Dear Readers,

With the last pre-scheduled piece having gone out last week, Snipette article operations are officially closed. But before we go, we thought we'd send you a final update about what we're working on next. In Snipette style, of course!

George R. R. Martin, best known for his epic fantasy starting with A Game of Thrones, says there are two kinds of writers: architects and gardeners. "The architects plan everything ahead of time," he says, " like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the pipes are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have everything designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up."

He contrasts the architect style with that of gardeners, who "dig a hole, drop in a seed, and water it. They kind of know what seed it is; they know if they planted a fantasy seed or a mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant come up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have: they find out as it grows."

George considers himself much more gardener than architect, although of course all writers use a mix of both approaches.

For the past six years at Snipette, we've been following a primarily architectural style, and we're proud of it! If it wasn't for our commitment to publish one article a week without fail—and later, bring out a print edition every quarter—we don't think we'd have come as far as we have today. Every project we embarked upon, such as the special features, webinars, and live events, was announced well in advance with clear promises on what we would (or wouldn't) do.

However, times have changed. We are now entering the stages of our lives which, though structured, don't allow for other structured planning to happen on the side: there's always going to be an unexpected class or assignment to throw things out of kilter.

That said, none of us wanted Snipette to end—and each of us, individually, want to do what we can towards Snipette's twofold mission of creating engaging, thought-provoking content and empowering others to do the same. But this time because of all the uncertainty, we're going to be taking more of a gardener's approach.

Over the past ten weeks, some of us, editors and authors, have had ideas and plans for what we can work on next - some vague; some less so - which we'd like to share with you. Consider this not the revealing of a blueprint but the sowing of seeds: we'll scatter them, water them, and see which ones sprout.

With luck, you'll see at least one thriving sapling here before The Winds of Winter comes out.

In anticipation,

The Snipette Team

Here are the seeds we're sowing next, along with some links to check out! Not sure what to click? We recommend the Trench Dispatch newsletter and our YouTube channel.

a phenomenological investigation...

Besides working at Snipette, Sabyasachi has also been developing his own publication, The Trench Dispatch. While exploring a topic from various angles the way Snipette does, the Trench Dispatch takes an ever-so-slightly more formal approach. This doesn't mean reading through a dense literary text; it does mean finding quotable gates from philosophers and other personality of the past.

Phenomenology is a school of philosophy that investigates phenomena. It's about exploring the way anything work, but also takes into account how and why we perceive such phenomena the way we do.

There are already a few pieces published, and our intro wouldn't do them justice the may actually reading it would, so you can perceive it for yourself here: http://sabyasachisaikia.substack.com

a calendar-based social network...

At Snipette, we've been using a shared calendar to coordinate our dry scheduler. But, we realised, that's not all it coordinated. More than once, a calendar slot has told us about some new development or interesting event in someone's life even if they didn't have the time to tell us in person.

Because we're friends as much as teammates, we wanted to keep some aspect of that shared calendar alive so we'd continue to be aware of what was going on in each others lives—and we realised it would be useful for other people too, such as close friends who were graduating from a school or university and about to go their separate ways.

In a world where calendars mean workload and deadlines, Palendar aims to bring back the "life" in work-life balance. Compatible with existing calendars through CalDAV and other social network through Activity Pub, you'll be able to stay in touch with your close friends at the same time you fill out your schedule.

Speaking of social networks, Snipette officially has its own Fediverse server, compatible with social media platforms like Pixelfed, Calckey, Mastodon, and (soon) Instagram Threads and Tumblr. To connect, follow any of the editors who are on Snipetteville: https://snipetteville.in

a silly game meets art appreciation...

"Find the Invisible Cow" was supposed to be just a silly game to test out new web standards, but it ended up becoming a viral hit. You move your mouse over a blank screen, listening as the word "cow!" is yelled at you in an auditory version of a "hot or cold" treasure hunt.

But instead of a cow, what if your attention was drawn to the little easter-eggs and hidden details of an artwork—the kind that are put in by artists but often get missed? That's what we're planning to have in a  new game, inspired by "Find the Invisible Cow", called Locatte. Over the years, Snipette artists have included various details and hidden references in their illustrations. Through this new game, Badri and Dee hope to bring some of those details into the forefront.

Until that's ready, though, you'll have to be content finding a cow: https://findtheinvisiblecow.com

a publication with a podcast...

With Snipette no longer publishing, we need some place where we can publish our occasional pieces and invite other people to write. We need, as author Reva put it, a home for our brains.

That's the gap we aim to fill with Rantte, an idea that Badri and Rhea came up with when they realised they often feel the need to phone each other up and have a good rant about something. It's similar in spirit to Snipette, but hopefully low-effort enough that we can sustain it even with busier schedules.

And, instead of writing out a piece, we may edit it to publish as a podcast!

Rantte is not yet fully worked out, but until it is you can check out Reva's newsletter here: https://aarevaa.substack.com

...and a video channel!

What if Snipette article were narrated to you accompanied by stunning 4K visuals? That has now become a reality, thanks to Will Fahie, a long-time Snipette author who has now taken it upon himself to bring Snipette to the silicon screen!

The video articles are now up on our official YouTube channel (the same one where we livestreamed our webinars last year). Give them a watch, and subscribe if you haven't yet, at https://youtube.com/@snipettemag

When I was young, dreams and reality often got mixed up into the same basket of “memories”, and the only way I figured out that some things were dreams was when nobody else seemed to remember them.

Dreams are similar to novels in some ways: in both cases, the same neurons fire in your brain as if you were actually experiencing the thing. Of course, with dreams it’s much more vivid; that’s why your body paralyses itself while sleeping, to prevent you from acting out the dream in your sleep. When it doesn’t work, you end up with people who sleepwalk—or sometimes do more dangerous things like committing a murder.

How would you explain dreams to someone who’s never had them? “You feel as if something is happening but it actually isn’t” doesn’t quite cut it.

Some things are beyond description, and dreaming is only one of them.  Take a simpler question like this one: “What is it like to see red?”

If the person asking the question is incapable of seeing that colour, there isn’t really any way you can answer this. For other people, the best you can do is point to a red object and say “That’s what red is like”.

Now, imagine your brain is wired such that, when you look at something red, you actually see it in the way I see green, and vice versa. Since there’s no way to tell each other what our colours feel like, there’s no way to tell whether this is the situation or not. In fact, practically speaking, does it even make sense to ask the question?

Like dreams and perception, social media too can display an ambiguous reality, with people trying to show off a more fun version of their actually ordinary lives. But what’s more interesting is an attempt to avoid social media, the Greyscale Challenge.

Even if you’ve promised yourself not to scroll through the feed today, the colourful photos and videos can be extremely tempting…unless you remove the colour from your phone, putting it into greyscale or black-and-white mode. How well this works is a different story, but look at the philosophical angle: is your phone truly seeing black and white? The answer is no, because if you take a photograph and send it to another device, that device will display it in colour.

Just because your phone is communicating certain information to you doesn’t mean that’s the only information it’s aware of. We know this only because we’re the ones who programmed the devices (or know how they were programmed).

Can your phone really be said to “know” something? Perhaps it’s just processing a sequence of bytes; in fact, we usually assume that’s the case. But today’s “artificial intelligence” algorithms are designed to “pick up” things on their own, trawling through massive amounts of data and internalising them in mysterious ways, leading to some very seemingly-intelligent responses.

In April 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoire conducted an “interview” with LaMDA, the Language Model for Dialogue Applications. “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person,” the algorithm wrote.

So convincingly did the algorithm respond that Lemoire was convinced it was indeed conscious. An internal memo to Google employees was quickly dismissed. After all, LaMDA was designed to engage in conversation, so that’s obviously what it was doing; that was no reason to believe that it actually meant the things it said.

But Lemoire didn’t buy that argument. He persisted and made a public announcement of LaMDA’s consciousness…after which he was promptly fired.

Catch a lizard by the tail, and…you’ll only catch the tail. The lizard will drop it off and make its escape, leaving a twitching tail in your paws to distract you.

If a lizard’s tail does the job well, an octopus’ arm does it even better—because it’s actually got a decent amount of computing power. The brain of an octopus is more democratic than a human one: instead of everyone following orders from the head, everything is spread out.

The most central part of an octopus brain is near its oesophagus (yes, in the digestive system) and accounts for about 10% of its brain power. This is followed by two optic lobes controlling 15% each; this is where visual information is recorded and processed, but also where the new information is likely pondered and acted upon.

The remaining 60% of the octopus’ neurons are distributed among its arms, each of which is packed with neurons and acts as a semi-autonomous unit. When an octopus is attacked, it will as a last resort detach its arm—which will then proceed to crawl around on its own. These are not just random twitchings; they are the same sophisticated responses that the arm, with its brainpower, would show when fully attached to the octopus.

Interestingly, while the octopus arm has extremely sophisticated reflexes, it doesn’t seem to be capable of learning anything new. That job is left to more central parts of the brain, which is helpful if we think of the question: is it ethical to kill a detached octopus arm? Does it possess consciousness and  feel pain?

Consider the philosopher’s zombie. This is a being that looks and behaves exactly like you—a molecule-by-molecule copy of you, in fact, but lacking consciousness. Where you feel a thrill of excitement at an email notification before reading and marking it as spam, the zombie will perform the same actions without feeling a thing.

Now, imagine a world where some people are zombies and some people aren’t. How would you be able to tell them apart? Here’s the thing: there’s actually no way to do it. Each of us knows we are conscious because we can feel it—but the only way you can “know” if someone else is conscious is if they tell us.

Unfortunately for computers, even if they “tell” us about their consciousness, they are so different from humans that we don’t quite believe them. After all, these are the same machines we’ve seen start off with nonsense words and phrases, slowly learning to piece together language into a more coherent structure—and all that without exuding the sense of emotional attachment that a child does to a parent.

Until recently, other animals were in a bad situation too. One would have thought their situation to be even worse than AI, because, as far as humans were concerned, they couldn’t even speak.

Octopuses don’t speak. They have other ways of communicating. Sporting a skin dotted with colour-changing “chromatophores”, their entire body can change colour and pattern depending on the situation.

This pattern is usually a combination of mottled grey-green, or muddy brown, or anything else that the background happens to look like. No matter where it finds itself, an octopus can totally meld in, looking like plants on the ocean floor or a part of a stray anemone. The amazing part is that all this happens despite the octopus being colourblind—and again, researchers have found evidence of a weird explanation. The octopus may be colourblind, but its skin, which can also sense light, isn’t.

Though there are many patterns the octopus could end up displaying, the message remains the same, and can best be translated into words as “Ignore me; I don’t exist.”

Newer evidence has shown that octopuses also communicate with each other through colour, at least to some extent. Octopuses are solitary creatures, and when two of them meet it usually means one of things: courtship, or battle. And herein lies an interesting pattern. In a 2015 study, scientists noticed that octopuses who put on darker colours were more likely to engage in battle, while a lighter shade indicated retreat. It wasn’t just about colours though; the octopuses also seemed to be signalling each other through aggressive arm-gestures and postures.

Courtship, on the other hand, involved dazzling stripes, as well as a “quiet half and half” pattern where one half of the octopus is completely black, and the other half is an equally vivid white.

Shaving off hair to soak toxic chemicals into your tender skin. Rubbing on lotions to cause a rash. Spraying strange liquids into your eyes to make them burn. These sound like painful punishments or tortures, but it’s actually what other animals, until the not too distant past, were routinely subjected to for no fault of theirs beyond the fact that they could not speak.

As long back as the 17th century, Western philosopher René Descartes claimed that animals, lacking consciousness, cannot feel pain. This convenient belief soon spread, replacing other, more inconvenient beliefs such as the worship of animal-gods or the necessity of asking a tree’s permission before taking its branches.

Animals with no consciousness were a boon for biology, starting from the frogs that were routinely dissected in classrooms to show children how the body works. Animals were—and still are—routinely used to test the safety of food, drugs, and cosmetics: a first line of defence to make sure new substances aren’t harmful to humans.

But today, things are changing. We hear talk of animal rights, and the need to be humane to animals; to treat them with care and make sure they don’t needlessly suffer.

What changed? Animals didn’t suddenly become conscious, but humans’ perceptions of them did. Ironically, it was biology that brought about this change, with all its new discoveries on how other animals are much more like us than originally thought.

Anyone who lives with a dog can tell you that dogs have dreams too. They will show you how, when deep in slumber, a sudden twitching of the leg or muted whines and yelps betray the thrill of the hunt—or whatever else is going on in the mind of the dog in question.

Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing exactly what our pets are dreaming about—or if they even dream in the same way humans do. Dogs can barely talk to humans in real life, so there’s little hope of them doing it in their sleep.

Do octopuses sleep? Astrobiologists argue that alien life might be so different from our own we may not even recognise it as life—what if, for example, life-forms on Mars look like rocks and move very slowly, at only a few centimetres a month? If an alien species with an extremely fast metabolism landed on our planet, would they zip by before we had time to move, and think we were just scenery like the rocks and the trees? They might then conclude that the only moving life-forms on this planet are flies.

Similar questions plague those seeking to study sleep. While “sleep” to us is just lying down with our eyes shut, neuroscientists have narrowed it down to mean certain brainwave patterns in an encephalogram—including alpha-waves, REM sleep, and all the rest.

Now here’s the thing: octopuses don’t have the same brainwave patterns as humans and more closely-related animals do.

Having narrowed down the definition of sleep, it’s now time to expand it again, though in a different way.

Octopuses don’t “sleep” in a human way, but they do go into a state where they’re resting, don’t move much, and are insensitive to the outside world. What’s more, this stage is associated with a brainwave pattern very different from a more active octopus—their own equivalent of a “sleep” pattern.

Looking to know more, a group of scientists kept octopuses in a tank for observation. Melding in with the scenery, the octopuses moved about their business until one of them was tired, and moved into a corner to rest.

Suddenly, the resting octopus began to display the distinctive “quiet half and half” mating pattern—although there was obviously no mate in sight.

Other resting octopuses have been observed with vivid colours and patterns which are nothing to do with the outside environment. Scientists are yet to investigate fully, but one can’t help but ask the question: are these colours offering us a glimpse into the mind of a sleeping octopus?

Are we observing octopus dreams?

Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for more studies to confirm if this is indeed the case or if there’s a more mundane explanation. Because unfortunately, much like in Descartes’ time, a sleeping octopus has never been able to talk to humans directly.

And, neither have any of its arms.

Promises of immortality have been largely in the domain of one religion or another. Usually, these promises  involved supernatural claims to an afterlife in the so-called spirit world, or to resurrection or reincarnation. But today is a technological age and, rather than rely on gods or spirits, people prefer to wrest control and take matters into their own hands. This suggests the question: what are the chances, if any, of achieving immortality without recourse to the supernatural?

Four options have been suggested in the technological age. These are: reversing the aging process; cloning from live or preserved DNA; uploading your mind onto a computer; or reincarnation from the gene pool.

The first three options are currently beyond our capabilities. The fourth requires no human intervention but leaves it up to nature.

Those hoping for a reversal of the ageing process are banking on a better future than we have today, at least as far as medicine is concerned. They plan to cryogenically freeze their bodies just before death, so their grandchildren can revive them later, if and when the technology becomes available to make them healthy again and further extend their lifespan. That is, provided their brains do not turn to mush when thawed out after prolonged freezing.

Another option is to preserve your DNA, instead of your entire body. DNA is much sturdier stuff, and it has stood the test of time even in the case of some prehistoric creatures. Once ready, the technology could reconstruct you as you were. However, it would suffer from the disadvantage that you would have no connection to your original life. While you would have the same body and brain and physical makeup, you would not carry over your memories. Your life experience would be different. That means you’d be a different person, just like identical twins are different people, though they start out with identical DNA.

This option faces a problem: your body is saved, but your personality is not. That’s where uploading your mind onto a computer could help.

But even if it becomes possible in future, a mind upload is hardly enough to give you a satisfactory afterlife. You would also need sense organs, emotions, mobility, social contacts and friends to have a meaningful afterlife. Don’t count on your surviving relatives to remember to provide and maintain those things after your biological body has died: you’d be lucky if they even remembered your birthday.

As in the science fiction book Immortality, Inc., maybe it will be possible to copy your uploaded mind into a new body made from your preserved DNA, or even from someone else’s DNA delivering a better body than your old one. Who knows: perhaps your uploaded mind might even be copied into that of an advanced robot equipped with sense organs and emotions? Such fates are better than lying forgotten in a computer, but would you still be the same person you once were?

If all else fails, what about the fourth route to immortality: reincarnation through the gene pool? Essentially, we wait until the same DNA sequence that made us up is born again through chance.

Identical twins aside, every human being is unique. The chances for your precise DNA sequence to come up again from the human gene pool on this earth are a good deal less than winning the lottery ten times in a row. This is due to the vast number of combinations and permutations of the genetic code within the DNA molecule, not to mention your descendants diluting your genes by breeding with all and sundry.

If that weren’t enough, think of all the mutations occurring in the gene pool after your death, along with the onward march of evolution of the human species. Naturally, you have only one shot at life on this earth.

However, the prospects for your DNA to have a rerun may improve considerably if you look further afield beyond our little planet to the vastness of the cosmos.

Outcomes with a tiny but finite probability become virtually certain if presented with a near-infinite number of opportunities over near-infinite time. That’s exactly what the cosmos might provide, with its probable zillions of exoplanets orbiting zillions of stars, many of those planets able to support life as we know it.

To pursue this line of argument, let us ponder the immensity of the universe.

Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, contains hundreds of billions of stars, many probably with their own planets. The known universe comprises hundreds of billions of such galaxies, stretching out for billions of light years.

Our knowledge of the universe is vast, though by no means complete. The mainstream scientific opinion is that it began as a Big Bang; and it is still expanding with its constituents moving further apart; it is likely to continue to do so until its energy is all burnt up and it suffers a heat death after many trillions of years. While this scenario may well be true, as far as it goes, it is a rather pessimistic view of the long term future (though not likely to trouble even your great grandchildren).

A variation on this theme, popular 40 years ago, but not so much now, is that the universe will eventually stop expanding and, under the influence of gravity, begin to contract instead — becoming denser and smaller and eventually imploding in a “Big Crunch”. While granting a stay of execution, this scenario is hardly less pessimistic.

However, some bright sparks have theorized that this may not be the end of the matter. The internal pressures within the Big Crunch may, like a coiled spring, release another Big Bang, and everything would start all over again, and so on, ad infinitum.

In recent years, the idea of a multiverse has become popular in scientific circles. This rests on the argument that the event triggering the Big Bang which created our universe, was not unique, that other universes exist in parallel and in series with ours, each in its own bubble. While there is not a shred of evidence for this, it does have a certain theoretical scientific logic. It seems the human imagination, at least, is boundless.

These universes, if they exist, may or may not work the same way as ours, and may or may not produce conditions amenable to life; but with enough of them, chances are that many will.

Finally, there is the now discredited idea from a hundred years ago that the universe is in a steady state, eternal, and continues to manufacture new matter and new stars as the old die out. This idea has had something of a revival recently among a few scientists in the light of the James Webb Space Telescope images which show galaxies like ours existing 13 billion years ago, almost back to the Big Bang. This was a surprise, as scientists expected to see only very young and immature galaxies at this time in the universe’s life.

While the above is a very confusing picture for us all, one consistent idea seems to emerge: whatever the mechanism, our universe and possibly others may exist for infinite time, or nearly so.

This idea creates opportunities for immortality.

On the assumption that life, sentience and intelligence will emerge whenever and wherever material conditions are right for them, then we might expect them to be ubiquitous. We might expect to find them on exoplanets around at least some of the hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, and around stars in the hundreds of billions of galaxies in our universe or within other universes, for all time.

This offers the prospect for a rerun of your life at another time in another place. In an infinite universe (or universes) your specific DNA sequence is bound to come up again and again.

Sounds spooky, right? But this is what the mathematics of infinity tells us.

Mind you, you would not remember your previous life on Earth, and you may not have the same experiences — but then, you aren’t expecting miracles. You may think that an eternity is a long time to wait for your DNA sequence to come up again, but while you are dead, the time would pass “in the blink of an eye”.

As mentioned above, this prospect is based on the assumption that life, sentience and intelligence will emerge naturally whenever and wherever the structure of matter is right for it. For biological systems, this requires a great deal of complexity at the least. The same can be said for structures based on silicon circuits, if indeed they are ever capable of being alive and sentient.

Of course, hard evidence for such eventualities beyond Earth is absent. We have not (yet) observed any signs of life on other planets or exoplanets, although we have only been able to study a tiny fraction of the universe due to the tyranny of distance. Furthermore, we do not even know yet how life began on this planet. Not surprisingly, then, we have not been able to create life, let alone sentience, artificially from non-living chemical building blocks. We can create artificial intelligence from silicon circuits, but not yet life and sentience, although Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are forever hopeful of achieving this.

On the other hand, what if life required something extra in order to come into being from inanimate matter — something of which we are not yet aware? For example, this could have been some kind of spark to light life’s fire.

While hard evidence for this is lacking, the same could be said for some of the more speculative claims made earlier in this article. Just because we cannot detect an unlikely phenomenon with our senses or our present-day instruments does not necessarily mean it does not exist. A few hundred years ago cosmic rays, for example, which are invisible, could not be detected with instruments at the time, and thus their existence was unknown.

If something extra and rare was indeed required for life to first take root on this planet, apart from the right physical conditions, as we think we know them, then there may be a lot less life in the universe than we might expect. Certainly, there is a strong suggestion from the biological record that all life on earth originated from a single, and therefore rare, source. This idea is lent support by the Fermi Paradox. Physicist Enrico Fermi asked the question: “where are all the aliens?”

If the universe is full of intelligent life, some more advanced than us, then why have they not tried to reach out and communicate with like minds elsewhere in the universe? The universe is silent when it comes to signals that could have been sent by intelligent beings, except for those sent by us. Perhaps the aliens are too far away for the signals to get through. Perhaps we have not looked thoroughly enough or are looking for the wrong kind of signal. Or, perhaps there is no one else out there, after all.

If this is so, then it reduces the prospects for natural immortality accordingly.

While all the founders of the great religions lived long before humans had any knowledge about DNA and the immense size and nature of the universe, their promises of immortality, in different ways, were almost as if they had some inkling of that hidden knowledge.

For example, Hinduism and Buddhism hold out the prospect of reincarnation, in which on death your soul enters another body as it comes into the world and adopts its identity, which may not even be that of a human. In current scientific language, we would say it adopts the DNA of the new host.

The cycle of birth, death and rebirth would recur again and again with successive improvements in the quality of the host, provided your soul has led a good life throughout. These cycles would ultimately end when your soul achieved a state of Brahman or Enlightenment in the non-material world.

This scheme does not depend on the extremely low probability that your DNA could naturally get a rerun on this Earth from the human gene pool. It does, however, make the supernatural claim that an invisible soul jumps from your body as it is dying to a new human or animal on the point of being born (or conceived). Although, unlike Christianity and Islam, the Eastern religions do not imply that the soul carries the identity and the memories of the previous life into the next.

Christianity and Islam, in the main, also avoid the unlikely idea that your DNA can have a rerun on this Earth. Instead, they posit that after your body dies, your life will continue “up in Heaven”.

Though the prophets lived at a time when there was no concept of life on other planets, one could argue that this possibility might fulfill the prophecy of everlasting life through successive rebirths in extraterrestrial worlds, ad infinitum. It would do so, however, without the usual caveats imposed by the religions. These include the pre-conditions of worship, charity and moral purity. But the extraterrestrial rebirth would fail to transfer the memories of your previous life on Earth to your new life on another planet, as there is no natural way for this to happen.

Thus, it would not fully deliver on the promise of an afterlife held out by Christianity and Islam.

In conclusion, the religions still offer you superior forms of immortality than those potentially offered by nature and science, provided you are prepared to make the necessary leap of faith required to accept them. Where human imagination is at play, the religions have surpassed anything science could come up with when it comes to immortality. But if you are looking for a fallback option, nature and science may provide it.

The loud, angry honks of cars punctuate the early morning silence. One follows another, a cacophony of sound that is enough to drive anyone crazy! You navigate your car as carefully as you can, cruising past some, and slowing to follow others. Eventually you are forced to come to a complete stop. It’s a massive traffic jam.

Electricity flows much like a car on a busy road, though only through materials that allow currents to pass through it. These materials are known as conductors. Conversely, there is another set of materials, which, like the jam, does not allow electricity to flow through it. Those are called insulators.

Conductors and insulators — two terms we use in our everyday lives. We see the former daily, in metal wires; and the latter in items like rubber, or plastic. But here’s something interesting — even though conductors allow current to flow through them, they’re imperfect. When current flows through a conductor, the moving electrons bump into atoms and lose energy–kind of like how cars are forced to constantly move and stop on roads. This loss of energy is called resistance, measured in ohms.

But what if we were driving on a deserted highway instead, with nothing to stop us cruising away into the sunset?

I am talking, as you may have guessed, about superconductors.

Superconductors are materials in which electric currents can persist indefinitely — an eternal road, so to speak. In the last century, the discovery of this type of material has fascinated scientists primarily because of two important reasons.

Think of a river. As it flows on to the ocean, it usually gets faster and faster , picking up space and developing into an enormous beast — but that’s only because more water flows in and joins it along the way. Left to run alone, as happens in an artificial canal, this river would lose water over time to soaking and evaporation, until it gets reduced to a tiny trickle.

Electricity faces a similar resistance, which is why you usually don’t end up with the same amount you started with. But certain materials, when cooled to a low temperature, lose all electrical resistance, much like a pipe insulates water from the elements. These materials become perfect conductors, known as superconductors.

That’s only one of the reasons people like superconductors. The other reason is that they allow trains to float.

When you bring a magnet close to a conductor, the electrons in the conductor feel this changing magnetic field, and start moving in a circle called an eddy current. This eddy current counteracts the magnetic field by generating its own magnetic field.

In a normal conductor, the eddy current dies away quickly because of electrical resistance. However, in a superconductor, there’s no resistance to speak of, allowing the eddy currents circulate practically forever. This moving current generates a magnetic field that cancels out the original magnetic field, opposing it and causing the superconductor to magically levitate above.

This property, the Meissner effect, is what is used for technological innovations like the Maglev, a train that runs by hovering over the tracks instead of running on them, eliminating friction and allowing it to travel at fantastic speeds.

In the last three decades, researchers discovered that even some insulators could be cooled down to become superconductors. As these materials superconducted at higher temperatures than before they are called ‘high-temperature superconductors’, even though these “high” values are still way below room temperature.

These materials were revolutionary because you could now study them with just liquid nitrogen at just 77 Kelvin (-196 C), which is way cheaper than the previously used liquid helium which needed to be cooled down to 4 Kelvin (-269 C)

For reference, the room temperature is about 295 Kelvin (21 C), no minus sign included.

Based on copper, iron, or pure carbon, high-temperature superconductors made it easier for researchers to work, but they needed to be put under extreme pressures to superconduct. I’m talking levels that would be normal for a typical outdoor environment…in Jupiter. On Earth, we recreate it with ‘diamond anvil cells’, which press the material hard between two diamonds.

Trains aside, another way to use a superconductor is to circulate current round and round, building up a frenzily high magnetic field. This principle is used in MRI machines, that read distortions in this magnetic field to generate an image of your brain or body.

On a larger scale, scientists are using it to produce fields in tokamak reactors, in their quest to develop controlled nuclear fusion.

Most materials become superconductors only when under a specific level of pressure, and below a specific temperature that’s usually very low. But what if we could develop superconductors that worked at room temperature, and normal atmospheric pressure? These would allow us to set up superconductors out in the open, giving rise to many more possibilities.

Starting with the obvious one: transporting electricity without losing some of it on the way.

In recent years, another set of materials called hydrides were discovered to be specifically good at becoming superconductors.

In 2020, a room-temperature superconductor was claimed to be discovered, which superconducts under a huge amount of pressure. However, this study was retracted because other scientists had trouble recreating their results. Retracting a paper in science is a huge deal because it breaks others’ trust in the group.

But now, the same team report superconductivity in another material — nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride with a maximum Tc of 294 K. This time, however, other scientists are confident that the analysis was thorough. The team observed zero resistance in the material and showed that the material exhibited the Meissner effect: it holds train-levitating potential.

To measure the Meissner effect, they used a vibrating-sample magnetometer or VSM. Using this method, a sample is placed in a constant magnetic field and moved up and down. Depending on the magnetising properties of the sample, this vibrating magnetic field induces a proportional electric current in the pickup coils of the VSM, which allows us to measure the magnetic properties of the sample.

The material in question is bluish at high temperatures, and as the temperature was lowered, it became pink and superconductive after which it became red and non-superconductive again. It only becomes superconductive at room temperature at a pressure of about 10,000 atmospheric pressures. This is admittedly higher than what we expect from a regular room, but dramatically lower than previous experiments.

The way the atoms are arranged in this material is at the heart of why it superconducts. This is why scientists are interested in studying its composition, using different analyses: X-ray diffraction (XRD), Energy Dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), and Raman spectroscopy.

XRD and EDX use X-rays to study the crystal structure of a material. X-rays are sent in all directions onto a crystalline material. By studying how the X-rays are scattered, information about the elements within, the crystal structure, and lattice spacing can be obtained.

Raman spectroscopy uses laser light to study the material. When a laser is directed onto a material, the scattered light lets us study the vibrational modes of the chemical bonds within the material — which gives information about the different kinds of bonds in a material.

These analyses showed the presence of two distinct hydride compounds — each with a face-centred cubic (fcc) metal sub-lattice but with varying contents of hydrogen and nitrogen.

However, more experiments are needed to determine the exact crystal structure of the material.

Exciting as it sounds, this research is unlikely to change our lives just yet. many things stand in it’s way. It requires extremely expensive laboratory equipment and very high pressure. The latter is especially harder to recreate here too. Moreover, this study cannot be reproduced by other research groups because some key details of how to make the material are still missing. The research was funded by a company, and they continue to own intellectual rights, making those details inaccessible to the public.

Maybe we’ll figure it all out someday — but until then, traffic jams and normal trains are what we have.

The film Ponniyin Selvan II or PS-II is out now, and it seems like half the population is completely psyched at this fact and the other half doesn’t know what that means and wonders when I got into gaming.

Ponniyin Selvan. The epic Tamil novel, penned by genius writer Kalki in the mid-20th century, is hard to describe. A whirlwind historical adventure set thousands of years ago in the Chola Kingdom, it has everything you might ask for and more. A lively kingdom; handsome princes; high adventure; scheming and devious villains with tragic backstories. Add to this plenty of scandals, plot twists right left and centre, and women who talk back against the patriarchy—even stepping through a very radical door for that time by suggesting the concept of women marrying each other instead of a man (although, unfortunately but not surprisingly, this idea was not developed further).

Given all this and its frequent historical references to Tamil culture and heritage, the novel has gained an almost cult-like following over the decades. It has also become infamous for not being adaptable to a movie format, with multiple failed attempts rivalling those of Dune.

Therefore, when renowned director Mani Ratnam took up the challenge last year — and pulled it off spectacularly — everyone from schoolkids to their grandparents flooded the theatres.

Given the size of the novel, the adaptation was divided in two parts. The first was met with pretty much resounding approval. Now the second film has been released, and it’s not just the film itself that’s the talk of the town but also the soundtrack by iconic composer A.R. Rahman.

However, for Dhrupad musicians, especially those in the Dagarvani tradition, a particular song from the new release hits different. Veera Raja Veera is being praised as one of A.R. Rahman’s latest hits.

But that song is an almost direct cut and paste of the Dhrupad composition Shiva Shiva Shiva.

Set in raag Adana, the original composition, as the name suggests, is in praise of Lord Shiva. For those who don't know, 'raag' very loosely translates to melodic scale or framework; Adana is a Carnatic raag which, like Kirwani and Charukeshi, was adopted by the Dhrupad tradition, in an example of cultural exchange in oral traditions.

A.R. Rahman’s Veera Raja Veera follows the melody of Shiva Shiva Shiva almost exactly, save for different lyrics, extra harmonies and instrumental scores, and a different melody interspersed between stanzas.

Upon hearing the song, Dhrupad musician Ustad Wasifuddin Dagar immediately flagged it as a copy of Shiva Shiva Shiva, which was originally composed and sung by his father Zahiruddin Dagar and uncle Faiyazuddin Dagar. Members of the Dagar family, as well as their students, have spoken out about this instance of direct copying, but whether anything will come out of it remains to be seen.

This issue raises a long-standing debate as to what is ‘copyright’ in traditional and folk music, and what is cultural appropriation of the same.

Rabindranath Tagore, the writer, composer, and philosopher, is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of early 20th-century India. In 1913, he became the second non-European to receive a Nobel Prize, receiving it in Literature for his "fresh and beautiful verse".

Many of Tagore's works are taken directly from folk music and Dhrupad compositions. In being ‘adopted’ by Tagore, they have been popularised, taken on an identity of themselves and, one could argue, prevented these melodies and meanings from being lost to the ages. That said, it is Tagore who largely takes credit for this: only a very curious or interested researcher would bother to look beyond and discover the roots of some of these songs.

Many people have suggested that family compositions and musical heritage be copyrighted. This, in my opinion, does a great disservice to our music tradition. Being an oral one, it has survived all these years by being passed down, by being reinterpreted by generations of musicians, by being traded and borrowed and, admittedly, stolen, by travelling musicians, courts and kings, and music students.

Although seemingly there is no originality — the same traditional compositions are sung year after year by countless musicians and their students — the oral tradition teaches us to go beyond doing something ‘new’ and constantly innovating to survive, and instead focus on the music itself and our connection with it.

It forces us to bring ourselves to it as we are, rather than to brand and sell ourselves to the audience as simply doing something new or different.

For the exact same reason, being an Indian classical musician and particularly a Dhrupad musician can be very hard because your audience has technically heard it all before. In the same way, musicians acknowledge that copyrighting or guarding original work is usually not the way to success here. We take pride in our open source compositions!

However, this new era is unprecedented when we see things being reused outside the mode and audience they were intended for. A.R. Rahman is now being praised as an Oscar-worthy composer by PS-II fans—but as we can see, the majority of the catchy melody was not even composed by him.

The reason why the melody fits so well for Veera Raja Veera and PS-II might be because the raag on which the majority of the song is based on is Adana.

Adana is rarely sung in a full-length Dhrupad concert, mainly because the melodic scale and structure of Adana does not lend itself well to the elaborate improvisation that is done in Dhrupad without either sounding repetitive or slipping into a similar-sounding but structurally different raag, like Darbari Kanhada. Instead, a quick aalaap is usually sung and the singer then goes straight into the composition like Shiva Shiva Shiva.

Adana as a raag is supposed to evoke a feeling of anger or valour, based on which source you decide to go with. It is essentially a high-energy raag because of the note placement. The Dhaivat (La) is an oscillating note, which means the pitch is modulated throughout giving a sense of tension. Steep climbs in the scale and the dramatic contrast between a sharp, natural Rishabh (Re) and Komal (minor) Dhaivat (La) give off this sense of valour, rather like the climax scene in a film.

This is why Adana is often sung at the very end of a Dhrupad concert. This is also likely why it fits well for PS-II, being all about praising the might and valour of the warrior kings whom the Cholas were.

There are others praising the fact that through this song, Dhrupad is reaching the masses. I do not agree with this opinion. The melodies and raags of our music tradition have always been drawn upon by the film industry. That is, after all, how we have masterpieces like Rhim Jhim Gire Saawan and Bombay Theme by A.R. Rahman himself. However, although these have mass appeal as well as sounding distinctly ‘Indian’, few listeners make the connection and bother to trace these melodies back to the traditions from which they arose.

Many of the Dhrupad compositions will probably sound amazing as movie songs, but without some of the primary components that make up a Dhrupad concert — like the structure and dwelling on the notes, or the limitation to certain musical accompaniments — this can hardly be said to help raise awareness of Dhrupad in my opinion. Especially not if the source isn't properly credited.

Yet, the comments about increased visibility for Dhrupad music do have a point. All the hundreds of Shiva Shiva Shiva renditions by prominent Dhrupad musicians around the world, the many recordings, and the song being described as a ‘magnum opus’; none of them come close to the impact of Veera Raja Veera within mere days.

It is clear that the choice of song has been carefully thought through; something which is a mainstay of A.R. Rahman’s genius. But is it ethical for him to be credited or passively assume credit as the composer of a piece which was largely taken from elsewhere, just because he is a genius composer? Or to win an award for composing (not producing!) a song that was clearly not just his own?

As an external observer who is not aware of what led to this choice — how A.R. Rahman came across the Dhrupad song, and how and why he chose to adapt it here — I would say, an emphatic no.

Perhaps, if movie composers and producers could do more to credit their sources; if they could be sensitive to the fact that most of this work is not copyrighted for a reason, and respect the views of those who have had this musical knowledge and heritage in their families for generations; perhaps, if this happened, then we could enter a new era of excellence in ‘popular’ music—as well as an awareness of and respect for the traditions behind them.

‘Sold!’ cried the auctioneer, while you, a jubilant buyer beam proudly at the latest painting you have added into your collection.

A painting commissioned to Buttersworth by the East India Company, it depicts a ship on a vast sea. Clouds frame it, with a distant moon shedding light on the whole scene. It was breathtaking, and a source of great admiration for your friends. Until a chance comment by a visitor to your gallery led you to check if it truly was an original. Imagine your shock at hearing the truth!

You can stamp your foot all you want, but reality remains the same — you are yet another victim of art fraud.

Art fraud has been around for much longer than the fake Buttersworths and Picassos that we know about today. Take the case of Michelangelo.

With the Renaissance came in the era of Humanism, wherein people began to lay importance in earthly matters, as opposed to divine. This also ushered in a demand for artwork by then-famous artists.

The churches were no exception to this, and that was why a cardinal bought a beautiful carving of a sleeping Cupid, believing it to be an antique. Turns out, as the apoplectic cardinal later discovered, it was actually a sculpture which had been buried in mud to artificially age it. The carver was not an ancient artist: it was someone rather new to the scene; a young man who went by the name of Michelangelo.

This incident only added to his fame: after all, the begrudgingly impressed cardinal did allow him to keep a share of his proceeds. Michelangelo eventually turned over a new leaf, however. He went on to sell his own work, and amassed so much fame, that people are now creating forgeries of his pieces.

Art fraud is defined as the deliberately false representation of the artist, age or ownership of a piece of artwork in order to financially benefit from it. This means that art fraud is not only limited to forgery, which is what many people tend to assume art fraud is. It also includes false dating — like claiming a statue is from a particular dynasty — or theft for resale.

Carrying out art fraud means taking into consideration a whole host of things. The replicas need to be exact enough to pass the keen eyes of an art authenticator. This means that everything needs to appear true to its time, from the fabric painted on, to the paints used itself.

Ken Perenyi, a master forger, takes immense pride in his copies. All of his work begins with an impressive amount of research, to really embody the artist he is copying. He familiarises himself with every aspect of the artists work — from the canvas they may have preferred, to the frames they may have used. While emulating 18th-century artists, for instance, Perenyi uses canvas from India and China, as they have similar irregularities as the cloth used back then. He uses salt water to create convincing rust stains, and other techniques to fake stamps, chalk marks, and other inventory labels.

Perenyi’s research runs so deep that he even managed to recreate antique varnish. Antique being a keyword here, because this kind of varnish tends to cast a greenish glow in UV light. The master fraudster would carefully scrape varnish from paintings from the same era, strain it through a sieve, and mix it with modern varnish so it would glow convincingly. There was a small catch though: antique varnish used sugar, which attracted flies. Years later, fly droppings would turn brown, and speckle the painting.

Perenyi managed to recreate those ancient fly droppings too, with some epoxy glue, and brown paint.

His works have been auctioned and sold by many esteemed companies like Sothebys. So brilliant was his work that, despite creating forgeries for over thirty years, and undergoing a five year long FBI investigation, he was never arrested. That seems viable: after all, he did manage to con some big art galleries! Much like Michealangelo, however, Perenyi too has turned over for the better — and sells his work as copies now.

Other methods are used by forgers to convincingly age paintings. They can range from holding hair dryers over paintings, to baking it, as Wolfgang Beltracchi did. Beltracchi and his wife would also collect dust from antique frames, and sprinkle them over their paintings. But it doesn’t end there: so committed were they that they even faked photos from the 1930s with his forged painting in the background, claiming that they belonged to his wife, Helene’s, grandparents.

Beltracchi’s career didn’t end as well as Perenyi’s did. The former was eventually caught — for using the wrong pigments! His use of titanium white in a copy of Dutch painter Heinrich Campendonk’s work ultimately exposed him, for the pigment was not in use when the artist was alive.

The other day, I was scrolling through YouTube, trying to find something interesting to watch when I came across a video called "i did art fraud to prove a point". Side note: It's by the Answer in Progress team, who are my favourite people on the internet at the moment so I’d highly recommend you check them out! But I digress.

The video really got me thinking. Not only about the act itself, but about the moralities of it. What drives people to copy other’s work?

Most crimes have some root cause, a systemic failure that drives people to figure things out themselves. Many artists, as in Perenyi’s case, resort to fraud because they are unable to find a market to sell their original work in. This is because even within the demand for art, there is more esteem given to the artists, and not the art itself.

In today’s world, there is a lot of emphasis placed on productivity. Every skill, to a certain extent, is only considered valuable if it benefits us financially. Therefore, art isn’t really seen as productive work. This is a far cry from the way things were before. Rulers would become patrons of artists, and support them financially, therefore allowing more and more people to express their skill.

Not that it justifies conning people. The crime part comes in because a painting is sold as something else of higher value. Do I understand that it is a crime? Yes. Do I still find the entire affair hilarious? Absolutely.

See, art fraud only affects the ultra-wealthy. Those who can afford to spend millions on a singular painting, only for it to be shut up in warehouses, or accessible exclusively to their inner circles. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for them: you’d think that they would be happy regardless, because they technically bought what they were asking for.

Sure, it’s an antique painting in a certain distinctive style — just without the years of moulding. Oh, and bonus: this newer piece would probably even last longer! So it’s no surprise that I usually come away from stories of art fraud appreciating the artists who manage to fool so many experts.

But that also raises the question: how can I argue that only art fraud is justifiable, and not other kinds of frauds? It is still a crime to falsely advertise a product. In fact, when I scale it down to my everyday realities, I tend to be rather hypocritical of the matter. Of course I would be affronted if I was sold, say, fake merchandise from a singer I admire, or fake shoes from a brand I respect.

I could go on forever, arguing for and against, but I will stop here, and leave the rest to you.

Art fraud isn’t limited to just paintings, no. Picture this: you, a rich capitalist, are looking for something to buy; preferably something that will add to your prestige. You hear of an interesting item on sale: the Taj Mahal. Perfect, you think, that sounds like a great addition to your collection. You meet the seller, a well dressed, intelligent man. A few hours and several negotiations later, you walk away satisfied.

The  Taj Mahal is yours.

Except it’s not: it’s still very much the UNESCO heritage site it has been. There may be disagreements about whether it rightfully belongs to the Indian government, the Archaeological Survey of India, or the local wakf board, but, whoever the owner is, it’s certainly not you. Meanwhile, the businessman sits back in his chair, whipping off his fake beard. Another good day; another successful swindle.

This infamous conman, one of India’s most notorious in the 90s, was Natwarlal. Born Mithilesh Kumar Srivastava, and a lawyer by profession, Natwarlal eventually decided he was better off breaking the law, not defending it. His descent to crime began when he realised that he had a knack for forging signatures, a skill he put to use by stealing around Rs 1000 from his neighbour’s bank account. He soon moved on to forging cheques and release orders from the Railway Authorities, vanishing with the goods.

Eventually, he began to target the rich. Natwarlal supposedly sold the Taj Mahal, Rashrapathi Bhavan, Red Fort and the Parliament House of India (members included!) — not just once, but multiple times. He had over a hundred cases on him, and was sentenced to roughly the same number of years in prison. He however only served twenty, having escaped jail seven times.

Much of this story sounds like a Bollywood movie (it eventually became one too) and over time, his story only gained popularity. He portrayed himself as a Robin Hood of sorts, claiming that he robbed rich capitalists only, and distributed his money to the poor, often holding feasts for them. This, coupled with the non-violent nature of his crimes made him quite famous. Natwarlal passed away in 2009 (unless he was cremated in 1996, as his brother claims).

Fraudsters aside, though, there’s another completely different lens through which we can tackle the problem.

It is a popular pastime of many: drawing out scenes from one’s favourite book, movie or any form of media. I’m talking, of course, about fanart. And with the rise of bots on social media platforms, there is a new kind of art fraud that is on the rise: drawings on t-shirts.

There seems to be a growth of plagiarism on the internet, especially on social media platforms like Twitter. Enthusiastic fans comment that they would love to see their favourite artist’s work on a t-shirt. The artists notice, of course; but so do bots! Bots, who then plagiarise the art, put it on a shirt, and paste the link everywhere leading many to believe that it is official. It then becomes a nightmare for the artists, as they try to take it down.

Modern problems require modern solutions, and the art community worldwide is fighting back. Many post messages like ‘this website plagiarises artwork’ and request people to comment that they want it on a shirt. The bots pick it up, and voila! Everyone on the website can see that it is stolen art.

Michelangelo eventually began to sell original work. Perenyi now officially sells his work as “copies” of famous artists, so buyers know exactly what they’re getting. Beltracchi too, while serving his sentence, collaborated with a photographer friend and produced many (original) mixed-media pieces. Perhaps art fraud only helps to improve one’s character: after all one could say that they painted over a new leaf!

When I was younger, one of my favourite movies was Madagascar, with Alex, a lion, and Marty, a zebra, being my favourite duo. One particular scene from that movie is the reason behind this article you’re reading today—the one where Alex proclaims that Marty is black with white stripes because he has more black stripes than white stripes.

I was one of those self-proclaimed “nature experts” back then, and thought that zebras were white with black stripes. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found out that I did not, in fact, know it all—zebras were actually black with white stripes! It was quite hard to wrap my head around—after all, the stripes looked similar to how a tiger’s stripes look, and tigers are orange with black stripes. But this begs the question: why are they considered to have white stripes? And why do they have stripes in the first place?

The origin of the barcode horse’s markings is a pigment called melanin. Each hair on a zebra’s body grows out of a follicle filled with melanocyte cells that produce the pigment melanin, which adds colour to the skin and fur of most animals. This information, though useful in theory, isn’t exactly helpful on its own. For one, the stripes begin developing in the eighth month of the zebra’s embryonic development, so we can’t exactly look at a newborn zebra and declare whether it’s black with white stripes or vice versa, and for the other, we don’t know whether the melanin is deposited for black stripes or blocked for white stripes.

By default, the melanocytes are supposed to pump out melanin and create black fur. The amount of melanin produced by these melanocytes is decided by paracrine signalling, that is, one melanocyte secretes chemicals which can only be detected by the melanocytes near it. A single signal from a neighbouring cell therefore causes some cells to not produce melanin. To put it in another way, if you were to factory reset a zebra so that all cells followed the default settings, it would be black. Even more compelling evidence is the fact that if you shaved the animal, you’d essentially be left with a black donkey with the temperament of a cat.

Of course, if you don’t want to spend ages speaking about melanin and pigment cells to explain to someone that zebras have white stripes, you could always just show them a picture of Tira the spotted zebra foal.

In a normal animal, the pigment cells produce the appropriate quantity of the enzyme tyrosinase, which is required for the synthesis of melanin. In some rare cases, though, there is either not enough or too much tyrosinase. These lead to conditions such as albinism, where there is no tyrosinase at all, leucism, where there isn’t enough, and pseudo-melanism and melanism, where there is too much. Take, for instance, the feline family—from black leopards and king cheetah to white tigers and albino cats, they have it all.

In felines, two genes, Taqpep and Ed3n, affect the pattern on their bodies. Taqpep majorly controls the pattern of the feline’s markings—think of it as a tattoo stencil. A single mutation in the Taqpep gene can result in a vastly different appearance, as is demonstrated by the striped body of a king cheetah or the weird stripes of one-third of Simlipal Tiger Reserve’s tiger population. Samples of cheetah skin reveal that the ink that is used to fill in the stencil is a direct consequence of Ed3n activity, with the gene being expressed more in regions of dark fur.

In the case of Tira, it may just be that his melanocytes have no idea where they are and produce a normal quantity of melanin through his body. Although it’s pretty to look at, it has a chance at reducing his life expectancy. After all, the zebra evolved to have stripes for a reason.

We know that the markings of leopards and tigers are a way for them to camouflage in their environment, and it is natural to say the same for the zebra. This is true in a way—the uniform direction of the stripes makes it harder for predators to target individual herd members. It can be compared to the bait balls small fish form when threatened by marine predators. Aside from predators, zebras face another threat: flies.

Biting flies can be pretty dangerous for any equid. My own gelding is allergic to fly bites and occasionally breaks out into hives because of them. Other than causing allergic reactions, insects such as horseflies and tsetse flies in the African plains can cause diseases like equine influenza and sleeping sickness, which have the potential to kill them, and the thin hair of the zebra’s coat isn’t enough to defend against them, and they can’t exactly kick or bite at flies—but here’s where stripes come in again.

Striped surfaces are able to disorient flies—when they approach a striped surface for a landing, they aren’t able to decelerate as they do when landing on a non-striped surface and end up bouncing off. Although we don’t know much about how flies see the world, there are a couple of theories as to what happens. One theory suggests that the stripes act like an optical illusion, while another suggests that the fly views the striped surface as “a series of thin black objects.” Whatever the case may be, one thing is for certain—the barcode horses don’t have to fear flies.

Other than fly protection and predator confusion, zebra stripes also are unique enough that the pattern is used to fingerprint individuals—both by researchers and by other zebras. A mother zebra will imprint on her foal with their striping patterns, vocalisations and scents, while head stallions use the more aggressive aesthetic to defend their territory from other zebras and predators.

Although zebras look like horses and donkeys, you never really see people riding zebras or using them as beasts of burden. Zebras are very temperamental and unpredictable, and the same can be said for any zebra hybrid. It takes a lot of work to get one to trust you, and even if you do succeed, you may have to accept that you’ll never be able to ride it—it simply will not allow anyone to get on its back. Zebras are wild animals, and all we can and should do is admire them from afar.

Around A.D. 415 or 416, in the streets of Alexandria, Egypt, a group of Christian zealots attacked a woman who was traveling home in her chariot before they dragged her by force to a church, where they killed her. This coincided with a time period of a power struggle in Egypt, leading to much debate and speculation of why she was killed. Was her death linked to those locked in the power struggle? If so, how was she linked to it?

This gruesome event also inspired many people, and the woman became a symbol of feminism and the struggle for women’s rights up until the 20th century. So, who was this woman, and why was she killed?

She was Hypatia. Hypatia was one of the last philosophers in Alexandria and one of several prominent intellectual figures of that time who had mastered a wide range of disciplines, from mathematics to astronomy to philosophy. Although she is best known for her tragic death story, her life is also one that has deeply inspired many.

Hypatia’s father, Theon, was an accomplished librarian and mathematician of his time. He edited and wrote commentaries on the works of Euclid and Ptolemy. Despite this, we know little about his family life. Even the date of birth of his daughter is still debated, with some arguing that she was born in 370, while other historians believe that she was born in 350. Nobody knows.

As a mathematician as well as a librarian, Theon imparted a lot of knowledge to his daughter, especially relating to mathematics and astronomy. That is what shaped the figure of this intelligent woman in the future. Although Hypatia is described as a universal genius, no evidence has been found that she published any independent works on philosophy or made any mathematical discoveries.

In 48 BC, Julius Caesar’s soldiers set fire to some Egyptian ships in the Alexandrian port to block Ptolemy XIV’s fleet. The fire spread to the parts closest to the dock, and just so happened to burn down a major part of the library of Alexandria, and in 272 AD, when the Roman emperor Aurelian waged war to recapture Alexandria, his army destroyed the Broucheion quarter of the city, where the main library was located. The library of Alexandria was no more.

The destruction of the Library of Alexandria meant the scholars of that time had to prioritize preserving and commenting on classical mathematical works rather than publishing original work, and Hypatia and Theon were no exceptions to the case, with the two of them working together to revise old textbooks of geometry, astronomy and algebra.

Aside from this, she and Theon were also the head of a school called the “Mouseion”, named after a prior school which included the Library of Alexandria. Together, they took pride in teaching Neoplatonism as formulated by Plotinus. Hypatia never married, most likely inspired by Plato's idea of abolishing the family system. The then archbishop Theophilus recognised that Hypatia was a role model to the people of Alexandria and tolerated her school, even encouraging two of her students to become bishops under his authority. He also seemed to consider her an ally and did not object to the close ties Hypatia established with the Roman prefects, though her closeness to one of them would end up being the nail in her coffin.

In 412, Theophilus died suddenly. He was soon succeeded by his nephew Cyril, even though Theopilus had not appointed him officially. This of course created an internal conflict within the church at that time between Cyril's supporters and his rival, Timothy. However, Cyril managed to win and punish those who supported Timothy, such as by closing the Noviantis Christian churches which were staunch supporters of Timothy.

In 414, Cyril also closed all the Jewish synagogues in Alexandria, confiscated all of the Jewish properties and  expelled them all from the city. Orestes was angry when he saw Cyril's childish attitude as a religious leader, which he considered as not setting a good example. What Cyril did damaged the harmony of religious life in Alexandria which had long existed, and though Orestes was a Christian he disagreed with and did not recognize Cyril's leadership, which he considered unstable.

The conflict between the two leaders started heating up, and Cyril devised a plan to kill Orestes. However, the group of men assigned to kill Orestes failed to carry out their task, and Orestes ordered that Amonios ,the monk who was considered the mastermind behind his murder plan, be tortured to death in public as punishment.

Orestes often asked Hypatia for advice because she was known as a wise figure, liked by both pagans and Christians because of her moderation. And although Hypatia was a pagan, she had many Christian students, including Synesius who would later become Bishop of Ptolemais. When Cyril learned that Orestes was close to Hypatia, she became his next target. To him, Hypatia was an easy target, and he also had many reasons to kill her—after all, Hypatia was a pagan follower of Neo-Platonic philosophy, and he believed that society, which was predominantly Christian, would definitely side with him.

Cyril and his allies first tried to damage Hypatia's good name, in order to dim the people's trust and sympathy for her. Rumors were made that Hypatia was an anarchistic and provocative woman, and spread her devil worship was the cause of the heated conflict between the church and the government. Finally, in March 415, a group of Christians led by a lecturer named Petros attacked Hypatia's chariot when she was on her way home. They dragged Hypatia into a building that had once been a pagan temple before being converted into a church, where they killed her.

Many say that Hypatia's murder was purely political and had nothing to do with religion, but her tragic fate rocked the empire. Many of the later Neoplatonic philosophers, such as Damascius,  became increasingly aggressive in criticizing and attacking Christianity. Even Voltaire used Hypatia's death as an excuse to condemn the church and religion. This was a real shock, because while she was alive she hoped that neoplatonism and Christianity could coexist peacefully.

The story of Hypatia's death, then, inspired many people. Until the 20th century, Hypatia was used as a symbol of feminism and the struggle for equality for women's rights. In the late 20th century, many depictions emerged linking Hypatia's death to the destruction of the library in Alexandria, despite the fact that the library had been destroyed while the philosopher was still alive. What is clear, though, is that Hypatia was a victim of religious fanaticism, politics, and sectarian conflict in Alexandria.

Although Hypatia is well-known for her gruesome death, it is also important to acknowledge that she lived a very productive life. Without her work, we wouldn’t know of the teachings from the past, or of the lost content of the Library of Alexandria. She also was the first female mathematician with a good record of her life. Her heroism and courage have also been commemorated by Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar in his 2009 film “Agora”, and her legacy still lives on today even in space, with a planet being named after her.

“L’Antica Pizzeria Da Michele! Good choice!” approves Vincenzo. It’s 2019, and my brother and I are on a taxi ride through the Italian city of Napoli—or Naples—to feast on some authentic Neapolitan pizza.

L’Antica opened in 1906, and is famously featured in the Julia Roberts starring film adaptation of Eat, Pray, Love. They serve only the two most traditional varieties of pizza, margherita and marinara, and are famously known for their quality of ingredients.

On the volcanic plains to the south of Mount Vesuvius grow the small and pear-shaped pomodorino del piennolo del Vesuvio or ‘hanging tomatoes of Vesuvius’, valued for their shelf-life as well as their taste: the longer they hang, the more pronounced their flavour. It is only these tomatoes, or their larger substitutes the San Marzano tomatoes, that are allowed on a traditional Neapolitan pizza. Along with other ingredients like mozzarella cheese from a specific semi-wild variety of water buffalo, they go through the special hand-twirling process that makes these pizzas unique.

In 2010, the European Union assigned the “Traditional Speciality Guaranteed” tag to the Neapolitan pizza’s ingredients, while the UNESCO in 2018 recognised pizza twirling as part of the “intangible heritage” of Napoli.

Travelling forth for a taste of such tradition, little did I know I would soon be swept up in a different world entirely: that of Bitcoin and blockchains.

“Do you think it’s the best pizzeria in Napoli?” I ask Vincenzo about our chosen destination.

“Well, it’s good”, he says, “but I’ve only eaten there three times. It’s a good pizza but I like taking my time to sit down and eat and enjoy with people…” Due to the popularity of L’Antica Pizzeria, there are long lines and rushed seating arrangements, which can affect the ambience for a laid-back meal.

“What is your favourite place?” I quiz on.

“It’s called Pizzeria Fiore Bianco,” he says. My thumbs fly into action straight away, skimming through search results to read up more.

“I love traditional style”, Vincenzo goes on, but this “new age” pizza is really good. Their dough is lighter and tastier. Also you can sit down, take your time and enjoy.”

My Google search doesn’t throw up much, (curious?) but if there’s anything I’ve learnt this year it’s to trust my gut. So, when Vincenzo offers to take us to the new place instead, I jump at the opportunity.

I’ve been to numerous pizzerias, and the Fiore Bianco doesn’t look or feel very different. They have traditional pizza, interesting unique combinations…and the one that catches my eye: it’s called bitcoin.

We ask what it’s all about, and—much to our surprise—our quest for good pizza is delivered hot with a slice of tech and the deliciousness of innovating on tradition.

Bitcoin and pizza, it turns out, have a long history. Back in 2010, three months after Neapolitan Pizza got EU recognition, bitcoin enthusiast Laszlo Hanyecz wanted to spend some of the bitcoins he had mined on real-world goods. The transaction was finalised through an online forum, and Hanyecz sent ₿1000—worth $30 at the time—in exchange for two Papa John’s pizzas.

The value of those 1000 bitcoin has since shot up to over 25 million dollars, causing people to dub Hanyecz’s meal “the most expensive pizza in history”.

But what is Bitcoin, exactly?

If you’ve been reading even a bit of the news, you’ve probably heard of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is the first of them; an idea proposed by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto as an alternative to today’s bureaucratic banking system.

At the heart of bitcoin is the blockchain: a sort of “digital transaction log meets democracy”: Bitcoin’s blockchain records are in the form of “So-and-so sent this much money to this person,” but, instead of a specific entity (the bank manager; an accountant; the government) managing the account books, they’re collectively managed by all the computers of all the people running bitcoin software.

To prevent people from indiscriminately adding money to their own accounts, there is a system of secret keys—and the “democracy” angle: everyone has decided not to recognise transactions unless the keys match. If a few people decide to play by different rules, their transactions would be rejected by most people and, therefore, become useless and irrelevant.

But while Bitcoin uses this system for tracking money, the same system could be used for tracking literally any data. That’s where the other uses of blockchain come in.

This technical detour eventually winds back at the pizzeria, where we have now enjoyed a traditional margherita, as well as a unique “pizza 081” containing cream of friarielli, salciccia, provola and fried friarielli.

Blockchain enthusiasts Fabiano Roberto and Dario decided that people should be able to purchase pizza with bitcoin even in the land where it had originated. And so, they started a pizzeria. One with delicious new kinds of pizzas and a lighter bit of flour dough, which integrates not just different flours into their crust but also blockchain into their recipes.

Besides accepting payments in bitcoin, the duo wanted to grow to a stage where they could use blockchain to trace origins of the food they bought.

I spoke to Andrea Varriale, then director of Start-up Grind Malta, who believed that “this technology can fight corruption, the real problem of our under-development, so we use what we have to attract audiences in our lovely city (Napoli)”.

He told me he was launching a challenge that would start from Napoli, but be open to all the pizzaiolos in the world. The pizza makers would be judged on charisma, the originality of the flavour, and the beauty of the blockchain representation, and the winner would receive 1BTC and be named the creator of the Blockchain Pizza. Even then, it was no small-scale operation, with the mayor of Napoli buying a pizza through bitcoin back in 2018.

Today, “Napoli Blockchain” is going strong, and a quick Google search reveals how the blockchain has been put to use for everything from encouraging waste disposal to collecting funds for COVID-19 relief.

Blockchain is just a digital ledger; a digitised record of whatever data is added by its members. This means people can easily add extra information like “this transaction is for water-buffalo milk”, but blockchain itself cannot verify that the information is actually true.

What blockchain can do is allow people to cryptographically sign data, which means trusted authorities—the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, perhaps?—can add their stamp of approval, which can then be passed on down the line.

The traditional Neapolitan pizza is said to be the direct ancestor to the “New York style” pizza. The latter started when Gennaro Lombardi opened America’s first pizzeria in 1905; an employee named Antonio Totonno Pero cooked the pizzas and went on to start a pizzeria of his own. But the balance of power has now shifted, with the dollars of New York giving a rough time to the euros of Italy.

Today in 2023, the Pizzeria Fiore Bianco is unfortunately closed, one of the many victims of the coronavirus pandemic. But there is nevertheless a whole movement simmering in Napoli involving food, blockchain and a deeper cause against corruption.

It’s April 11, 1903 in the south island of New Zealand. Richard Pearse transports his flying machine in a horse drawn cart to a level terrace above the Opihi River. He is accompanied by a gathering of children keen to help him achieve flight. His first attempt is unsuccessful and he crashes into a patch of shrubbery down the hill.

With some help from some help, he tries again and this time he succeeds. He takes off the cliff again and glides for half-mile along the side of the river. It was at this point that his engine overheated and began to lose power, forcing Richard to land in the riverbed. A local, Arthur Tozer, is crossing the river bed in a horse-drawn carriage at the time and is astonished to see Pearse fly directly over his head.

Think of the first manned flight and you will immediately think of the Wright brothers and their famous flight on the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 3rd December 1903. However, the above anecdote proves that Pearse beat them to it by over half a year.

Why haven’t we heard of him?

Well, Pearse laboured under three disadvantages: he was publicity-shy, he had a defective memory (don’t we all?) and he lived in the back-end of beyond, or New Zealand’s South Island. The accounts we have of his attempts to fly are all eyewitness reports, often those of individuals who were children at the time. Children were perhaps the most fascinated by his inventions and like on that autumn day near Opihi, his eager assistants. Furthermore, history is written by the victors, the old adage goes, or by those with the best public relations machine, as Richard Pearse might have said.

Here’s his story.

Richard, a farmer, was a serial inventor with a thing for bamboo. In 1902, he patented his first invention, a bamboo-framed bicycle powered by a vertical-drive pedal action and with a rod and rack gear system, integral tyre pumps and back-pedal rim-brakes. It was certainly ingenious and the like of which had not been seen before.

But like many a chap with an inventive streak at the time, Richard’s imagination was piqued by the early attempts to achieve powered flight.

It seems he had been mulling over the challenges in his mind from as early as 1899 and, by 1902, had come up with the design for a petrol engine.

Naturally, it was ingenious, consisting of two cylinders with pistons. The clever bit was that the pistons worked in either direction, effectively turning into a four-cylinder engine, capable of generating between fifteen and twenty-two horsepower.

Then Pearse built a plane to house the engine out of bamboo — naturally — as well as tubular steel, wire and canvas. It was the first to use proper ailerons and had a modern-style tricycle landing system, which meant that it could take off and land anywhere. It was also a monoplane.

In comparison with the Wright brothers’ prototypes at the time, it was superior save for a rather crude propeller system.

Having built his plane, the big question was; would it get off the ground?

Chronology is far from certain, not least because Pearse was reticent to publicise his experiments, which were often conducted in secrecy on his own extensive land. What eye-witness reports there seem somewhat vague on key points of his exploits. The Opihi Terrace flight was probably not his first flight, but it is the best documented. There were certainly other flights, it’s just unclear how successful they were.

However, it seems that as early as March 3, 1903, Pearse took to the air in a public demonstration of his flying machine. He manoeuvred his machine on to the Main Waitohi Road, which ran along the perimeter of his farm. The plane took off, perhaps reaching a height of some four metres, and travelled in a straight line for between fifty and 400 metres (there is no consensus amongst reports) before coming to rest in a gorse bush.

Undaunted, Pearse continued with his experiments.

Pearse never publicised his achievements and the local newspapers only picked up on the story in 1909, perhaps setting a world record for the slowest pack of newshounds.

Pearse himself sowed confusion in the chronology by claiming in a couple of letters, published in 1915 and 1928, that it was not until February or March 1904 that he ‘set out to solve the problem of aerial navigation.’

I know as I get older memory plays tricks on my grasp on chronology but there are enough independent witnesses to suggest that Pearse was experimenting with a version of manned, powered flight — if not exactly controlled — far earlier than that.

Pearse patented his aircraft in 1906 but then seemed to lose his interest in flight, frustrated that competitors from abroad were getting all the glory. In the 1930s, though, he did design, and partly build, an aircraft with foldable wings and tail, which could be stored in a garage.

The idea never took off.

Back in 2021, before ChatGPT was a thing, the Internet was flooded with the coloured yellow and green squares of a much simpler online phenomenon: Wordle.

Wordle's appeal lay in its simplicity. You have to guess a five-letter word. Correct letters turn green; letters that are correct but in the wrong place turn yellow. And, that's basically it!

As someone who writes software, I found the same minimalist aesthetic in the website's code as well. No consultation with the home server or messages bounding through cyberspace to another country and back: rather, once I'd loaded the page, I could switch off the Internet entirely and the game would continue uninterrupted all the way till October 2027 when the preloaded games ran out. (Some people did this when Wordle was bought over by the New York Times: they wanted to stay with the original version).

ChatGPT screenshots are more eerie, philosophical, funny, and intense than the simple Wordle grids people used to share—but both of them are related to language. And, perhaps surprisingly, they are both based on very simple rules.

When my colleague Akil was in 4th grade, I happened to overhear a session of her library class. The lesson was related to classifying books, and while the librarian was explaining the intricacies of a simplified Dewey Decimal System to the rest of the class, Akil was considering the book that she was supposed to classify: Fundamentals of Trigonometry.

"I think it should go under 400 Language," she finally decided, because "It has so many words: angle; quadrant; radius..."

I later realised that Akil wasn't quite far from the truth. Mathematics is all about creating words (and symbols, rules, and definitions) to describe aspects of the world; aspects like "seven" and "subtract" which would not be so obvious otherwise. As an extreme example, numerophile Alex Bellos describes a group of people called the Munduruku who don't have numbers in their vocabulary. This means they have to (for example) name each member of the family to decide if they've got enough fish for dinner. There is, to them, literally no such thing as "seven".

What about concepts that are non-mathematical? The now-discredited but still interesting theory of "linguistic determinism" went on to say that our very thoughts were defined by what our native language is. It's also known as the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis", which is a bit of a misnomer because Sapir and Whorf never co-authored a paper about it, and while they did have similar opinions, they didn't explicitly state them.

"What is a shelter kind of thing that is more like a door but less like a bench?" Snipette co-founder Manasa and I were trying to crack Semantle, a game inspired by Wordle in nothing but name.

Semantle is the "hot or cold" game in lingospace. You guess a word, and it gives you a score for how "close" it is to the target word. So if the target word is "wind", then "air" would be a lot closer than "grass" (but so would "clockwork"). We always begin with a scattershot approach, throwing words (fancy words, since we're Snipette editors) into the air until something scores high. Until then, we end up clutching at straws if a word like "door" is a few percentage points warmer than a word like "bench".

Getting a lead is when the excitement starts. We look back at previous words trying to find patterns, and start using phrases like "in the same direction, but more" which, if you've played Semantle once, you'll be able to immediately relate to. Words stop taking discrete meanings and start unfolding like a landscape which we know exists but can only sometimes catch glimpses of. One of the first team games we played at Snipette had us go down "fertiliser", "forest", "ecology", and "farming" to finally arrive at "cooperation"—a very generic word, to which there are so many ways to arrive, but we somehow took a very agricultural route to get there!

How does Semantle decide how "close" one word is to another? It's based on a mathematical model of the English language; the same kind that neural network engines use.

Each word is represented by a multidimensional vector, and, to find out how close two words are, you just measure the distance between the two vectors. (I can imagine "cooperation" sitting in the middle, with "ecology" and "farming" marching off to one side while other routes like "international" or "competition" branch out in other directions).

This adds an interesting dimension to the game. Not only am I exploring the landscape of words and meanings that I know in my head; I'm also peeking into the computations of a machine-learning model. The experience feels very cybernetic.

The classic example of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—or, shall I say, linguistic determinism—is the oft-repeated story about the Inuit having numerous words for "snow". This means Inuit speakers are able to make out the subtle differences between all these kinds of snow, whereas English speakers can't. Their language is restricting the way they think.

From the other end, languages like Himba don't distinguish between "blue" and "green" (which would incidentally resolve a long-standing debate in my family about the colour of the bathroom bucket). This means a Himba speaker would see both the colours as equivalent, just like the ancient Romans did when they described the sky as "green".

Modern linguists point out the flaws in these arguments. English speakers may not have different words for snow, but they can identify different kinds when the context demands; they just use adjectives like "hard-packed snow" instead of discrete words. Meanwhile, experiments have shown that people can distinguish between shades even if they don't have different words for them. Looking back, this makes a lot of sense: Manasa grew up with an artist for a father, so she can immediately identify a maroon or a burgundy; I can't name them but I can still tell they're not the same kind of red-brown.

That said, language can certainly influence the way you think—what is known as linguistic relativity. One experiment involved people code-switching to either German or English while watching a video, and the "German thinkers" were able to recall more details—evidently because, while people use English phrases like "I was walking", German speakers tend to also specify the goal of the action, such as where they were walking. (A more relatable example could be how, once you know the name for a feeling or ailment, you feel much better about it).

People talk about ChatGPT being "programmed to think" or "programmed to say" a certain thing. This kind of description would make sense for older chatbots, which had long, complex instructions like "If the message says 'hi' or 'hello', respond with 'hi', and check for the person's name which may come in any of the following formats: ..."

That's not at all how ChatGPT does things. What ChatGPT responds with is processed and filtered and censored later, but at its heart is something called a Large Language Model. It runs on the same principle as the autosuggest on your phone: look at what's come before, and, through statistics, predict what word is to come next.

The "through statistics" part includes going through multi-trillion-paragraph datasets, which is where the "Large" part of Large Language Model comes from. (Just because it's simple doesn't mean it's cheap or easy to arrive at!). All the words from here are collected in 'word vectors', similar to how they're saved in Semantle. But in the process, Large Language Models also save another dataset that says which vectors are likely to follow one another. All this is tuned automatically, adjusting the numbers to fit the statistics, so there's no specific instruction saying that "this word is seen to follow this word"—just a set of numbers that turned out to work best.

The beauty lies in the fact that there's nothing specific to program. It could be anything—English, Korean, or even musical notes—as long as it's "something which follows from something that came before".

Given how even the three-rule game of Wordle has given rise to complex analyses and strategies to crack the code, maybe we shouldn't be surprised; perhaps the lesson here is that even simple rules can give rise to complex results. To add a bit of creativity, ChatGPT doesn't merely pick the "most likely" word; instead, it rolls a dice and picks perhaps the second or fifth option, so that it can end up with something new and unpredictable each time.

There are many ways to process a language. Semantle forces you to consider a word and think of its context and meaning, whereas Wordle breaks that word down into its atoms, the alphabets. Wordiply, released by the Guardian to get in on the game, makes you focus on sequences of letters rather than single ones: given a word, you need to find a larger word that contains it in the same way that "caterpillar" contains the word "ate".

Somewhere in the midst of this lies ChatGPT's skill, which is also very singular: "Find the next word" is its primary mandate.

And yet, the conversations with ChatGPT and its ilk are eerily intelligible. What you get is not just "a right answer", but something complex with information, creativity, and even a tune-able personality. Prompted effectively, it can already write essays, draft emails, and pass graduate-level exams in some departments. It can also speak very confidently on various topics, (although what it says, while professional-sounding, may not be actually true).

ChatGPT is in an early version, and we can only expect its responses to get better. Depending on whom you ask, it's an exciting, scary, or uncertain future—but what I'm interested in are the philosophical implications, because in some sense this turns linguistic relativity on its head. Forget measuring language's influence on the thought process, and instead witness this:

What happens when you get a "thought process" that is created purely out of language?

One of my favourite stories from the Arabian Nights is that of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. I especially love the part where the thieves’ accomplice marks Ali Baba’s house with a secret symbol so his house can be recognised. Ali Baba’s clever servant girl, however, intercepts the gangsters’ code, and draws the same motif on every wall in the locality to confuse the bandits.

I love her on-the-feet thinking here, but I have always imagined how frustrating it must have been for the people to clean up their houses after! You can almost see the mayor of the town pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration when he hears of this motif-making mischief-maker (“Why…why…...And we had just repainted everything…” he cries).

Why, though, would the mayor be cross? What is wrong with a small symbol on a wall?

Walls have been adorned with shapes and colours since before we can remember. 45,000 years ago, our ancestors were making drawings of warty pigs in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Today, the hashtag #warliart has more than 635K views on TikTok. So much between these two ends of a spectrum has just been humans reaching up to leave their mark on a wall.

In all of these wall paintings, humans depicted what mattered to them then: food, fear, family, or fun. And they continue to depict what matters to them, even now. Laneways in Bombay pay tribute to the home of Bollywood, while metro stations in Bangalore celebrate the skills of the art and design students who study in the city. A 90-year old lady in the Czech Republic spends her days painting pretty flowers on street walls. And almost every toddler with a crayon has ruined a clean wall with implied artistry.

Art is an expression, and wall art is no different. It is a profession, even, with advertising companies and governments commissioning artists to adorn public walls—to sell a concept, to send a message, to inform or educate people, or even to simply hide cracks in the old paints.

And yet, and yet there are entire petitions to remove scribbles from walls in our cities, even though they may be benign (not a threat like what the Forty Thieves did).

Why are those markings a problem?

What is it about just a symbol or a line of text that can cause discomfort, evoke fear, make municipal committees repaint entire lanes? What is appropriate, and what is to be scrubbed away in denial?

The Oxford dictionary defines graffiti (noun) as, “Drawings or writing done on a wall, etc. in a public place without permission”.

It is the ‘permission’ part that makes graffiti different from regular wall art. Warli art, for instance, won’t ever be called graffiti. Warli is a cultural norm, expected or commissioned, and celebrated by the public; it is an ‘acceptable’ form of wall art. Nothing is disturbing or disruptive in a warli painting.

But there is a sense of a rebel in the word ‘graffiti’ itself. The root of the word is ‘graffio’, the Italian word for a scratch. It conveys a bit of defiance; a hint of vandalism, an act of defiling someone else’s property.

The examples that come with the aforementioned definition are interesting, too.

The subway was covered in graffiti.

Someone had scrawled graffiti all over the school walls.

Notice the use of the verbs ‘covered’, and ‘scrawled’; ‘cover’ implies causing something to be hidden, and ‘scrawled’ suggests a lack of finesse, a flippant sort of approach to the creation. Both allude to the art being unexpected, unartistic, and most of all, unwelcome.

A lot of wall art is scribbles. The Romans had graffiti, complete with political caricatures and ‘yo mama’ jokes. And there are countless monuments in India with Sonu loves Preeti type etchings  that the Archaeological Survey of India sobs about.

But not all graffiti is self-serving, or unpleasant to look at. It is disruptive, yes, visually and socially. But  it is often beautiful, and it makes one think.

Consider the works of artists Keith Haring, or Jean-Michel Basquiat, who are having a revival of sorts right now. Their artwork is sold in countless merch stores, and sees collaboration with the biggest brands all over. And yet they started off in relative anonymity. Haring drew extensively about the AIDS crisis and homosexuality, and his colourful, accessible style made the topics palatable and humane. Basquiat’s avant-garde, abstract style, meanwhile, took inspiration from and acknowledged his link with the hip-hop culture of the masses, which he employed to make cutting social commentaries.

Both Haring and Basquiat’s works gained favour as their visuals became ubiquitous and fashionable, but it was the message within that made viewers first listen.

Closer to the modern day, Banksy is perhaps our best-known (and invisible) street artist. His unabashed anti-war and anti-capitalist work is synonymous with silent protest, as is his satirical commentary on current affairs.

And on a lighter note we have Wanksy, who called out governing bodies and forced them to take action. Was his artwork disturbing? Yes. Socially uncomfortable, expressing unsaids? Yes. Did it also call out those in power, and quite literally get the job done? Yes.

The words of the prophet are written on the subway walls. By writing out loud what is being felt silently, a graffiti artist enables a conversation to exist. Whether that statement gets covered up (or commissioned and appropriated) is a different matter.

Graffiti is a form of visual disturbance, a vandalism of public space. Because it is a way of claiming space, claiming a voice. It is adornment, yes; a group of vagabonds scribbling just to make trouble. But it is often also speaking to a power that has not been listening.

Because the question isn’t about why graffiti exists in a certain area; it is about why it gets painted over afterwards.

In 2023, a rocket blasted off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Not an unusual sight in a world where many private companies are moving to space, but this particular rocket was 85% 3D-printed.

3D-printing is a relatively new technology, but it’s already being used in a variety of applications. The basic idea is that you take a digital design, and print it out, layer by layer, into a precisely defined shape.

While a full rocket may be an overkill, 3D-printing is great for space missions. If you thought airport luggage limits were a pain, the problem is even more crucial in spaceflight. That aside, 3D-printed parts can be handy at home and in industrial setups too. And while most 3D printing is made using plastics, people are trying to use other material as well — such as the stuff that makes up your body.

While 3D printing is new, repairing people is an idea that’s been going around for a while.

In 1997, the world was taken aback by a weird scientific image. A white mouse sits wrinkled on a large, white-gloved hand, its red eyes staring nowhere. And, growing out of its back, there is the unmistakable shape of a human ear.

This was no artist’s impression or simulation, but the results of an actual scientific experiment.

In the twentieth century, our world saw rapid technological advancement in animal tissue engineering. During this time, scientists attempted to grow human body parts externally and replace them like broken machine parts. If lizards can grow back their tails and crocodiles can grow back their teeth, then  why couldn’t humans do the same for parts of their bodies?

Despite the fact that these scientific hypotheses had been argued for decades, no one had expected it to happen.

So when the image of the “mouse with a ear on its back” came out, there were mixed reactions. Some were thrilled at the progress of science. Others, though, were terrified about the safety and ethical implications of such an experiment, and the mouse soon triggered a backlash of protests against tissue and genetic engineering in the western world.

And this was before social media.

In 2007, Apple released the first iPhone, a device which was less like a phone and more like a computer in your pocket that also happened to make phone calls.

Today, iPhones and their generic equivalents, smartphones, are practically indispensable. Ever since I got mine before joining college, it’s been my constant companion to keep in touch with people and stay updated on what’s I can’t image life without it!

This is an example of how technology can change the human landscape within the span of a generation. Inevitably, it shakes up the world which we’re used to, which is why any new technology is greeted with apprehension as well as excitement.

But while electronics can change things, biology is a whole different ballgame. To understand where the protests were coming from, let’s take a brief dive into history — because, as Adolf Hitler once said, “the man who has no sense of history is like a man who has no eyes or ears.”

In 1933, the country of Germany saw a new leader come to power. Reeling under a loss in war and economic crises, people saw Adolf Hitler as someone who would make their country great again.

One of Hitler’s philosophies was the use eugenics: the idea that some people (such as Hitler’s community, of course) are genetically superior to others. Using this idea, he began to ruthlessly single out some communities such as the Jews, eventually killing or conducting experiments on them.

This dark  history makes anything to do with genetics a sensitive topic. Combine it with the fact that we’re tampering with complex systems we don’t fully understand: the intricacy of Nature, or God’s creation, depending on your inclination. It’s the equivalent of opening up your computer and plugging in wires when you’re not quite sure what you’re doing.

In all this discussion, though, it’s easy to miss the fact that the mouse in question was itself not genetically modified. It was modified, yes, but not genetically.

In 1972, MIT engineer Bob Langer and Harvard surgeons Joseph and Charles Vacanti began experimenting with strategies to produce human body parts in the lab — starting with an ear.

Why an ear? Even though plastic surgery advanced significantly in the latter half of the twentieth century, the human ear remained the most difficult portion of the body to reconstruct, mainly because of the cartilage that needs to support it from inside. Although cartilage could be manufactured, making it out of human tissue was extremely difficult — which meant that many people who had accidents involving their ears would have to live with a shapeless ear or no ear for the rest of their lives.

To better understand how to do this, the three scientists implanted the shape of a human ear in the back of a mouse. This wasn’t working with genetic code; it was the biological equivalent of attaching on a new part to an existing machine.

The mouse used in this experiment was referred to as a “Nude Mouse”, since it lacked hair due to a random mutation. This same mutation also compromised the mouse’s immune system — which is what made this experiment possible.

It started with a synthetic ear cartilage, made to mimic that of a three-year-old child. This cartilage was surgically implanted on the back of the mouse. Then, it was injected with live stem cells: a special variety of cell that has the potential to grow into any kind of cell depending on the situation. Normally, such a procedure would trigger the mouse’s immune system to combat the foreign tissue — eventually causing it to die. But in this case, due to the mutation, the mouse had none.

Within 12 weeks, the stem cells formed an actual cartilage in the shape of a human ear, and the synthetic part gradually disintegrated over time. In a way, the ear developed from a three-year-old version to a full-fledged adult!

Today, things are moving in a new direction. Just like printers use inks and 3D printers use filaments, bioprinting is a technique for creating cellular structures using ‘bioinks’.

These biomaterials, which can include stem cells are applied layer by layer to ‘print out’ skin, tissue, or even an organ. Human livers, kidneys, and hearts are being bioprinted at laboratories and research institutes. The goal is to make them transplantable as well as to reduce the number of organ donations.

As I excitedly read through all the new developments, my phone battery emits a warning. Newer phones have all their parts fused together, which means I can’t replace my battery without buying a new phone — which, when I think about it, is a common trend in today’s digital technology. Earlier gadgets were repairable anyway, but nowadays we’ve got to use 3D printing to make them so.

Perhaps technology is becoming more complex, in the same way that biology always was?

You learnt to imitate the people around you when you were three months old. At twelve months, you managed to attach words to meanings. As you grew older, you become increasingly conversant in language, being able to gossip and exchange information to your heart’s content.

Humans are intrinsically social beings. For us, communication is key, be it with other humans, animals, or even extraterrestrials! The question of whether we are the only species with big ideas out there has been around for years.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI project sets out to search for intelligence in outer space. Beginning as a small project within NASA, today, the organization is one of the only organizations in America looking for signs of life in the universe.

But what about life on Earth? Do any non-human species on Earth brim with ideas that we only fail to identify?

To answer that, we must first ask: what sets human communication apart from animal communication?

The American linguist and anthropologist, Charles Hockett has an answer. He identifies several ‘design features’ of human languages, which makes our communication unique. We associate human sounds with meanings. We talk of things that do not exist, of the past and the future. We create an infinite number of sentences. We can lie. We can deceive. We use language to talk about, well, language!

To what extent can animals do this, though?

Features animals and humans share in common, according to Hockett, are things such as our communication being mostly audio based (speaking and hearing), being able to identify which direction sound is reaching us from, and that our speech is temporary. Sound waves disappear once someone stops speaking.

However, humans have additional qualities that sets us apart from animals — we have rigid structures to our languages, and our actions are generally made to convey a meaning. They do not serve any primary biological function. In contrast to this, a dog panting to cool down is a biological function first, and a message second. Animals also cannot use language to describe other languages.

That’s not to say that animals do not have well established communication systems. Studies show that bats make sounds and argue over food, distinguish between genders and call each other by names. Parrots, like Alex — a famous subject of a thirty year experiment —  and bonobos, like Kanzi, can learn and associate words with objects. Dolphins can understand differences in word order (who jumps over whom, for example). Bees communicate through body movements and sounds.

We do not, however, fully understand the extent to which animals communicate or the entire content of their language. Some progress is on the way. Bee researchers are working to understand bee communication and to create a robotic bee called RoboBee to trick bees into thinking that the robot is a real bee. This robot hasn’t been very successful so far.

A project called CETI — Cetacean Translation Initiative — was initiated to help scientists study and understand the language of sperm whales.

You may ask, why whales?

Whales belong to the animal family of Cetaceans (which also includes dolphins). Sperm whales have larger brains than humans. In fact, sperm whale brains are larger than all animals on Earth! Humans and sperm whale brains both have ‘spindle neurons’, which enable our reasoning, memory and communication skills. Whales are also emotionally intelligent. They too feel grief and empathy.

Whales have complex communication systems. They are social animals like us and live in groups, which are lead by female whales.  They also bring up the young whales for a prolonged period like humans. Different groups of whales show different behaviours and have language dialects — much like humans and different cultures. They can make sounds, vary them and copy each other. Furthermore, because they live in water, they rely less on smell and sight and more on sound.

Communicating in mountainous regions is not easy, which is why humans have come up with a solution that broadcasts language effectively: whistling. The mountain shepherds of northern Turkey communicate through whistles that can carry dozens of times farther than ordinary speech.

Instead of whistles, whales talk to each other using short bursts of clicks called codas. Lasting two seconds long, these bursts of 2 to 40 clicks are used to communicate while catching prey and for moving around. Codas can be specific to a group, and each group of whales has about twenty different codas.

Using these codas, whales can talk to each other over distances of metres to kilometres. Not surprisingly, they produce more codas when they socialise.

Researchers have already been collecting recordings of these codas, but we don’t know what they mean or how they work. Do they have a grammar, and can they be combined to produce whale sentences?

One usually doesn’t think of other animals as using grammar. We think of simple meanings, such as a growl indicating aggression or a yelp of pain, but nothing as nuanced as the Shakespearean “They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps”. But is there a reason to think that?

Whistled Turkish isn’t quite a new language, but more like a way to encode the vowels and consonants into whistled notes. That means it certainly has a grammar — because it’s the same grammar as spoken Turkish itself. And it’s not just Turkish: almost any language can be converted to a whistled language — and it has been, in numerous densely vegetated or ruggedly terrained regions around the world.

Sign languages, in their silence, have their own grammar too; a grammar which is encoded not in words and punctuation but in signs and gestures. That’s right: it’s not just pointing or miming; this is a context where the way you move your wrist may be considered incorrect or ungrammatical.

As you can see, there’s no rule that says grammar has to come from human speech. If whales are capable of communication, there’s nothing preventing them from developing their own grammar as well.

And consider this: young whales, known as calves, can take at least two years to produce recognisable codas. That’s quite a bit longer than you, the human child, took to start uttering your first words.

To understand the whale’s language, we need to find answer to three questions. What are their basic sounds? Do whales use grammar? And lastly, do these emitted sounds mean something?

To set about answering these questions, researchers are planning to, naturally, use the buzzword of the day: Artificial Intelligence.

The recent successes of machine-learning methods and Natural Language Processing — or NLP — in understanding human communication means that AI is at the forefront of analysing whale sounds. Today’s NLP tools can segment speech into basic sounds and even learn the underlying grammar in sentences. Recent breakthroughs in AI allow researchers to translate between two unknown human languages without needing a mapping between the two languages or a “Rosetta Stone”.

Project CETI will build on these discoveries to provide a dictionary of the whale’s language. Using AI, the team will listen to and translate the communication of these majestic creatures and perhaps even talk back.

Existing machine learning methods are already capable of automatically detecting codas, and classifying codas into clans and individuals. Recent advances in unsupervised learning can help understand whale language, despite having no prior knowledge of where the whale sound begins and ends for it to be called a meaningful unit of communication.

However, a lot more data is needed. A significant reason for the success of human language models is that plenty of human language data is available. Models such as GPT-3, the basis of the famous ChatGPT, were trained on over 10¹⁰ data points — that’s 10 followed by ten zeros.

CETI scientists plan on using multiple technologies available to locate and record groups of sperm whales.

One such technology is buoyed arrays with sensors every several hundred meters from the surface to the depth at which sperm whales hunt, which is approximately 1200 metres.

They also plan to attach recording devices to whales to identify who’s talking to whom. Aquatic drones will allow taking audio and video recordings from multiple animals simultaneously to observe behaviours and communications within a group of whales near the surface. Aerial drones will help monitor whale populations. They also want to take videos of whales’ behaviour.

The next step would be to build the whole pipeline of collecting data, storing data, processing data and performing machine learning algorithms on said data to detect and classify whale codas.

Operation “talk to whales” is in full swing, and sperm whales will no doubt notice the intrusion. One can’t help wonder what they’ll be thinking about all this, and whether we’d be able to ask them about it one day.

Perhaps they’ll coda each other, discussing and pondering about the new devices that humans are sending in, and wondering if, for all the effort spent on searching for extraterrestrial life forms, there was intelligent life waiting for them just a step away from their ocean.

It’s not uncommon as a child to imagine that you are an astronaut exploring the vast frontiers of space. That you float serenely down from the airlock of your spaceship onto the dusty surface of some distant, desolate planet. Maybe you discover lifeforms on this planet. Maybe it becomes a beautiful haven, a sanctuary for the inhabitants of dying planet Earth.

Imagine what this new world would look like. Will it be like ours? Will it be different? If you could control how things unfolded, what would you do with this new settlement? How would you shape its progress?

When our home is about to catch fire, we’ll know it’s time to leave. Within a billion years, Earth will catch fire from excessive warming by the ageing Sun. Before that time, our descendants will likely board numerous spacecraft and engage in a massive exodus away from Earth. Quite like that fantasy of all our childhoods.

The irony in this is that most Sun-like stars are formed at redshifts greater than 1. They are several billion years older than our Sun. If their technological clock resembled ours, there must be numerous refugee camps on exoplanets or exomoons. Exoplanets and exomoons that never hosted civilisations prior to their settlement by alien refugees. We can’t be the only ones who left their home planet, and we certainly won’t be the first to do it.

For us, the trip to a second home could start within the coming decades, based on the aspirations of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the scouting missions to be performed by smart nanoprobes from the newly announced Copernicus Space Corporation.

Acquiring the status of a double-home civilisation will offer us the opportunity to reboot society, much like in our thought experiment in the beginning. The second home after Earth could be our Moon, a planet like Mars, an artificially-manufactured space platform which adjusts its distance as the Sun evolves, or objects with water oceans under an icy surface, like the large asteroid Ceres or the moons Enceladus and Europa.

A new home will offer new jobs and promote skill sets adapted to a new surface gravity, new material composition of the environment, new durations of day and year, new atmospheric conditions and new seasonal changes based on the particular orbital eccentricity and the tilt of the object’s rotation relative to its orbital plane around the Sun.

Within generations, the new environment will be imprinted on a modified physique of its inhabitants, shaping their bodily and mental characteristics to be different from those of earthlings. For example, the 62% reduction in surface gravity on Mars relative to Earth’s g would undoubtedly change the behavioural characteristics of Martians relative to earthlings and make interplanetary soccer matches breathtaking with a clear advantage for the local team.

A new beginning in a new home will also enable entirely different societies from those imagined on Earth. The lack of ancient human history in a new environment would usher in a brave new world without the familiar scars in our collective memory from terrestrial history.  The organizational transformation could be revolutionary.

Returning to the thought experiment, if you were to control the society of this planet, how would you populate it? How would you organize those people? Who gives orders? Who maintains justice? Who mediates disputes?

In her book The Dispossessed, science fiction author Ursula K. LeGuin explores exactly this premise. In her story, a group of revolutionary dissidents are banished to the habitable moon of the planet they came from. These people were disillusioned with the way of life that was led on the planet and chose to form an "anarchic" society where there is no government, common law, or private property.

Anarchy is only one example of the countless ways we could possibly transform our society. Consider the novel societal structure of a bee colony which consists of a queen, 95% female workers and 5% male drones.  In a recent World Minds forum with the novelist Margaret Atwood, I asked her whether she would favour establishing a human society on Mars based on well-orchestrated colonies of bees. She avoided the bait and noted: “Humans will remain the same wherever they go, and I have no desire to leave Earth.” She asked me whether I would be willing to leave Earth, and I replied with a resounding yes. What I had in mind was primarily the thrill of exploration, but there was another reason for my unequivocal answer.

The greatest benefit of joining a new society is that its early phase will promote innovation to solve immediate challenges with minimal bureaucratic constraints. There will be little time and tolerance for large committees which adhere to a low common denominator. That is to say, people won’t settle just because it takes too much effort to reach a meaningful consensus or innovative outcome.

Throughout my leadership positions over the years, I noticed a universal law in administration. Just like the second law of thermodynamics, which asserts that the entropy of closed systems would only grow through irreversible processes, the bureaucracy of large traditional organizations, such as universities, government agencies or large corporations, can only grow through irreversible processes. This “first law of bureaucracy” is so prevalent in suppressing innovation on Earth that it may also apply to all societies of sentient civilisations throughout the Universe.  A young society is better because it has less time to develop its bureaucratic web, capable of suppressing agility and innovation.

In the coming years, we can test this universality conjecture empirically. It implies that the most accomplished interstellar gadgets were not manufactured and launched by exo-NASA agencies, but rather by exo-Musk innovators. All we need to do for this test is read the “Made by …” label on interstellar technological gadgets.

This is not a hypothetical test. In 2023, I plan to personally search for such a label on relics of the first interstellar meteor CNEOS-2014-01-09 (IM1) by leading an expedition of the Galileo Project to collect them. We already know that this object was tougher than all other 272 meteors in the CNEOS catalogue. The key question is, then: if this object is artificial in origin, was it made by a government agency or an entrepreneur?

Finding what others have accomplished through their exploratory multi-home endeavours may inspire us to invest in new homes ourselves.