NEWS FLASH! I’m breaking out of this here cave, this “astro” cave. No longer to be restricted to the limited world of the internet, I’m heading out on the electromagnetic spectrum, in a way that can only be described as talking on the radio. Yes, from 8.30 am this Thursday 27 January I’ll be joining [...]
So, there’s this cycle chic movement, which seems to be about hipsters taking ownership of the roads away from M.A.M.I.L.s (middle-aged men in lycra – I got that from someone at work). Apart from that dubious goal, one of its aims is apparently to make cycling more appealing by getting cool people to ride bikes, [...]
Ah, Herald Sun. How we rely on your scientific reporting, particularly when it comes to creative interpretation of climate change. A couple of months ago we had an article about how the first 6 months of 2010 were, globally, the warmest ever recorded. This was ably refuted by the accompanying photo of a lifeguard shivering [...]
Previously, we discussed the indeterminate result of Australia’s federal election and how that left us in a very rare state of macroscopic quantum superposition. Well, I discussed it, and if you did too then you’re probably wondering how far the analogy can be pushed in light of this week’s Oakeshott-Windsor led resolution. The answer is: [...]
Lex Luthor is clearly a bad scientist. If for no other reason, then the simple mathematical formula of ‘bad guy + mad scientist’. (What? That’s how maths works.) But he does go to some good sources for his science news. In Action Comics #890, where Action Comics is famously the title that Superman first appeared [...]
How do I miss these things? It seems that seven people hold the keys to the internet – chosen to restart it if something breaks the domain name system and, I don’t know, stops phishing phraudsters pretending to be your bank account. Apparently a restart requires five of the seven key holders to bring their [...]
In a massive victory for science, Australia is in the midst of its first quantum election in over 70 years. Just as Schrödinger’s cat was famously caught in a state of being neither alive nor dead but somehow both, the Australian government is now in a superposition of Labor and Liberal, with somehow no one [...]
Dear diary, Sorry it’s taken me so long to write – my stars, you wouldn’t believe the things I’ve been doing. Actually, I remember back in the days of snail mail (not that they called it that then, but you young kids wouldn’t know anything about it) that I used to start all my letters [...]
So I recently checked out the Melbourne Solar System, a nifty scale model of our little corner of the galaxy. The sun is down near the St Kilda Marina (itself pretty cool, what with the whole boats on shelves thing) and Pluto is 5.9 km away in Port Melbourne. Overall, an excellently nerdy and highly [...]
Thanks to Thinking is Dangerous, I recently learned of Bob Park’s 7 warning signs of bogus science. These are basically a set of features that most pseudoscience, flim-flam, gobbledy-gook, wibble-wobble, whatever, has in common: The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his [...]
