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Opening the box
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This post is a work in progress, but I’ve decided to post it in its unfinished state. Comments and questions welcome! This week I went to a seminar on the new results from the MiniBooNE experiment given here at Imperial by Morgan Wascko. The MiniBooNE results have been discussed in depth elsewhere. Like MINOS last…
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Proof
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If you’ve been intrigued (but possibly unconvinced) by my recent arguments about induction and the nature of scientific proof, go read Sean Carroll’s riff on the distinction between belief and proof in science. When we’re discussing the existence of quarks (or superstings), this may seem a literally academic argument, but these distinctions surface in ongoing…
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Things I’m not going to blog about
The blogosphere is in echo-chamber mode with advice and admonition for how bloggers should behave (don’t be rude), and how scientists should spread the rational word (don’t be boring).
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March madness
OK, a little bragging: I am proud to be able to say that I came in at the top of this year’s CITA NCAA Basketball Tournament pool with my pick of Florida to emerge as the ultimate winner. (I also beat most of the New York Times staff!) Sadly, no money will change hands.
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April First (and Second)
We take so much of the web for granted today, we often forget how very contingent it all is. Without the very specific work by Tim Berners-Lee inventing the http protocol, perhaps some sort of hypertext communication standard would have come along, but it’s hard to believe that it would be quite the same. Berners-Lee…
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Nature Network London, still-Outstanding Questions, and new Satellites
Yesterday evening I attended the launch party for Nature Network London, a new site run by Nature magazine, which hopes to be a web home for science and scientists in London. There are articles, blogs, discussion forums and calendars of scientific events. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I ended up meeting lots of people from Imperial — whom…
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Outstanding questions for the standard cosmological model
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This week is the big “Outstanding questions for the standard cosmological model” meeting here at Imperial. I am too busy finishing up my topology talk to blog about it (and recovering from running 13.1 miles yesterday), but luckily Tommaso Dorigo has been on the ball (and has also taken some good photos which I’m sure…
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Cosmology, Philosophy and Topology in Edinburgh
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I’m just back from a couple of days up in Edinburgh, one of my favorite cities in the UK. London is bigger, more intense, but Edinburgh is more beautiful, dominated by its landscape–London is New York to Edinburgh’s San Francisco. I was up there to give the Edinburgh University Physics “General Interest Seminar”. Mostly, I…
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Neofelis diardi (Bornean)
Because you can never go wrong with a cat picture, especially of a new species: Borneo’s Clouded Leopard: © WWF-Canon / Alain COMPOST The world remains full of wonders…