Tag: New Scientist
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Crazy ideas you have in the bath
You know how it is … you go for a run and then lying in the bath you read a New Scientist article about Dark Energy and you think of two crazy ideas which you hope some respectable scientist will at least have stuck a paper on arXiv on, so you can at least say…
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Russia Today (@RT_com) broadcasts fiction, not news
Last week’s New Scientist reports that Russia Today – the Kremlin’s propaganda channel subsidised to broadcast lies in support of the Russian Federation’s hostility to any country in Russia’s “near abroad” that dares to travel down the path of democracy and the rule of law – went one further when it started churning out stories…
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Islamism is bad for your health – and not just in the obvious ways
Thanks to the New Scientist I have discovered that Islamic fundamentalism can have more damaging effects than just its attack on science, reason, liberty and equality: it can also damage your health. Evidence from Iran, where the 1979 revolution led to both men and women adopting far more conservative modes of dress, is that the…
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It seems Chomsky was right (and what it might mean?)
(Before any of my “political” friends think I have obviously suffered a serious blow to the head, I am talking about his theories on grammar and not his idiotic politics…) In the late 1950s Noam Chomsky proposed that we have a natural capacity to process grammar and thus to use language – in essence that…
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Why we’ll never meet aliens
Well, the answer is pretty plain: Einstein‘s theory of general relativity – which even in the last month has added to it’s already impressive list of predictive successes – tells us that to travel at the speed of light a massive body would require an infinite amount of propulsive energy. In other words, things are…
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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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Read more novels and you’ll be a better person
As a part-time PhD student with a full-time job, choosing what to read often feels like a moral dilemma as much as anything else. That book on MPI Programming? On the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, or one of the many novels I have bought and not got round to reading. Each carries…
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Dietary myths debunked by the New Scientist
I always think it’s good to get rid of myths about human diet – so here are six care of last week’s New Scientist. 1. Drink eight glasses of water per day Turns out we get plenty of water from food and drinks such as tea and coffee (the idea these dehydrate is also debunked).…
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“Crowd sourcing” to play a key role in fundamental physics experiment
Ordinary people are to be asked to make a contribution to an experiment which aims to determine key facts about the nature of the physical universe – reports the New Scientist. Particle physicists at CERN – the join European experiment famous for the Large Hadron Collider – are conducting an experiment – AEgIS – into…
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Incompleteness in the natural world
A post inspired by Godel, Escher, Bach, Complexity: A Guided Tour, an article in this week’s New Scientist about the clash between general relativity and quantum mechanics and personal humiliation. The everyday incompleteness: This is the personal humiliation bit. For the first time ever I went on a “Parkrun” today – the 5km Finsbury Park…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 