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Ennui in the UK
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There’s a lot to criticize about the US campaign system, and the politics that it supports, but there’s no denying that both Democrats and Republicans knew that something big was at stake in the 2004 elections. Here in the UK, the Tories — thankfully no longer the “natural party of government” — are showing what…
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Science Publishing III: Attribution
Finally, my colleague Sean Carroll writes about David Politzer’s Nobel-prize speech, and giving credit where it’s due.
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Science Publishing II: RSS & XML
&uot For the technically-minded, here’s an article (via Lockergnome) on The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: Syndication and Annotation on the Web, by Hammond, Hannay, and Lund of the Nature Publishing Group: RSS is one of a new breed of technologies that is contributing to the ever-expanding dominance of the Web as the pre-eminent,…
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Science Publishing I: Science Commons
Some of the biggest issues in science today have to do with the prosaic questions of publishing: How do we disseminate scientific work and the underlying scientific data so that the maximum number of scientists (and members of the public) have access to it? How do we ensure that proper credit is given for work?…
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Numbing numbers
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As the horrid death toll from the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami continues to rise, we are confronted with a barrage of numbers: many tens or even a hundred thousand dead, nine on the Richter scale, ten-meter waves. Do we really know what these figures mean? Part of the problem is simply definitions: who knows…
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Winter break
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See you in a week or so. Courtesy The New York Times (2004).
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Pogue Mahone
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Thanks to the help of the aforementioned ringer, we went to see the Pogues play in Birmingham last weekend. For the most part, they’ve worn their age well; lead singer Shane MacGowan may be the exception, beginning to look more like Johnny Vegas, but sounding even more like the drunks and hustlers in his songs.…
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The Multiverse
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As an irrelevant aside, contrary to the the narrator’s claim in What We Still Don’t Know, Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees certainly did not coin the term “multiverse” (the idea that what we call the whole Universe is just one among many, perhaps each with its own properties); it was used in superhero comics in…
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What we still don’t know
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Channel 4 in the UK just finished showing What We Still Don’t Know, a new science show presented by Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal. The aim was admirable, discussing science’s open questions, rather than presenting the usual heroic fait accompli of pop-science. Somehow, the series got hijacked over the course of the episodes, becoming…
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Waverley Sunset
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