Politics
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Politics and the misuse of Science (UK edition)
The UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology issued a report on “Scientific Advice, Risk and Evidence Based Policy Making.” Although their press release soft-pedals the issues, The Guardian’s headline says “MPs accuse ministers of twisting science for political purposes” and the article quotes Oxford Lib Dem MP Evan Harris to that effect. He…
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Obligatory political commentary
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I admit I was sceptical that my fellow Americans would manage to kick the bums out this year, but some sort of sense has prevailed. The Dems have the House, may yet win the Senate, Rumsfeld is gone (in a UK-style post-defeat resignation), and my own congress-person, Nancy Pelosi, is the first female Speaker of…
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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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Garden State
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It’s not every day I get to blog the praises of my home state, but New Jersey’s Supreme Court has said that same-sex couples are entitled to “the same rights and benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples under the civil marriage statutes”, but fall short of calling such unions “marriage”. Because of that last caveat, The…
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African Science
This past week I had the honor of meeting members of various African National Science Academies visiting the UK on the invitation of the Britain’s Royal Society. I was invited to talk about my experiences in the Society’s own MP-Scientist Pairing “Scheme” that I participated in last year. These are high-powered scientists, holding posts in…
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Political Commandments
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Ronald Reagan often talked about the Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican” (attributed to California Republican party chairman Gaylord Parkinson during the 1964 California Gubernatorial election). It certainly served Reagan well (for ill rather than good, despite his bizarre posthumous revalorization). The Labour Party could learn a thing or two.…
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Big brother, watching me (or vice versa?)
When I left for Trieste last week, I decided to leave some vital data with the UK government: the pattern of my irises. Now, when I enter the country, my eyes are scanned by a science-fiction-ish kiosk and I get through faster than those other less fortunate foreigners. But I’m the one with the data…
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Brian Aldiss on Food and Civilization
In the years of the Han emperors in China… the Chinese perfected the crossbow with which to defeat the barbarians. The barbarians did not have the skills necessary to cast the bronze locks the crossbow requires. With the barbarians taken care of, a time of peace prevailed within the newly united states of China. So…
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Spending pounds and bending light (two ways)
I spent the early part of the week in Sheffield at the first meeting of the Institute of Physics Astroparticle Physics Group. There were talks on the search for the Dark Matter, gravitational waves, neutrino astrophysics, gamma-ray astrophsyics, and, of course, cosmology. All of this sometimes goes by the name “non-accelerator particle physics”: trying to…
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You get what you pay for
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There’s a report on the BBC that the Labour party may have given out a large number of “honours” (Knighthoods, Lordships, peerages, etc.) to their biggest donors. Maybe it’s my (small-‘R’) republican tendencies coming out, but, um, who cares? Seems better than, say, giving out political favors. Or contracts to run the very successful operation…