Yay, bank holiday!

Apropos of nothing in particular, I indulged in a bit more nostalgic Doctor Who watching recently ( Read more... )

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Interesting juxtaposition in the US Presidential Election of Sarah Palin's derogatory statements about science vs. Obama getting the endorsement of high profile scientists.

Palin, in that 'loveable' folksy way of hers (see also: George W Bush), decided to ridicule 'wasteful' scientific research on things like fruit flies: "You've heard about some ( Read more... )

Further adventures in book reading.

( 15. Bad Science - Ben Goldacre )

When I discussed Prof Richard Dawkins's three-part series The Genius of Darwin I was puzzled as to why it merited the word "polemic" in my TV guide, noting that "creationism attempts to refute geological wisdom as surely as it does biological wisdom, but we don't go around calling [TV geologist] Dr Iain Stewart a polemicist ( Read more... )

My book-reading pace has picked up again since last time.

( 10. The Lady in the Lake - Raymond Chandler )

1,800-year-old Roman stone sarcophagi found in Newcastle. That's not far from us! I learn from this story that they're apparently building a Great North Museum in Newcastle including antiquities, a planetarium, an interactive model of Hadrian's Wall, a life-size T-Rex dinosaur skeleton, and special exhibitions from London. This could be very ( Read more... )

I'm greatly enjoying Prof Richard Dawkins's current C4 series The Genius of Darwin, commemorating the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species. All pretty basic and obvious stuff about evolution perhaps, but I've been hoping for some time now (in this world of lowest common denominator science programming) that someone would come along and ( Read more... )

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Things that share little in commmon except that I saw them recently:

The Phoenix has landed. The Mars probe, that is. That's a bit of a relief. Watching the video of everything it had to do on its descent I was a little sceptical1Sadly this good fortune does not extend to the pair of 200 year old pistols allegedly forged from meteoric iron, ( Read more... )