Tag: BBC
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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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Stopping the patent madness
The BBC’s lead story in Britain today is about a decision of a US court which no direct or immediate applicability in Britain at all – over Apple’s victory over Samsung in a US patent case. The fact that the case, at least in theory, matters not a jot to Britain seems to have rather…
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The Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon
When did you first become aware of “Fifty Shades of Grey”? Perhaps if you are a man rather later than if you are a woman… about six weeks ago I noticed that this book – which I had heard of (possibly because I had seen someone reading it on the Tube) was being talked about…
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A reason why kids don’t do programming any more?
As I write this, in the next room my two daughters are playing with their Wii, with the eldest using her Andorid phone to provide incidental music. It’s a not untypical Saturday morning scene in millions of homes I imagine. In here I am contemplating one of the legacies of my teenage years – the…
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The tyranny of the arts graduates continues
I imagine in Michael Gove‘s world, this has been a good week. The UK’s secretary of state for education has been in the news a lot this week, and that seems to be the key metric for him – after all his qualifications for the job essentially seem to be that he was once a…
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Review of “The Black Cloud”
My interest in astronomy and astrophysics comes from childhood and when I was much, much younger I had an (unscientific) fondness for the “steady state” theory of cosmology, which, in the early 1970s was not as thoroughly discredited as it is today (though, of course, many newer cosmologies borrow from it or show similarities to…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 