Indian Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on Saturday in response to rising pressure from student-led protests.
âCockroach Movementâ Forces Out Indiaâs Education Minister
"Indian Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on Saturday amid mounting pressure from the âCockroach Movement,â which demanded major government reformsâstarting with his departure. Student activists accused Pradhan of failing to safeguard a competitive medical school exam, the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET), after authorities concluded that its contents had been leaked online. ...
Without accepting fault, [Education Minister Pradhan] explained that he had agreed to step down in order to prevent âanti-national forcesâ from exploiting the upheaval.Â
Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of the CJP, celebrated the resignation with fellow protesters in New Delhi on Saturday.
âIt's a victory for the people of India,â Dipke said to the crowd. He later posted an image of Indiaâs Constitution on social media, with the caption: âThank you.â ...
On the advice of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Indian President Droupadi Murmu appointed Pralhad Joshiâwho already oversees the ministries of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, along with New and Renewable Energyâto oversee the Ministry of Education âin addition to his existing portfolio,â which is a typical arrangement in India following a Cabinet vacancy and does not preclude a later permanent appointment...
CJP Spokesperson Saurav Das said in an interview with local media ANI following the presidentâs announcement that the party members will be meeting the new education minister âvery soon.â ...
What Comes Next for the CJP?
The CJP established its list of demands on May 16. In addition to calling for Pradhanâs resignation, the CJP asked for compensation of 10 million rupees ($104,000) for each student who died by suicide following the leak.Â
They also sought greater legislative oversight of the educational system, gender equity in government roles, a fully independent media, and certain reforms to the electoral and political systemâsuch as creating a 20-year ban on politicians switching parties before seeking election.
Adding to those mandates, the CJP last week asked that the central government drop any potential charges against protesters, after claiming that several had been âillegally detainedâ by police.Â
Following Pradhanâs resignation, representatives from the CJP met with officials from the Indian government to discuss the rest of the partyâs demands. In a press conference following the meeting, Das said on Saturday that the negotiations had been successful.
"All our demands have been accepted,â he said, without elaboration. âWe request the protesters to withdraw immediately and return home peacefully."
The CJP added during the press conference on Saturday that representatives from the movement would meet with officials again in four weeks to work on broader reforms. Its spokesperson told local media that the fight for a transparent educational system is far from over.Â
He said that members of the CJP conveyed to officials that if the issues are not addressed, the protesters will reconvene âand demand accountability.â
-via TIME, July 25, 2026. Non-paywall version here via MSN, July 25, 2026
Something that I find really interesting about probability in continuous systems is that you can have events that are technically possible despite having a probability of zero.
For example, if I'm trying to pick a number between 0 and 1, and the space is continuous, there are an infinite number of numbers available. The odds of it being any particular number in the set one out of infinity, which is to say, zero, yet at the end of the day its still one of those numbers.
A second thing that is interesting about probability in continuous spaces, that is faaaaaar weirder than even the above, is that there can be two events that both have a probability of zero, while one is infinitely more likely than the other.
For example.
Imagine a right triangle.
Imagine you are throwing a dart at this right triangle.
The odds of it landing in any particular region is just the area of the region divided by the area of the triangle. One dimensional points don't have an area, so the odds of it hitting any point is, obviously, zero, but lines also don't have an area, so the odds of hitting one of those is, again, zero. But! The odds of hitting anywhere on the line x=0.5 is infinitely more likely than hitting the exact point (0.5,0.5). And then being weirder still, the odds of hitting somewhere on the line x=0.5 is exactly half of what they'd be hitting somewhere on the line x=1, what with the vertical line at x=0.5 being half the length of the vertical line at x=1. So you can have a zero probability even that is infinitely more probably than another zero probability event, and also, exactly twice as likely as another zero probability event. But they're all still zero probability. Which doesn't mean that they can't happen, just that they won't.
(Not a mathematician, this was just sort of casually explained in my Baby Quantum for Dummy Electrical Engineers and we all left the room like this:)
This reminds me of the Bus Stop Paradox, which is that the average wait time for the bus is slightly longer than the average time between busses. This is because if you arrive at a random minute, you're more likely to arrive during a longer delay, because those contain more minutes. Another version of this is that if you agreed your roommate was in charge of lightbulbs and they bought a terrible brand that burns out in 1 second 75% of the time, the average lifespan would be very low, but you might never notice because in order to know about the duds you'd have to see one, and they all get installed and removed instantly.
I'd heard a similar statistic about how your friends, on average, have more friends than you. The gist was something like if there was one guy in a town of 40,000 people that was friends with everyone, he would blow everyone's average way the fuck up, because now everyone would have one friend with 39,999 other friends. Whereas all the people with 1 or 2 friends aren't in enough friend groups to meaningfully pull the average down. Making your friend count larger doesn't just change how big the number is, it changes how many times that big number gets counted.
I have a sneaky feeling that something like this can be used to explain things like wealth inequality, but I can only kind of gesture blindly in that direction. That's just my math gut whispering to me and it is frequently wrong.
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there are a lot of really good ancient roman laws but i think my favorite is that, if you got struck by lightening and died, you couldnt have a proper burial because it meant that the gods hated you
A bit of a biased coffee night question bc he's my guy, but if you could put him in any of your recast tournaments (ones you've done or even just imagined for this question), is there a role you'd put Deforest Kelley in?
in my mind there's a version of dracula with leonard nimoy arthur holmwood, william shatner dr. seward, and deforest kelley quincey morris. so. that
[this is the last ask for coffee night! thank you all for a wonderful night, i will see you in the morning.]
wait, why is Deforest Kelley not the doctor and Shatner the action hero? Are we deliberately playing against their Trek types, or are we basing this on other roles, or real life info...?
Leonard Nimoy never gets to play romantic leads despite being a very handsome man. also, despite how unsettling it is when weaponized as Spock, he has a lovely smile. Holmwood is the least sketched of the three suitors and needs somebody who can bring complexity and deep, immediate, fuckable charisma to a not very there part.
William Shatner is insane. He also loves playing deeply weird little men and likes making deeply weird choices. This is played off in Star Trek (and entirely forgotten in the public imagination) but this is a man who is given a plotline involving Captain Kirk having a mental breakdown, getting paranoid, or turning evil every couple episodes. Shatner would absolutely be down to play a guy weighing the pros and cons of handing the guy-who-eats-stuff a kitten to see if he would eat that stuff. shatner would also enjoy giving line readings that sound like beat poetry for the phonograph sections.
Deforest Kelleyâs Bones is not only a doctor. he is also, crucially, a southerner. (source: him asking for a mint julep in that one episode where they all get high and go straight to their basest desires.) he is also the dark horse sexy one of the bunch. you need someone with an immense amount of charisma who can pull off country charm and there is only one of these guys who can do it.
donât cast to established type! cast to personality always!
it's so rote now... ooooh here's 72 actors you recognize making shocked faces at a greenscreen. ominous narration to let you know that this is definitely the scariest thing we've ever had to fight. we wheeled Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan out of the retirement home to fag it up again. are you entertained. are you reaching for your wallets yet.
I've never seen anything more soulless in my life tbh. I've never wanted to see a movie crash and burn more. let it be dead so marvel studios can get on with being a spirit halloween already.
people tagging this with Russo brother hate as if any other director(s) wouldn't have gotten the same brief for the exact same big budget cgi disaster movie crossover schlock are so funny. there's no world where this was a boundary-pushing art film babes I'm sorry. you're ordering milkshakes at the hardware store
The worst sin you can commit around so-called "woke" white liberals is pointing out that, actually, NOT every homophobic republican is gay!, actually, many of them are just evil cishets doing their thing, and the closeted ones affect people more through evil than through their gayness so why are y'all so fixated on it? Hooooboy y'all those liberals will FLIP THEIR SHIT because how DARE you fuck with their hilarious narrative turning every evil anti-queer politician into a good ol' fashioned fag like they deserve, it's actually SUPER liberal and cool and effective to blame all queerphobia on queer people, why are you RUINING our GOOD TIIIIME
"BUT DOESN'T GRINDR KEEP CRASHING WHEN--" no. Jesus it happened ONE time at ONE republican gathering. Yes there's a SLIGHT increase in traffic on the site for their gatherings - the same as EVERY SINGLE BIG GATHERING OF HUMANS. If you've been telling people "Grindr crashes at EVERY GOP convention" you've been spreading misinformation to blame queer people for the violence they face in the US and it's gross
mandatory viewing on this subject (particularly the second one which provides some well-needed critical thinking and fact-checking on the whole "republicans always crash Grindr" claim; there's a shit ton of blatant misinformation going on there we need to make people more aware of. like, a major part of this myth stems from a straight up satire twitter account's post that was taken at face value.)
from the second video:
But building on that essay [first video], and what weâve discussed today as a prime example of a narrative born from the âhomophobes are secretly just gayâ trope, I want to examine why itâs so resistant to correction, and why people that are otherwise usually media literate and concerned with truth over comforting myths might grab onto this with both hands and refuse to let go.
And I'm including myself in this. The first time I heard the Grindr crash thing, I laughed. I'm not coming to you from moral superiority. I'm coming from a position of "I also fell for this and then felt annoyed about it and made it everyone else's problem in the form of a video essay because I think the truth is actually a more effective political weapon than a lie."
So why does this work? I think there are four main reasons, ranging from "understandable" to "I'm not sure that's healthy babe."
The first reason: yo, it feels good. Queer people are constantly on the receiving end⊠Of right-wing politics in a material, tangible way. These aren't abstract disagreements. These are people who've campaigned on the premise that your love is invalid, your identity is a disorder, your existence is a threat to children. And when the power imbalance is that stark, there is something extremeeeelllly satisfying about the idea that the oppressor who thinks they are so much better than you is nothing but a fraud. They canât even meet their own bar for âdeserves rights.â
It's the political equivalent of "the bully has a crush on you." We're told that story from childhood. So when someone offers an adult, political version, "they're homophobic because they're secretly homosexual", weâre already primed and lubed, and it slides right in to how we understand the world. And suddenly, the power dynamic feels more manageable, theyâre just pathetic self-hating gays, Iâm not scared of that. It feels good, and it feels true. And thatâs the exact kind of story that goes viral, regardless of whether itâs based on evidence.
The "Republicans crash Grindr when they gather" claim has every quality of what misinformation researchers call âstickyâ, as in, itâs sticky. Itâs sticks to your brain. And it does so, even after you learn the truth. Researchers call this The Continued Influence Effect (CIE). Itâs a cognitive phenomenon where misinformation continues to influence a person's reasoning and beliefs even after it has been clearly and credibly retracted. The paper posits that people continue to use misinformation because, on some level, they still feel it is relevant or useful, even if they know it's false. This paper frames this not just as a problem of forgetting the correction or new information, but as a problem where the feeling of familiarity and narrative coherence from the original misinformation overrides the factual knowledge of its retraction. We believe, because it feels true.
And youâll see this under any post thatâs been debunked. People who fell for it will say âwell, it might as well be trueâ or âThis case might be false, but this really happens, so it might as well be true, and in a way it is true.â [laughter] Like yeah but in another way that isnât nonsense, it isnât. But it doesnât matter, once itâs in your head, itâs often hard to get rid of. Especially when itâs gone so viral that youâve seen people talking about it from all directions, each time your new worldview being compounded and cemented. And this⊠it went viral. And I get why.
One: itâs funny, and funny storied spread faster than boring ones.
Two: Itâs ironic.
Three: We have a clear villain being a hypocrite. People love an exposed hypocrite because...
Four: it feels like justice. Itâs someone we see as a threat getting caught in the act, exposed for their lies! They finally get their just desserts! And on top of that, itâs easy to believe because...
Five: itâs just plausible enough even for a skeptic.
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