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Marx: Science and Paradox
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It is … paradox that the earth moves round the sun, and that water consists of two highly inflammable gases. Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive nature of things. –Karl Marx, Das Kapital, quoted by Francis Wheen in The Guardian. Or that objects in motion tend…
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Peer review
Scientists complain a lot about peer review. It’s a safe bet that most of us think that our papers are generally not improved in the process, but in the usual self-congratlulatory way, most of us probably think that we’re in the minority of good referees who actually make useful suggestions, or catch egregious errors. We…
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Beatles-Stones-Who
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If you grew up suburban in the late 70s (after they had all left their best days behind), one of the most important questions was, of course: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, or The Who? ITV4 is showing “The Kids Are Alright”, a documentary made about The Who just before Keith Moon died. Amped-up on…
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I thought that was my job
“Physics Elevated to an Art Form” — Oakley‘s new tag line.
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Ineluctable modality of the visible
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Today, June 16, is Bloomsday, the day that Joyce’s Ulysses takes place in 1904.
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Alternative crackpots
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The New Statesman, a lefty British politics magazine (which just underwent a snazzy revamp), published a column by Ziauddin Sardar, an otherwise perceptive writer, entitled “When Knowledge is not the answer.” Without putting too fine a point on it, it is the stupidest essay I have read in a long time. He is responding to…
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Sacred Music
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Last night I went to hear Alejandro Escovedo at St James Church in London. As an atheist/Jew, I’ve never really gotten used to churches (and this really is a church, not a performance space), can’t help but want to be respectful of the sanctity of the space. Escovedo brought along his string quintet, and the…
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Front Page Probability
In a bid to combine numeracy with sports coverage, The Observer presents the Poisson distribution as a headline on its front page today. Supposedly, it has something to do with predicting the number of goals a team will score in the World Cup. The Poisson distribution is P(n) = λn e-λ/n! This gives the probability,…
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