Politicians are always quick enough to invoke ’scientific advice’ when they want to deflect responsibility for an unpopular policy decision, like the availability of different treatments on the NHS, or the mass slaughter of animals during a foot and mouth outbreak. And as long as they actually are acting on good scientific advice, fair enough.
But [...]
Posts tagged with ‘science’
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A passing thought on the Nutt business
3 November 2009 – 4:54 pm
The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins
15 September 2009 – 4:17 pm
Full title: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. I don’t need any persuading about the fact of evolution, but Dawkins is always worth reading on the subject. And Amazon had it at 50% off, so as much as I dislike hardbacks I thought I’d give it a go.
Since I’ve read so many [...]
The Earth: An Intimate History by Richard Fortey
6 August 2009 – 3:38 pm
The Earth: An Intimate History is big, fat (480 page) book about geology. Richard Fortey writes extremely well and it’s an impressive attempt to make a fairly dense subject exciting.
I have to admit though I nearly didn’t finish it; by about halfway though I’d had about as much as I could take of schist, gneiss, [...]
Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin
29 April 2009 – 3:47 pm
Your Inner Fish is a book which uses comparisons between human anatomy and the anatomy of other animals, living or extinct, to show how evolution helps explain the way we are and the way our bodies develop. Shubin is the palaeontologist who discovered Tiktaalik, one of the key fossils in understanding the fish/tetrapod transition, so [...]
Links
14 January 2009 – 8:00 pm
the small science collective
via Carl Zimmer, sciencey mini-zines
(del.icio.us tags: science zines )
Earth, observed – The Big Picture – Boston.com
‘The Earth Observatory is a website run by NASA’s Earth Observing System Project Science Office. Bringing together imagery from many different satellites and astronaut missions, the website publishes fantastic images with highly detailed descriptions, feature articles and [...]
A good day to collide some hadrons
10 September 2008 – 4:40 pm
So the Large Hadron Collider has finally been switched on; very much later than originally scheduled, but then it’s a staggeringly big, complicated, expensive piece of kit, so it was just as well to make sure they got it right first time.
It really is pure geek porn: the sheer size of it, just as a [...]
Microcosm by Carl Zimmer
27 July 2008 – 11:31 am
Full title: Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life. The bacteria Escherichia coli is best known for occasionally causing food poisoning outbreaks, but most strains of it are harmless and indeed a normal part of our gut flora. It’s also one of the most-studied life forms on earth because, like fruit flies and [...]
The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker
22 July 2008 – 9:59 am
This is the latest of Pinker’s books on various aspects of language and psychology. Specifically, it looks at what language can tell us about the ways the human mind understands the world. For example, the various tenses available to us might tell us something about the human brain’s inherent models for understanding time. Or different [...]
Links
18 July 2008 – 11:00 pm
Silver Lake on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
Autochromes are a kind of early colour photography. This one is particularly fabulous, but check out the whole set.
(del.icio.us tags: autochromes photos )
Running for Office: It’s Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner
OK, fair's fair, this is quite funny.
(del.icio.us tags: Kansas politics )
Marc Steinmetz [...]
Links
4 June 2008 – 8:00 pm
What are some mindblowing scientific concepts? | Ask Metafilter
via somewhere: 'I'm looking for some scientific concepts that people who are stoned or drunk will find absolutely incredible. Something that will captivate their strange attention spans. Any thoughts?'
(del.icio.us tags: science )
Links
12 May 2008 – 9:00 am
CERN Podcast
Science porn.
(del.icio.us tags: cern physics podcasts science )
Bones, Rocks and Stars by Chris Turney
5 May 2008 – 10:21 am
Or to give it its fuller, more informative title: Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened. It is what it sounds like: a brief (under 200 pages, including the index) overview of dating technologies for a general audience: radio isotope dating, dendrochronology, Antarctic ice cores and so on. And I enjoyed it; [...]
More on the atheism/science malarkey
17 September 2007 – 4:42 pm
At Pharyngula, P.Z. Myers comments on the Jake Young article I linked to earlier. The bit of his post I would pick out is this:
Once again, science is a method. It’s a general set of procedures that rest on skepticism, induction, empiricism, and naturalism. Atheism is a conclusion. We look at the universe using the [...]
Science ≠ Atheism
13 September 2007 – 3:00 pm
There’s a post over at Pure Pedantry about the dangers of presenting science and atheism as equivalent or too closely connected; suggesting, for example, that atheism is the natural or inevitable end result of a scientific mindset.
It’s understandable that they sometimes get run together. There is a connection; it’s not a coincidence that scientists are [...]
How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties!
23 August 2007 – 3:35 pm
I’ve just started a book called ‘Irrationality’, about the irrational behaviour of human beings. So far, much of the general drift has been fairly familiar, but no matter how many times you get told about the untrustworthy tendencies of the human mind, the specific experiments are still startling. Three that happened to jump out at [...]
The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner
10 February 2007 – 4:41 pm
This book was recommended to me when I was in the Galapagos; I finally got round to reading it and I’m really glad I did. It’s an account of Peter and Rosemary Grant’s long-term study to measure the effects of natural selection on finches in the Galapagos. When this book was published in 1994, the [...]
Fucking bootiful
6 February 2007 – 12:28 am
It takes a lot to make me have sympathy for Bernard Matthews, whose company represents everything that’s worst in industrial food production, both the way they rear the turkeys and the revolting processed foods that they make from them. But I did get a twinge of sympathy when bird flu started killing all their turkeys.
I’ve [...]
Crappy journalism in action
24 August 2006 – 1:00 pm
I nearly posted a link to this story on the BBC website about cows having regional accents because I thought it was mildly interesting. But the internet linguistics police quickly debunked it.
The BBC story starts by saying “Cows have regional accents like humans, language specialists have suggested.” What actually happened was that a PR [...]
Bomb-sniffing flowers
15 May 2006 – 10:22 am
Scientists in Denmark, the US and Canada have all been working on producing a genetically-engineered plant whose flowers will come up red instead of white in the presence of underground explosives. The idea, of course, is that you can use them to to test for the presence of landmines by dropping the seeds from the [...]
Intellectuals, science, and the English Channel
7 May 2006 – 9:59 am
Something Todd Swift said pointed me to an article in the Guardian about the lack of public intellectuals in Britain, written by Agnès Poirier, a French journalist working in London. It’s worth reading just for the culture-clash exhibited in the comments.
I noticed that the unspoken assumption, from both sides of the argument, was inevitably that [...]
The ternness of terns
4 May 2006 – 4:38 pm
George Szirtes discusses people’s need to identify things – flowers, birds – something he doesn’t share. Indeed he sets up (but slightly backs away from), an opposition between the botanist’s way of looking and the artists’s way. He ends like this:
Yet all the time I am aware that even an urban citoyen of the imagination [...]
Transitional species
22 March 2006 – 1:40 pm
I was looking back at old PFFA threads yesterday, and there was an argument about religion, evolution and so on during which someone asserted that “there are no verifiable fossil records of transitions from one species to another.” This morning I feel inclined to make a point which I don’t think is always appreciated by [...]
Learning algebra
28 February 2006 – 12:41 pm
Something Kevin said sent me towards an article in the Washington Post about the uselessness of algebra to normal life, and the ensuing mouth-frothing response in the comments over at Pharyngula.
Two things I’d say. It rather makes me despair to see people talk about algebra as though it was advanced mathematics. Algebra is hardly even [...]