News
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Floods
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My thoughts and sympathy go out to the residents of my old neighborhood, Osney Island, in Oxford, where it’s just started to flood before the waters peak (we hope) later today. Good luck to all the residents — stay strong, stay dry!
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Useless boycotts
Once again, my Union, the University and College Union, has sort-of voted to boycott Israeli academics. It’s only “sort of”, because, like last time, the decision comes about from a vote of activists present at the UCU annual conference, not of the membership at large. Indeed, the vote has been opposed by the General Secretary…
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LA’s Burning
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A beautiful but frightening picture of the fire burning near the Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles. Evidence that we were probably never meant to live in that part of the world? (Photo courtesy Monica Almeida/New York Times)
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Another reason we should teach evolution and the big bang
…they are part of an an ancient Jewish conspiracy, and so it pisses off the anti-semites…
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Science In, On and Around the Media
Neil Tyson of New York’s Museum of Natural History had an excellent appearance on The Daily Show where he reminds us that “Astrophysicists are a simple people“. John Stewart flipped between slack-jawed incomprehension and good jokes. Better science than most of the real news. Speaking of the media and science, I spent Tuesday night boozing…
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The Rt. Hon. Tony Blair, MP
I somehow scored an invitation to a talk by the Prime Minister sponsored by The Royal Society on “Our Nation’s Future”, specifically, on Science Policy. (Personally, I was pleased to see an extremely large contingent from Imperial present, including Dame Julia Higgins (Principal of our Faculty of Engineering, and Foreign Secretary [!] of the Royal…
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Hubble
By now you’ve heard that NASA has changed its mind and decided to send a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble has been an amazing instrument, its pictures seen and marvelled at by people literally around the world. The most amazing thing about NASA’s decision is that it’s front page news for the…
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When they think we’re not listening
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We learned yesterday that President Bush has a bit of a potty mouth (at least when he’s abroad; I bet Cheney makes him wash his mouth out with soap when he talks dirty back home) and a not particularly nuanced view of foreign policy: Bush: What they need to do is get Syria to get…
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UFOs exist…
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…but not aliens. Or so they would have us believe.
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You already know what I think
There’s no need to comment on: NASA says — and forces all of its public statements to say — that The Big Bang is just a “theory”. (But there’s no lack of opinion out there, at Cosmic Variance, Bad Astronomy, Pharyngula, Balloon Juice, Stranger Fruit, Gary Farber, and Mark Kleiman…) The closure of the London…
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