Science
-
Church comes out against science
·
We scientists had somehow managed to fool ourselves into believing that, since John Paul II said that evolution was “more than just a hypothesis”, since they admitted some wrongdoing in the persecution of Galileo, that the Catholic Church was on the side of science. Sadly, perhaps inevitably, we were wrong. In an Op-Ed in yesterday’s…
-
End of the Universe
Today, alas, will see the end of The Centre of the Universe. Thanks, again, to Jem Finer for creating it, a work of thought and beauty. But I’m sure he’s looking forward to sleeping in a warm bed, surrounded by his family, rather than a shed in the middle of a park surrounded by weird…
-
Weekend notes: LISA
·
With Live 8 on in the background, I was able to get a bit of work done: colleagues from Imperial and 13 other UK institutions are putting together a “Letter of Intent” to the European Space Agency for the analysis of data from the LISA satellite. ESA, as expected of a multi-governmental agency guiding the…
-
Academics: blogs and publishing
The Village Voice has an article about academic blogs. And BlogScholar is attempting to organize the joyous but chaotic noise we make (but I’ll wait to see how serious it is before I sign up). Meanwhile, after a discussion of various models for academic publishing over on CosmoCoffee, moderator Antony Lewis has set up a…
-
Centre of the Universe
Went to see the opening of Jem Finer‘s The Centre of the Universe in Oxford last night. Jem is the artist in residence in Oxford’s Department of Astrophysics, and “The Centre of the Universe” is a homebrew radio telescope, built of telephone poles, scavenged wood and chicken-wire. Inspiration ranges from Babylonian ziggurats and Robert Smithson…
-
Crackpots
The Smithsonian is taking money from crackpot creationists (there is no other kind of creationist) to let them screen a movie propounding their crackpot (I am trying to make a point here) views. In their report on this, The New York Times manages the relatively nuanced “Although Charles Darwin’s theory is widely viewed as having…
-
Feynman: the collapse of society and the rise of cosmology
·
The Guardian has run excerpts from a new collection of Richard Feynman’s writings, Don’t You Have Time to Think?. In this, written in 1961, he talks about the future of human society and what could happen to physics. First, he’s pessimistic: The future of physics depends on the circumstances of the rest of the world…
-
Travelling ten
·
I’ve been a bit quiet the past week, so here’s a very random top ten from my just-completed trip to North America (New Jersey/New York and Toronto). In no particular order, except for number one: My sister’s wedding — Congratulations and Mazel Tov to Allison and Chris! The skeleton of the new Daniel Libeskind extension…
-
More wrongs from the right
From the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto on “Why I’m Rooting for the Religious Right“: One can disagree with religious conservatives on abortion, gay rights, school prayer, creationism and any number of other issues, and still recognize that they have good reason to feel disfranchised…. In the past three elections, the religious right has helped…
-
Belief vs. Understanding
From a fine dissection of the (religious) right’s view of evolution over at Science And Politics: I do not believe in evolution. It is not something you believe in or not: it is something you understand or not…. Evolutionary biology is sitting on such large mountains of strong evidence collected over the past 150 years…
Search
Recent Posts
Categories
- Academia (64)
- Art (57)
- Blog (1)
- Miscellanea (101)
- Music (71)
- Net (63)
- News (28)
- Politics (110)
- Science (332)
- Uncategorized (4)