Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
The news is that Lonesome George, the last remaining tortoise of his kind and a conservation icon, died on Sunday of unknown causes, the Galapagos National Park said. He was thought to be about 100 years old. New Scientist reports … The rarest animal in the world is no more. Lonesome George, the last of … Read more
About one week ago a whole new batch of web suffixes were made available and so the opportunity to screw up has been extended. Supposedly as part of this process a UK-based internet registrar highlighted their top 10 disasters and suggested that unless you think carefully about it, you might end up attracting a very different, unwanted audience. (Yes OK, … Read more
Pirate Bay has been formally blocked in the UK by all the ISPs (BT, O2, Sky, Virgin Media etc…). They have done so for legal reasons, a High Court ruling in April directed them to do so. So now of course nobody can access the Pirate Bay from the UK and so their UK traffic … Read more
A team of smart folks in Japan have found a mathematical model for the ‘hit’ phenomenon in entertainment. It basically uses the advertisement budget time distribution and also word-of-mouth (WOM) to work things out. Oh wait, how the heck do you measure WOM? Well they went for the number of posts on social network systems such as … Read more
Some scary stuff is on the horizon … we’re on a much worse collision course with Mother Nature than currently thought. In Approaching a state-shift in Earth’s biosphere, a paper just published in Nature, the authors, whose expertise spans a multitude of disciplines, suggest our planet’s ecosystems are careenng towards an imminent, irreversible collapse. The … Read more
I first heard Richard talk about this two years ago. At the time, I listened, watched the slides and thought, “Nice Talk”, but did not really get it. Well, I’ve changed my mind, there is an article by Carole Jahme in yesterday’s Guardian that clearly explains it all, and so now I think I’m beginning … Read more