About


नमस्ते

This is me, Shivangi Tiwari. I am a geologist and paleoclimatologist from India.

 I primarily write about science, but there's some other stuff too, including travelogues, life stories, and some feminist rants. You can find all posts here.

P.S. In case you're curious about the name of the blog, it may disappoint you to know that when I wanted to begin writing my blog (back in 2012), I looked everywhere for inspiration on a good name, and when I couldn't find any (and I remembered Wordsworth who had said, "To begin, begin."), I named my blog after the configuration of my laptop and just moved on. Yep, just like that. 😎

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Darwin's Lost World - Part II

<< Previous page So what do we (did Darwin) know by now (then) ? That living creatures from the very very ancient past (we're talking in terms of millions of years) were often found preserved in the rock record. That we could make out some things about the past environments from these fossils. Fossils showed specific associations: you saw only certain types and groups of fossils in certain suites of rocks (belonging to different periods of geological time). There came a dead end at the base of the Cambrian. Scientists like to call this the Cambrian Explosion today, but back then, many of them were more inclined to dismiss this either as a figment of the imagination of relatively smaller body of researchers, or simply, incomplete/inaccurate science. That the Creator had made us all, was the popular view. 3 theories emerged to explain why we see the Cambrian Explosion (if it even is a real thing!): Charles Lyell Interestingly, it is said that Lyell was
Read more

On Darwin's Lost World

Image
Martin Brasier was a prolific paleontologist. And from what little I know of him, he must have been a pretty cool guy. I recently read his book "Darwin's Lost World" and it was definitely one of the better decisions of my life. On Darwin Thankfully, even the most plebeian of science curricula finds it worthwhile to describe Charles Darwin's scientific accomplishments. To me, all through childhood, Darwin represented my superiority to the apes. When someone said Darwin, I would get a mental picture of an ape gradually turning human. That's an overly simplistic picture, but then again, there is so much to learn about everything  that one doesn't quite know where to start. Source The rock record is the only thing that can give us a picture of the ancient Earth. Most other branches of science can tell you what the Earth is like, and why it is the way it is. But it was Geology that first told us what the Earth was  like, and bits of why it w
Read more

Yet another ENSO explainer

Image
There are hundreds of ENSO explainers on the internet, so what's the point of another one? This post ─ actually it will be a series of at least 10 posts ─ has two objectives: (a) To help laypeople (i.e. people with no formal training in climate science) understand the good science communication pieces out there, and (b) To help journalists discuss ENSO more accurately.   I am not interested in re-writing the same things which have been written about numerous times and satisfactorily before. I'd like to instead direct the reader to these good sources, but in a step-wise and digestible manner.   There are various aspects to ENSO. It is not only one of the most important climate phenomena of our world, but also a tremendously interesting one. My focus here is to relate it to Indian climate, and so I will broadly try to follow this path: (i) What is ENSO? (ii) How does it affect Indian climate? (iii) How will it affect Indian climate in the context of climate change? = = = What is
Read more