soh.am  does c.s. research, builds robots, codes, does stand-up, has a podcast & writes.

Soham Sankaran is not dead yet

Thoughts about the state of the world from someone completely unqualified to have them.

Warning: you are reading things Soham Sankaran wrote. If you must have more, follow him on twitter @sohamsankaran, and get new writing via email by subscribing below.


The unlikely, inevitable founding of PopVax, Part I: Three meetings and six million funerals (August 21, 2023)

Broadly-protective mRNA vaccines to save millions of lives

Shooting at the Dark (June 9, 2020)

The racist intents and effects of American firearms legislation, from the founding fathers to the present-day NRA.

Dosa at the airport (April 30, 2020)

At a restaurant in New Delhi airport, at 3 am in the middle of a pandemic, a man restored my faith in humanity by refusing to take my order.

More With Less: Reopening India with limited COVID-19 testing resources (April 15, 2020)

A strategy for reopening India piece-by-piece from the coronanvirus lockdown based on the counterintuitive insight that our limited testing capacity is best used to determine where COVID-19 is not, rather than to confirm where it is.

113 billion COVID tests to reopen India (April 12, 2020)

A nation-scale effort to build the largest testing infrastructure the world has ever known could solve COVID-19, create millions of new jobs, and set India up as a leader in biotech in one fell swoop.

At the Edge of Deception (April 8, 2019)

Articles about science in major news publications are often deceptively phrased even if technically not inaccurate. I detail two n=200 experiments that I conducted from which evidence emerged that two articles of this kind induced a significant increase in false beliefs in the minds of readers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, then make the case for a new standard of journalistic ethics based on ensuring via empirical testing that articles do not induce such false beliefs in readers.

The Infrastructure of Democracy is Broken (March 29, 2019)

Voting machines everywhere are broken, insecure, and unauditable. As long as this is true, democracy is in peril. Here's what we should do to fix them.

Nobody's Securing America (February 14, 2016)

On the U.S. National Security Agency's staggering inability to protect America from enemy hackers. Featuring the dual roles of the NSA, the irredeemable stupidity of the 'Nobody But Us' policy for zero-days, a litany of breaches of American data and infrastructure, the horrors of LOVEINT, DeAndre Jordan, and why defense wins championships.