I’ve just finished reading Edwin Danson’s book Weighing the World — The Quest to Measure the Earth.
Category: Musings
A collection of random thoughts, that don’t fit into the other categories, possibly only of interest to me
Cycling in cities
With the so called summer now here (although you wouldn’t know it from the weather) I’ve been getting out on my bike a bit more. I’ve also read a few articles on cycling infrastructure that were interesting and resonated with my experience.
First Impressions of my Kindle
I decided yesterday to get a Kindle ebook reader, in part to limit the amount of time I spend looking at computer displays.
The news is bad for you
Following on from an idea I first read about in “The Black Swan”, I’ve just been reading an interesting article outlining fifteen reasons why news is bad for you, and should be avoided. Rolf Dobelli’s argument is that by following 24 hour rolling news about everything in the world, we are distracting ourselves from more… Continue reading The news is bad for you
Men of Rock
Not music—but geology. I’ve been watching BBC Scotland’s recent series Men of Rock on iPlayer. Presented by Iain Stewart, it covers the history of geology, and how we have come to learn about the past, through the landscape of Scotland.
Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
Just to clarify things, this is a book about exposing bad science, not that Dr Goldacre is a bad scientist. And as there is only one of him, it would be difficult to construct a suitable double-blind placebo-controlled randomised trial to find out whether he is… anyway, I digress. I’ve just finished reading the aforementioned book, and… Continue reading Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
A year of data visualisations
For a slightly different take on the year past, I have been looking back over all the data visualisation links I have posted on twitter — there has been quite a number of really interesting ways to try and show off the big (and not so big) numbers making the headlines.
12 days of Christmas
I had been wondering (as one does at this time of year!), how many presents in total are in the song “12 days of Christmas”.
Is Seeing Believing – BBC Horizon
watched the fourth episode of the current series of Horizon last night on iPlayer — Is Seeing Believing? — the first one of this series I have seen. Horizon does seem to have improved back to it’s previous high standard, and was not dumbed down for TV as it was a couple of seasons ago. However, I… Continue reading Is Seeing Believing – BBC Horizon
Nuclear non-proliferation should include the UK
I was going to write a piece about the recent anouncement that the USA and Russia are committing to reduce the number of nuclear warheads they have in service, and that we in the UK should be doing likewise. But George Monbiot has written something much better than I could, in his article War with the Ghosts which I… Continue reading Nuclear non-proliferation should include the UK