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Katrina and the BBC
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The Observer also reports on the supposed anti-US bias of the BBC‘s Katrina reporting, citing a second-hand report from the always fair and balanced tycoon Rupert Murdoch on a conversation with Tony Blair. The PM supposedly referred to the BBC’s coverage as “gloating” and “full of hatred of America”. Even Bill Clinton seemed to echo…
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“They’re just birds”
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Unlike their sister paper, The Guardian, who seem willing to pander to the crackpot anti-evolution right, The Observer not only reports on the Religious Right’s weird valorization of the film March of the Penguins, but is also willing to point out the truth in an editorial (aka leader): If ever the world needed reminding about…
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The Guardian’s Unintelligent Design
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I was enjoying the new, redesigned Guardian newspaper today, until I came to the end of the new G2 features section, and an offensive interview with chief Intelligent Design crackpot Michael Behe, under the inappropriate banner, “Ideas”. Offensive because interviewer John Sutherland doesn’t call Behe on any of his flagrant misstatements (I hesitate to call…
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About to jump the shark
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Life Principle or just dirty water?
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In the Guardian, Paul Davies writes about investigating the origins of life on earth and, possibly, throughout the Universe. Davies, a media-savvy astrophysicist with a notable spiritual, if not mystical, streak, comes dangerously close to advocating something like Intelligent Design, albeit a more primordial level than its usual crackpot promoters. He talks about the existence…
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New Orleans: Alex Chilton missing — found!
Among all the tragic stories coming out of New Orleans, the devastation of families and homes, I’ve learned that Alex Chilton is among the missing. Chilton was, first, the teenage singer of the Box Tops who had a late-60s blue-eyed-soul hit with “The Letter. In the 70s, Alex formed Big Star, one of those obscure…
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Working hard for our money
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OK, academic scientists are clearly upper-middle-class, and on a day when it’s more obvious than ever that the poor in this country get a raw deal in everything up to and including disaster relief, I don’t want to bellyache too much about how hard it is to do a job I love in an interesting…
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Changes afoot
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Stay tuned for some big (but hopefully invisible) changes: Vanity of vanities: I’ve moved to the very cleverly named http://www.andrewjaffe.net/blog. Very soon I’ll stop updating the version at http://astro.imperial.ac.uk/~jaffe/blog, so please change your bookmarks. I’m using a new version of my blogging software, Movable Type. Let me know if anything breaks. New look. Too busy?
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New bottle (or, “Free” as in “Free Wine”)
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Thanks to the fine blog-reading folks at Orbital Wines, the owners of Stormhoek Wine in South Africa, the sad story of my missing wine was noticed — and the bottle has been replaced! (Alas, without a cool personalized label, but I think I deserve some penalty for my forgetfulness.) I look forward to imbibing this…