COP talks as ambition police
Part of what makes Greta Thunberg such a powerful voice in climate activism is her no-nonsense communication. Yesterday, for example, she called the impending COP27 climate talks, to be held in Egypt…
Analysis
257 posts
A masculine build-up to the Ind-Pak cricket match
It's just good business.…
Assorted comments: MOM, IIT Mandi, scientists' wishes
These are some remarks that have been fermenting in my mind and for which I don’t have the time or the inclination to supply a beginning-middle-end structure to publish as individual posts. I’m just p…
The passive voice is political
Eric Martinez, Francis Mollica and Edward Gibson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Edinburgh won an Ig Nobel Prize for literature this year for their work on what make…
The Frida Kahlo NFT
Like a Phoenix rising from its ashes, Art is reborn into Eternity. fridanft.org In July this year, a Mexican businessman named Martin Mobarak allegedly destroyed a painting by Frida Kahlo in order t…
The strange NYT article on taming minks
I'm probably waking up late to this but the New York Times has published yet another article in which it creates a false balance by first focusing on the problematic side of a story for an inordin…
Why everyone should pay attention to Stable Diffusion
Many of the people in my circles hadn’t heard of Stable Diffusion until I told them, and I was already two days late. Heralds of new technologies have a tendency to play up every new thing, however in…
When a teenager wants to solve poaching with machine-learning…
We always need more feel-good stories, but we need those feel-good stories more that withstand closer scrutiny instead of falling apart, and framed the right way. For example, Smithsonian magazine pu…
Yes, scientific journals should publish political rebuttals
If they can.…
What makes 'good science journalism'?
From 'Your Doppelgänger Is Out There and You Probably Share DNA With Them', The New York Times, August 23, 2022: Dr. Esteller also suggested that there could be links between facial features…
Dams are bad for rivers. Are skyscrapers bad for winds?
The effects of wind on buildings are relatively more popular than the effects of tall buildings on the wind itself.…
The importance of sensible politics to good science
Stuart Ritchie writes a newsletter-blog that I quite like, called Science Fictions. On May 30, he published a post on this blog entitled 'Science is political - and that's a bad thing'. I…