Science
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Science is Vital
I don’t suppose that there are many readers of this blog who are not aware of the Science Is Vital campaign for the support of UK science, but just in case: in response to the likelihood of continuing cuts to the UK science budget as spun by business secretary Vince Cable, we in the science…
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Epistemology and Ontology Among Friends
A week or so ago, I had an extended “conversation” on Twitter with two very old friends, Erik Davis and Ted Friedman. Erik’s a writer, specializing in “modern esoterica” which ranges from psychedelia and Led Zeppelin to Philip K Dick and Cthulu. Like me, Ted’s an academic, but he’s Professor of Communication at Georgia State…
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Consider a Spherical Cow (Company)
One of my old friends from graduate school, and a colleague to the present day, Lloyd Knox — whom you may remember from such cosmology hits as the Dark Energy Song — has started an initiative to create “short documentary videos to demonstrate the explanatory power of simple physical models and to help us understand…
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“Public Service Review”?
A few months ago, I received a call from someone at the “Public Service Review”, supposedly a glossy magazine distributed to UK policymakers and influencers of various stripes. The gentleman on the line said that he was looking for someone to write an article for his magazine giving an example of what sort of space-related…
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Science: Commercially Useful or Theoretically Outstanding?
Today was the next drip in the ongoing water torture that is the upshot of the government’s funding cuts on UK science: BIS Minister Vince Cable gave the coalition government’s first major speech on science. Rumors have been flying around of cuts of 20-30%, and we have been searching for any hints of the Government’s…
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B/E at the Biennale
As a scientist, I am used to my work being read by my peers, and I’ve made it into the occasional magazine or newspaper article, and even the odd TV and radio slot. But last week I travelled to Venice’s Architecture Biennale for the culmination of the first phase of the Architectural Association’s Beyond Entropy art/science project…
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The next decade
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Every ten years or so, the US astronomy community, under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, produces a road map for the next decade’s research in astronomy. The 2010 version, chaired by Roger Blandford, was just released, and astronomer/bloggers have already weighed in: Steinn Sigurðsson and Julianne Dalcanton (in two separate posts on…
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Swedish Statistics
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[Apologies to those of you who may have seen an inadvertantly-published unfinished version of this post] I’ve just returned from a week at the Annual meeting of the Institute for Mathematical Statistics in Gothenburg, Sweden. It’s always instructive to go to meetings outside of one’s specialty, outside of the proverbial comfort zone. I’ve been in…
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BPol++
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I spent part of this week in Paris (apparently at the same time as a large number of other London-based scientists who were here for other things) discussing whether the European CMB community should rally and respond to ESA’s latest call for proposals for a mission to be launched in the next open slot—which isn’t…
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Talking and blogging to ourselves
(Warning, scattershot blogging echo-chamber post follows.) Last week I went to the Science Blogging Talkfest sponsored by the Biochemical Society and led by Alice Bell from Imperial’s excellent Science Communication program. Partially because the event was mostly attended by science bloggers themselves, there was a bit of a preaching-to-the-converted sense to the proceedings. (I tried…
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