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Behold the duck
Behold the duck It does not cluck A cluck it lacks It quacks -Ogden Nash I have spent much of today failing to write anything useful about Galileo’s Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina so I thought...
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Use and abuse of mathematical language.
I have complained about the misuse of mathematical language before. Philosophy of biology is a serial offender here. But I recently came across a really good use of maths concepts to convey an idea. In...
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We are all going to explode tomorrow.
Today’s Guardian had a cool little special section about CERN. It is available here. I now have a false colour bubble chamber image as my desktop background. So the LHC hasn’t blown us all up yet,...
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Science and maths exams are harder?
So apparently, science and maths exams are harder than arts subjects. Someone has done some research into differences between exam grades in science and arts subjects and found that “There were...
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yotta, zetta, exa, peta, tera, giga, mega… kilo?
All SI prefixes that are positive powers of 10^3 end in an “a” except “kilo-” I propose we change it to “kila-” because it won’t really make a difference to how people talk; a kilagram and a kilogram...
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Beware the angry monkey
I thought this was too funny not to mention. I haven’t done a whole lot today. I spent a good long while just sitting here going “Yes, but what is a structure?” Which probably suggests I don’t quite...
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Brief thoughts on global warming
I was in the pub yesterday and the topic of global warming came up. Here are some quick points motivated by that discussion. Given the variety of environments the Earth has presented in its past, given...
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Titanoboa – Weighs a tonne and eats crocodiles
I just read about the Titanoboa. This is a snake that lived soon after the Dinosaurs died out. It was huge. I don’t think that quite does justice to it. It has been estimated that these things weighed...
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The end of time…
This New Scientist article made me wonder about time. The latest super-clocks are sensitive to differences in height (actually differences in gravitational field) small enough that their accuracy would...
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The pessimistic induction and Descartes’ evil demon
The pessimistic induction (PI) says something like this: Previous scientific theories have been wrong, so we shouldn’t believe what current science tells us. But let’s modify that with an “optimistic...
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