s “factory workers” is unclear.
—

Speaking of relationships:

Through our Public Health edition, we also seem to sit with the feeling that science is not serving rural areas, not serving the poor. In turn, there is also a lower expectation of science from the rural communities. Do you feel this is true?

Yes, I think that is true to a large extent. But it’s not to do with rural. You see, for example, if you look at western Maharashtra — the Pune-Nashik belt — some of the cleverest people live there. They are basically producing vegetables for the big urban markets: in Satara, Sangli, that entire irrigated area. And in fact, you will see that they are very careful about their future, and understand their place in society and the role of the state. And they expect many things from the state or the government; they want things to work, hospitals to work, have oxygen, etc. And so, it is really about the basic understanding of cause and effect of citizenship. They understand what is needed to make buses work, or hospitals function; they understand how the state works. This is not very different from knowing how gadgets work.

While the distinction to many others may be trivial, “science” and “scientists” are not the same thing. This equation is present throughout the interview. At first I assumed it was casual and harmless but at this point, given the links between science, science education, technology, and public welfare that Sohoni has tried to draw, the distinction is crucial here. Science is already serving rural areas — Sohoni says as much in the comment here and the one that follows. But many, or maybe most, scientists may not be serving rural areas, if only so we can also acknowledge that some scientists are also serving rural areas. “Science is not serving rural areas” would mean no researcher in the country — or anywhere, really — has brought the precepts of science to bear on the problems of rural India. This is just not true. On the other hand saying “most scientists are not serving rural areas” will tell us some useful scientific knowledge exists but (i) too few scientists are working on it (i.e. mindful of the local context) and (ii) there are problems with translating it from the lab bench to its application in the field, at ground zero.

This version of this post benefited from inputs from and feedback by Prathmesh Kher.

PSA about Business Today

If you get your space news from the website businesstoday.in, this post is for you. Business Today has published several articles over the last few weeks about the Starliner saga with misleading headlines and claims blown far out of proportion. I’d been putting off writing about them but this morning, I spotted the following piece:

Business Today has produced all these misleading articles in this format, resembling Instagram reels. This is more troubling because we know tidbits like this are more consumable as well as are likely to go viral by virtue of their uncomplicated content and simplistic message. Business Today has also been focusing its articles on the saga on Sunita Williams alone, as if the other astronauts don’t exist. This choice is obviously of a piece with Williams’s Indian heritage and Business Today’s intention to maximise traffic to its pages by publishing sensational claims about her experience in space. As I wrote before:

… in the eyes of those penning articles and headlines, “Indian-American” she is. They’re using this language to get people interested in these articles, and if they succeed, they’re effectively selling the idea that it’s not possible for Indians to care about the accomplishments of non-Indians, that only Indians’, and by extension India’s, accomplishments matter. … Calling Williams “Indian-American” is to retrench her patriarchal identity as being part of her primary identity — just as referring to her as “Indian origin” is to evoke her genetic identity…

But something more important than the cynical India connection is at work here: in these pieces, Business Today has been toasting it. This my term for a shady media practice reminiscent of a scene in an episode of the TV show Mad Men, where Don Draper suggests Lucky Strike should advertise its cigarettes as being “toasted”. When someone objects that all cigarettes are toasted, Draper says they may well be, but by saying publicly that its cigarettes are toasted, Lucky Strike will set itself out without doing anything new, without lying, without breaking any rules. It’s just a bit of psychological manipulation.

Similarly, Business Today has been writing about Williams as if she’s the only astronaut facing an extended stay in space (and suggesting in more subtle ways that this fate hasn’t befallen anyone before — whereas it has dozens of times), that NASA statements concern only her health and not the health of the other astronauts she’s with, and that what we’re learning about her difficulties in space constitute new information.

None of this is false but it’s not true either. It’s toasted. Consider the first claim: “NASA has revealed that Williams is facing a critical health issue”:

* “NASA has revealed” — there’s nothing to reveal here. We already know microgravity affects various biochemical processes in the body, including the accelerated destruction of red blood cells.

* “Williams is facing” — No. Everyone in microgravity faces this. That’s why astronauts need to be very fit people, so their bodies can weather unanticipated changes for longer without suffering critical damage.

* “critical health issue” — Err, no. See above. Also, perhaps in a bid to emphasise this (faux) criticality, Business Today’s headline begins “3 million per second” and ends calling the number “disturbing”. You read it, this alarmingly big number is in your face, and you’re asking to believe it’s “disturbing”. But it’s not really a big number in context and certainly not worth any disturbance.

For another example, consider: “Given Williams’ extended mission duration, this accelerated red blood cell destruction poses a heightened risk, potentially leading to severe health issues”. Notice how Business Today doesn’t include three important details: how much of an extension amounts to a ‘bad’ level of extension, what the odds are of Williams (or her fellow Starliner test pilot Barry Wilmore) developing “health issues”, and whether these consequences are reversible. Including these details would deflate Business Today’s ‘story’, of course.

If Business Today is your, a friend’s and/or a relative’s source of space news, please ask them to switch to any of the following instead for space news coverage and commentary that’s interesting without insulting your intelligence:

* SpaceNews

* Jeff Foust

* Marcia Smith

* Aviation Week

* Victoria Samson

* Jatan Mehta

* The Hindu Science

A spaceflight narrative unstuck

“First, a clarification: Unlike in Gravity, the 2013 film about two astronauts left adrift after space debris damages their shuttle, Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore are not stuck in space.”

This is the first line of an Indian Express editorial today, and frankly, it’s enough said. The idea that Williams and Wilmore are “stuck” or “stranded” in space just won’t die down because reports in the media — from The Guardian to New Scientist, from Mint to Business Today — repeatedly prop it up.

Why are they not “stuck”?

First: because “stuck” implies Boeing/NASA are denying them an opportunity to return as well as that the astronauts wish to return, yet neither of which is true. What was to be a shorter visit has become a longer sojourn.

This leads to the second answer: Williams and Wilmore are spaceflight veterans who were picked specifically to deal with unexpected outcomes, like what’s going on right now. If amateurs or space tourists had been picked for the flight and their stay at the ISS had been extended in an unplanned way, then the question of their wanting to return would arise. But even then we’d have to check if they’re okay with their longer stay instead of jumping to conclusions. If we didn’t, we’d be trivialising their intention and willingness to brave their conditions as a form of public service to their country and its needs. We should think about extending the same courtesy to Williams and Wilmore.

And this brings us to the third answer: The history of spaceflight — human or robotic — is the history of people trying to expect the unexpected and to survive the unexpectable. That’s why we have test flights and then we have redundancies. For example, after the Columbia disaster in 2003, part of NASA’s response was a new protocol: that astronauts flying in faulty space capsules could dock at the ISS until the capsule was repaired or a space agency could launch a new capsule to bring them back. So Williams and Wilmore aren’t “stuck” there: they’re practically following protocol.

For its upcoming Gaganyaan mission, ISRO has planned multiple test flights leading up the human version. It’s possible this flight or subsequent ones could throw up a problem, causing the astronauts within to take shelter at the ISS. Would we accuse ISRO of keeping them “stuck” there or would we laud the astronauts’ commitment to the mission and support ISRO’s efforts to retrieve them safely?

Fourth: “stuck” or “stranded” implies a crisis, an outcome that no party involved in the mission planned for. It creates the impression human spaceflight (in this particular mission) is riskier than it is actually and produces false signals about the competencies of the people who planned the mission. It also erects unreasonable expectations about the sort of outcomes test flights can and can’t have.

In fact, the very reason the world has the ISS and NASA (and other agencies capable of human spaceflight) has its protocol means this particular outcome — of the crew capsule malfunctioning during a flight — needn’t be a crisis. Let’s respect that.

Finally: “Stuck” is an innocuous term, you say, something that doesn’t have to mean all that you’re making it out to be. Everyone knows the astronauts are going to return. Let it go.

Spaceflight is an exercise in control — about achieving it to the extent possible without also getting in the way of a mission and in the way of the people executing it. I don’t see why this control has to slip in the language around spaceflight.

Phogat and Khelif, and others

This tweet is spot-on…

… and we’re seeing it play out somewhat in the aftermath of Vinesh Phogat being disqualified from the Paris Olympics for not staying within the stipulated weight limit for two straight days. It was a tough task and Phogat and her team did their best, but alas. Yet India’s lack of a sporting culture beyond cricket, to which Pradeep Magazine had alluded, raised its ugly head in the form of brainless comments from Hema Malini and Kangana Ranaut, just as it did last year when the wrestlers’ protests against Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh elicited nary a peep from India’s current crop of cricketers.

There is something of a parallel between the Phogat incident — which is still unravelling in some political circles in North India — and l’affair Khelif. Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was forced to brave a shitstorm online after her match against Italian boxer Angela Carini ended in 46 seconds, with Carini allegedly claiming Khelif’s strength was “not fair”. The incident was the invitation various boneheads, especially on the internet, needed to raise baseless questions about Khelif’s gender, questions that many other sportswomen have had to face before and likely will in future.

Curiously, none of these questions were relevant while Khelif was losing boxing matches, which she was in other tournaments before the Olympics. It became a problem the moment she won, and won well. As Rose Eveleth has said, none of Khelif not losing, not being white, and not being from a rich country is coincidental — just as much as the people raising the ruckus not really being interested in “women’s sports. They’re not out here trying to advocate for the things that female athletes actually want and need, like equal pay.”

In fact, now that crude populist impulses have begun spinning the circumstances of Phogat’s loss and Khelif’s triumph into divisive political narratives, the evil really haunting both women — and many others like them — becomes clear: damn the sports, it’s ‘us versus them’.

Did we see the conspiracies coming?

Tweets like this seem on point…

… but I’ve started to wonder if we’re missing something in the course of expressing opinions about what we thought climate deniers would say and what they’re actually saying. That is, we expected to be right about what we thought they’d say but we’ve found ourselves wrong. Should we lampoon ourselves as well? Or, to reword the cartoon:

How we imagined we could react when ‘what we imagined deniers would say when the climate catastrophes came’ came true: “I was so right! And now everyone must pay for their greed and lies! May god have mercy on their soul!”

Followed by:

How we expect we’ll react when we find out ‘what they actually are saying’: “I was so wrong! And now everyone must pay for my myopia and echo chambers! May god have mercy on my soul!”

And finally:

How we actually are reacting: “We’re just using these disasters as an excuse to talk about climate change! Like we did with COVID! And 9/11! And the real moon landings! Screw you and your federal rescue money! You need to take your electric vegan soy beans now!”

People (myself included) in general aren’t entirely effective at changing others’ attitudes so it may not seem fair to say there’s a mistake in us not having anticipated how the deniers would react, that we erred by stopping short of understanding really why climate denialism exists and addressing its root cause. But surely the latter sounds reasonable in hindsight? ‘Us versus them’ narratives like the one in the cartoon describe apparent facts very well but they also reveal a tendency, either on the part of ‘us’ or of ‘them’ but often of both, to sustain this divide instead of narrowing it.

I’m not ignorant of the refusal of some people to change their mind under any circumstances. But even if we couldn’t have prevented their cynical attitudes on social issues — and consensus on climate change is one — maybe we can do better to anticipate them.

Games and life

Yesterday, July 25, was a big day. Ironhide Games released the long-awaited fifth edition of their tower-defence game ‘Kingdom Rush’. I bought it as soon as it launched and completed its primary campaign in one sitting of several hours. Called ‘Alliance’, the game combines the gameplay of ‘Kingdom Rush: Vengeance’ and Ironhide’s ‘Junkworld’, together with aspects of ‘Legends of Kingdom Rush’. The game also continues a long storyline that began with the first ‘Kingdom Rush’ game, released in 2011, and last updated in ‘Vengeance’. For what it’s worth, it’s a good story, too.

In ‘Kingdom Rush: Origins’, Ironhide introduced Vez’nan as a powerful wizard who becomes corrupted by a gem called the Tear of Elynie to become a malevolent power threatening the kingdom of Linirea. In the games that followed, heroes and towers from several parts of the kingdom, ultimately including King Denas, were tasked with defeating Vez’nan and his allies. In ‘Vengeance’, Vez’nan returned to exact revenge against King Denas — or so it seemed. ‘Alliance’ describes Denas’s return as well as Vez’nan’s efforts against a greater evil called the Overseer, who is also the ultimate boss in ‘Legends of Kingdom Rush’.

A screenshot from the game 'Kingdom Rush: Alliance'.
A ‘Kingdom Rush: Alliance’ skirmish begins…

I love tower-defence games and among them ‘Kingdom Rush’ is my favourite by far. I own all editions of it as well as have unlocked most towers and heroes in each one. At more than a few points during a work day, I like to break one of these games out for a quick and hairy skirmish or — time permitting — a full-on campaign on a high difficulty setting.

But while I like to play as often as I can, tower-defence doesn’t fit all moods. I have 13 games on my phone: the five ‘Kingdom Rush’ games, ‘Junkworld’, ‘Monument Valley’ I and II (and the expansion packs), ‘Loop’, ‘1010!’, ‘Idle Slayer’, ‘Rytmos’, and ‘Lost in Play’. They’re all great but I’d single out ‘Idle Slayer’, ‘Loop’, and ‘Monument Valley’ for particular praise.

‘Idle Slayer’ is a top-notch incremental game (a.k.a. idle game): the game will continue irrespective of whether you interact with the player-character, the player-character can’t perish, and gameplay is restricted to tapping on the screen to make the character jump. The whole point is to slay monsters — which the character will if she/flies runs into them, automatically pulling out an omnipotent sword when she gets close — and collect slayer points and to pick up coins and gems, which the character also does if she runs/flies into them. ‘Idle Slayer’ thus eliminates the player (you, me, etc.) having to be challenged in order to reap rewards. It’s just a matter of time, although occasional bursts of speed and character abilities purchased with slayer points can make things exciting.

I agree with what journalist Justin Davis wrote in 2013:

“Idle games seem perfectly tuned to provide a never-ending sense of escalation. They’re intoxicating because upgrades or items that used to seem impossibly expensive or out of reach rapidly become achievable, and then trivial. It’s all in your rearview mirror before you know it, with a new set of crazy-expensive upgrades ahead. The games are tuned to make you feel both powerful and weak, all at once. They thrive on an addictive feeling of exponential progress.”

Right now, this is where I’m at: 209 decillion coins in my kitty and racking up 110 octillion coins per second, plus whatever I pick up as I keep running…

A screenshot from the 'Idle Slayer'.
My player-character is named Mintana. She’s awesome.

Second is the amazing ‘Loop’, an endless series of puzzles in each of which your task is to link up some open-ended elements on a screen such that they form a large closed loop. You can tap on each element to rotate it; when the open ends of two elements line up in this way, they link up. The game is minimalist: each level has a plain monotone background and elements of a contrasting colour, and there’s beautiful, low-key instrumental music to accompany your thoughts. ‘Loop’ is the game to get lost in. I’ve played more than 3,500 levels so far and look forward every day to the next one.

A screenshot from the game 'Loop'.
The two rings in the bottom-left corner are linked up.

Third comes ‘Monument Valley’, but in no particular order because it’s the game I love the most. I don’t play it as often as I play ‘Kingdom Rush’, ‘Idle Slayer’ or ‘Loop’ because its repeatability is low — but it’s the game that redefined for a younger and less imaginative me what a smartphone product could look and feel like when you play it. ‘Monument Valley’ is an ode to the work of the Dutch artist MC Escher, famed for his depiction of impossible objects that toy with the peculiarities of human visual perception. The player-character is a young lady named Ida navigating a foreboding but also enchanting realm whose structures and vistas are guided by the precepts of a mysterious “sacred geometry”. The game’s visuals are just stunning and, as with ‘Loop’, there’s beautiful music to go with. The objects on the screen whose geometries you change to create previously impossible paths for Ida take time to move around, which means you can’t rush through levels. You have to wait, and you have to watch. And ‘Monument Valley’ makes that a pleasure to do.

A screenshot from the game 'Monument Valley' II.
Unobtrusive pink, lush green, obsidian black.

It should be clear by now that I love puzzles, and ‘1010!’ is perhaps the most clinical of the lot. It’s Tetris in pieces: you have a 10 x 10 grid of cells that you can fill with shapes that the game presents to you in sets of three. Once you’ve placed all three on the grid, you get the next three; once a row or a column is filled with cells, it empties itself; and once you can no longer fit new shapes in the grid, it’s game over. ‘1010!’ takes up very little of your cognitive bandwidth, which means you have something to do that distracts you enough to keep you from feeling restless while allowing you to think about something more important at the same time.

A screenshot from the game '1010!'.
What does losing mean if you can never win?

‘Rytmos’ and ‘Lost in Play’ are fairly new: I installed them a couple weeks ago. ‘Rytmos’ is just a smidge like ‘Loop’ but richer with details and, indeed, knowledge. You link up some nodes on a board in a closed loop; each node is a musical instrument that, when it becomes part of the loop, plays a beat depending on its position. Suddenly you’re making music. There are multiple ‘planets’ in the game and each one has multiple puzzles involving specific instruments. You learn something and you feel good about it. It’s amazing. I’ve only played a few minutes of ‘Lost in Play’ thus far, and I’m looking forward to more because it seems to be of a piece with ‘Monument Valley’, from the forced-slow gameplay to the captivating visuals.

A screenshot from the game 'Lost in Play'.
A scene from ‘Lost in Play’.

Aside from these games, I also play ‘Entanglement’ in the browser and ‘Factorio’ on my laptop. ‘Factorio’ is the motherlode, an absolute beast of a game for compulsive puzzle-solvers. In the game, you’re an engineer in the future who’s crash-landed on an alien planet and you need to build a rocket to get off of it. The gameplay is centred on factories, where you craft the various pieces required for more and more sophisticated components. In parallel, you mine metals, pump crude oil, extract uranium, and dig up coal; you smelt, refine, and burn them to get the parts required to build as well as feed the factories; you conduct research to develop and enhance automation, robotics, rocketry, and weapons; you build power plants and transmission lines, and deal with enormous quantities of waste; and you defend your base from the planet’s native life, a lone species of large, termite-like creatures.

I’ve been playing a single game for three years now. There’s no end in sight. Sometimes, when ‘Factorio’ leaves me enough of my brain to think about other things, I gaze with longing as if out of a small window at a world that has long passed me by…

A screenshot from the game 'Factorio'.
[Polyphonic robot voice] This facility mines copper ore, smelts it to copper plates, and feeds it to factories that make copper cables.

Agalloch

Agalloch is a synonym of agarwood. In parallel, Aquilaria agallocha and Agalochum malaccense are synonyms of Aquilaria malaccensis, the accepted scientific name of a tree that produces much of the world’s stock of this wood. When the heartwood (or duramen) of an Aquilaria tree is in the grip of an infection of Phaeoacremonium parasitica, the tree secretes a resin to beat the fungus off. The resin is very fragrant; depending on the duration of secretion, the heartwood can become saturated with it, at which point it becomes the very odoriferous agarwood. For centuries people have extracted this agarwood for use in perfumes and incense. We have also found the oils extracted from the wood, especially using steam distillation of late, are chemically very complex, including more than 70 terpenoids and more than 150 compounds overall.

This is a fascinating tale for the origin of something beautiful in nature, prompted by a tree’s desperate bid to fight off the advance of a fungal menace. Of course the human beholds this beauty, not the tree and certainly not the fungus — and Aquilaria malaccensis‘s wondrous resin hasn’t been able to keep humans at bay. The tree is listed as being ‘critically endangered’ on the IUCN Red List thanks to habitat loss and improper management of the global demand for the resinous agalloch.

A cynical archaeology

From ‘ASI submits Bhojshala survey report to Madhya Pradesh High Court’, The Hindu, July 15, 2024:

The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) on July 15 submitted its scientific survey report of the disputed Bhojshala-Kamal-Maula mosque complex to the Indore Bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court. … On July 4, the High Court ordered the ASI to present by July 15 the complete report of the nearly three-month-long survey on the premises of the disputed 11th-century monument, the subject of a wrangle between Hindus and Muslims. The Hindu community considers Bhojshala as a temple of Vagdevi (Goddess Saraswati), while the Muslim side calls it Kamal Maula mosque. The HC on March 11 ordered the ASI … to conduct a scientific survey of the complex … It then gave six weeks to the ASI to complete the survey. The ASI later sought more time for the report submission. The ASI began surveying the disputed complex on March 22 which ended recently.

Isn’t it cynical of ASI to engage in these exercises? New structures will often be built on old ones. But undertaking a study, then preparing a study is just disingenuous. It is also disingenuous to appeal to science to settle questions that are otherwise devoid of reason. I wish history scholars and scientists spoke up more vociferously on this instead of engaging in this charade. It’s practically why a separate nodal agency of archaeological study and deliberation exists, and not to be a mute provider of ‘archaeological services’ when called upon…

India-based neutrino oblivion

In a conversation with science journalist Nandita Jayaraj, physicist and Nobel laureate Takaaki Kajita touched on the dismal anti-parallels between the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) and the Japanese Kamioka and Super-Kamiokande observatories. The INO’s story should be familiar to readers of this blog: a team of physicists led by those from IMSc Chennai and TIFR Mumbai conceived of the INO, identified places around India where it could be built, finalised a spot in Theni (in Tamil Nadu), and received Rs 1,350 crore from the Union government for it, only for the project to not progress a significant distance past this point.

Nandita’s article, published in The Hindu on July 14, touches on two reasons the project was stalled: “adverse environmental impacts” and “the fear of radioactivity”. These were certainly important reasons but they’re also symptoms of two deeper causes: distrust of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and some naïvety on the scientists’ part. The article mentions the “adverse environmental impacts” only once while “the fear of radioactivity” receives a longer rebuttal — which is understandable because the former has a longer history and there’s a word limit. It bears repeating, however.

Even before work on the INO neared its beginning, people on the ground in the area were tense over the newly erected PUSHEP hydroelectric project. Environmental activists were on edge because the project was happening under the aegis of the DAE, a department notorious for its opacity and heavy-handed response to opposition. The INO collaboration compounded the distrust when hearings over a writ petition Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam chief Vaiko filed in the Madras high court revealed the final ecological assessment report of the project had been prepared by the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON), which as the law required at the time hadn’t been accredited by the Quality Council of India and was thus unfit to draft the report. Members of the INO collaboration said this shouldn’t matter because they had submitted the report themselves together with a ‘detailed project report’ prepared by TANGEDCO and a geotechnical report by the Geological Survey of India. Perhaps the scientists thought SACON was good enough, and it may well have been, but it’s not clear how submitting the report themselves should have warranted a break from the law. Given all the other roadblocks in the project’s way, this trip-up in hindsight seems to have been a major turning point.

Locals in the area around the hill, under which the INO was to be built, were also nervous about losing access to part of their grazing land and to a temple situated nearby. There was a report in 2015 that police personnel had blocked people from celebrating a festival at this temple. In an April 2015 interview with Frontline, when told that local police were also keeping herders from accessing pastureland in the foothills, INO spokesperson Naba Mondal said: “The only land belonging to INO is the 26.825 ha. INO has no interest in and no desire to block the grazing lands outside this area. In fact, these issues were discussed in great detail in a public meeting held in July 2010, clearly telling the local people this. This is recorded in our FAQ. This was also conveyed to them in Tamil.” In response to a subsequent question about “propaganda” that the project site would store nuclear waste from Tamil Nadu’s two nuclear power facilities, Mondal said: “The DAE has already issued a press statement in this regard. I do genuinely believe that this has allayed people’s concerns.”

Even at the time these replies hinted at a naïve belief that these measures would suffice to allay fears in the area about the project. There is a difference between scientists providing assurances that the police will behave and the police actually behaving, especially if the experience of the locals diverges from what members of the INO collaboration believe is the case. Members of the collaboration had promised the locals they wouldn’t lose access to grazing land; four years later, the locals still had trouble taking their word. According to an investigation I published at The Wire in 2016, there was also to be a road that bypassed the local villages and led straight to the project site, sparing villagers the noise from the trucks ferrying construction material. It was never built.

One narrative arising from within the scientific community as the project neared the start of construction was that the INO is good for the country, that it will improve our scientific literacy, keep bright minds from leaving to work on similar projects abroad, and help Indians win prestigious prizes. For the national scientific enterprise itself, the INO would make India a site of experimental physics of global importance and Indian scientists working on it major contributors to the study of neutrino physics. I wrote an article to this effect in The Hindu in 2016 and this is also what Takaaki Kajita said in Nandita’s article. But later that year, I also asked an environmental activist (and a mentor of sorts) what he was thinking. He said the scientists will eventually get what they want but that they, the activists et al., still had to do the responsible thing and protest what they perceived to be missteps. (Most scientists in India don’t get what they want but many do, most recently like the ‘Challakere Science City’.)

Curiously, both these narratives — the activist’s pessimism and the scientists’ naïvety — could have emerged from a common belief: that the INO was preordained, that its construction was fated to be successful, causing one faction to be fastidious and the other to become complacent. Of course it’s too simplistic to be able to explain everything that went wrong, yet it’s also of a piece with the fact that the INO was doomed as much by circumstance as by historical baggage. That work on the INO was stalled by an opposition campaign that included fear-mongering pseudoscience and misinformation is disagreeable. But we also need to ask whether some actors resorted to these courses of action because others had been denied them, in the past if not in the immediate present — or potentially risk the prospects of a different science experiment in future.

Physics is often far removed from the precepts of behavioural science and social justice but public healthcare is closer. There is an important parallel between the scientists’ attempts to garner public support for the project and ASHA workers’ efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic to vaccinate people in remote rural areas. These latter people were distrustful of the public healthcare system: it had neglected them for several years but then it was suddenly on their doorstep, expecting them to take a supposedly miraculous drug that would cut their chances of dying of the viral disease. ASHA workers changed these people’s minds by visiting them again and again, going door to door, and enrolling members of the same community to convince people they were safe. Their efficacy is higher if they are from the same community themselves because they can strike up conversations with people that draw on shared experiences. Compare this with the INO collaboration’s belief that a press release from the DAE had changed people’s minds about the project.

Today the INO stares at a bleak future rendered more uncertain by a near-complete lack of political support.

This post benefited from Thomas Manuel’s feedback.