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All the news that’s fit to print?
Steinn Sigurðsson points out that the New York Times‘ ridiculous pay-only access to its op-ed content is now free to University students and faculty. Despite claims by Brits to the contrary (and despite a series of newsgathering mishaps over the last few years), the NY Times remains the newspaper of record even outside of the…
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Big Smoke Science
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In his comment on last week’s post, fellow physicist blogger Tommaso lets me know that he’ll be attending a meeting that we’re hosting here at Imperial College next week, Outstanding questions for the standard cosmological model. We’ll be casting a critical eye over current cosmological models and data, but I expect most of us will…
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Raiding the science coffers
In the last couple of weeks, the UK Government has announced that the Department of Trade and Industry is so far in the red that it has cut £68 million from the science budget. Usually, government finance isn’t a zero-sum game. But this year, to pay for payouts having to do with the collapse of…
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New York state of music
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“We single-handedly lowered the standards of an entire industry” — David Johannsen of the New York Dolls, in “Once Upon a Time in New York” on BBC4 During the 1970s, while New York City was in economic and cultural meltdown, the disaffected and disenfranchised minorities of the city spawned punk, disco and hip-hop. Within a…
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Logical Proof, Scientific Proof, Religious “Proof”
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With yesterday’s article on “Faith” (vs Science) in the Guardian, and today’s London debate between bioligist Lewis Wolpert and the pseudorational William Lane Craig (previewed on the BBC’s Today show this morning), the UK seems to be the hotbed of tension between science and religion. I’ll leave it to the experts for a fuller exposition,…
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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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Gung hei fat choi
恭喜发财 — Happy (Chinese) New Year! Congratulations and be prosperous in this coming year of the Golden Pig…
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Planck scanning strategy
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OK, this is going to be very technical. In his comment to my last post, my colleague Ned Wright asks a couple of important questions about the way that the Planck Surveyor satellite is going to observe the sky. In the spirit of Mark Trodden’s question about the use of blogs in the research process,…
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Planck Press
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With only [sic] about a year and a half to go before launch, The Observer has a story on the ESA Planck Surveyor mission that I’ve spending much of my time working on over the last several years. (In fact, I have to spend the day writing a program that will play a very small…
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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…