HOORAY FOR ACID RAIN. Okay so the pH3 drizzle might not be so good for your car paintwork over time (though not a bad as the throwaway culture we live in eh readers), but it might be saving us from global warming. I love this kind of science. It is a[…]

BOOM! Simon Winchester’s Krakatoa is a thorough and often fascinating book which still ends up just slightly unsatisfying. He’s been criticised by some reviewers for too many digressions on topics whose connection to the volcano are real […]

WHAT ALIENS MIGHT BE LIKE pt something-or-other [isn’t this a PBS series?]
On the whole science fiction novelists are no more convincing (though maybe more inventive) than science fact dreamers. Frank Herbert is the exception.[…]

Fans of Canadian publicly-funded TV might recognise Cosmic Odyssey, the Bill Shatner-narrated science series on the BC Open University’s Knowledge Network. The most recent installment was “Extreme Astronomy”, about “high-energ[…]

[insert DIET OF WORMS joke here]
“(…) Insufficient consideration has been given to the new underground religious war which is modifying the modern world. It’s an old idea of mine, but I find that whenever I tell people about it they[…]

Okay, I must admit I did not expect this when I idlely googled Monkey Testing. It is a bit of a let-down really, where are the shaven, rage infested gibbons of the movies. Instead a rather dull defense of random testing of software.
What stood out t[…]

OWL. Is this Science or Engineering then?[…]

On Scientists and Statistics
 
“The Law of Large Numbers guarantees that one-in-a-million miracles happen 295 times a day in America”
 
Of course this is only true if you make some truly bizarre assumptions, like only one p[…]

Fantastic stuff
 
“… according to a 1997 U.S. News and World Report study on who Americans believe are most likely to go to heaven, 52 percent said Bill Clinton, 60 percent thought Princess Diana, 65 percent chose Michael Jordan and […]

RETURN OF THE BEAGLE
What is noice about this story is that the sturdily British Beagle Mars vehicle has to now admit that when it comes to space there is no room for parochialism. This time using some sort of skycrane they hope to drop the thing dow[…]