Month: October 2013
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In what sense do photons exist?
This is a genuine question on my part – and I would be grateful for any answers! The inspiration for asking the question comes from Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics – my current “listen while running” book – along with Feynman’s own description of radiation in QED – The Strange Theory of Light and […]
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Another example of “Delingpole-ism”
Yesterday I highlighted the attack made on the BBC’s science reporting by James Delingpole, a novelist, English Lit graduate and – as I argued – under-qualified crank. Delingpole claimed that the BBC should be “impartial” on science – by which he meant it should give an equal weighting to the views of the tiny minority […]
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On climate change, science is not “impartial”
Reading the history of mathematics and science and you will come across stories about the various cranks and obsessives who, lacking all training, claim they have solved the great problems or proved that the accepted solutions are false. Even now there are those trying to show that Cantor’s diagonalisation argument is false, just as there […]
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Schooling, heritability and IQ
In recent recent weeks, in the UK, there has been renewed interest in the question of heritability and educational performance, after Dominic Cummings, the outgoing advisor to Michael Gove, the education secretary, claimed that some sort of left wing conspiracy in the educational establishment – “the blob” as Cummings calls it – were resisting the […]
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Two years in the gym
This morning, running in the regular 5km “Parkrun” in Finsbury Park (just around the corner) I picked up a (rather sore) thigh strain – so it feels like an odd time to write a piece about how great it is to exercise – but I want to write this piece because I feel I have […]
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Free software hex editor
I have noticed that my free software hex editor (hexxed) – which is licensed under the GNU GPL – does not really come up in any searches, so here’s another entry to boost it. It’s a bit crude, but it does some things well (e.g., display unicode and switch endianness) and it will run anywhere […]
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Astrology: the anti-science acceptable to the educated élite?
Imagine if, in the US, a new novel that celebrated creationism was awarded the greatest of all literary prizes, topped the local best seller lists, gained five star reviews in the papers and was recommended to school pupils by their teachers. Typical American idiocy, eh? Then imagine in the rest of the English-speaking world a […]
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 