-
Where I’m calling from
·
I know that nobody cares about the peregrinations of astrophysicists but there’s not much else to blog about when you’re on the road. So a quick explanation of my absence from the blogosphere: Last week, I was in Taipei for the CoSPA meeting (at which website you can find a copy of my talk on…
-
Anthropic Answers?
·
Author and cosmologist Paul Davies has got a new book out, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life? Like other recent books, it touches on the Anthropic Principle, the idea that we can learn something deep about the universe from the simple observation that we — sentient, water- and carbon-based life…
-
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…
-
Obligatory political commentary
·
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…
-
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…
-
Hubble
By now you’ve heard that NASA has changed its mind and decided to send a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble has been an amazing instrument, its pictures seen and marvelled at by people literally around the world. The most amazing thing about NASA’s decision is that it’s front page news for the…
-
Whew…
·
I’ve just finished my lectures for the course in Fourier Series and Fourier Transforms that I’ve been teaching. It was an intense, exhilarating and ultimately frustrating three-and-a-half week adventure –and I fear that it didn’t go very well. It’s tough material, probably the first stuff that these second-year students have seen in their undergraduate career…
-
Garden State
·
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…
-
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…
-
Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll!
·
Chuck Berry turns 80 next week! He invented rock ‘n’ roll and he understands the intimate relationship between electric guitars and capitalism as well as Colonel Tom Parker ever did — and much better than Elvis.