The Rays, again
Guess what? This study isn’t in today’s Independent.
Read More The Rays, againbad science
Independent of Facts
OK, then; remember the beef I had with the Indy about THE RAYS!! and THE BEES! ? Well, we now know what the problem is with the bees; they caught a virus. Interestingly, Australian bees are immune to it; I recall beekeepers on the Web back in February suggesting that this might be so. So,…
Read More Independent of FactsBad British History, Again
A prerequisite for good alternate-history is good history; as Ken MacLeod says, the trade secret of sci-fi is history. So I wasn’t too impressed by this, of James Nicoll’s, who really ought to know better. Would it be funny to do an AH where WWI never happened and the old order never fell, one in…
Read More Bad British History, AgainScienciness, again
This row over at Tim Lambert’s, also here, reminded me of something I’ve noticed around the blogosphere. There was this, too, and also this. They’re all arguments from meta-analysis of some sort, and they’re all wrong. They’re all wrong in the same way, too; the first, David Kane’s beef with the Lancet survey of mortality…
Read More Scienciness, againScience!
Climate-change denier and quack weatherman Piers Corbyn writes to the paper: The problem for global warmers is that there is no evidence that changing CO2 is a net driver for world climate. Feedback processes negate its potential warming effects. Their theory has no power to predict. It is faith, not science. I challenge them to…
Read More Science!CCTV Face Recognition: Not Just Evil, Useless Too
The German Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Crime Agency, BKA) recently decided to try out one of those face recognition programs on CCTV cameras placed in a railway station in the city of Mainz. And what happened? Well, having installed the software in October last year, they recruited 200 regular travellers as volunteers, whose faces were recorded in…
Read More CCTV Face Recognition: Not Just Evil, Useless TooEagleton: Intellectual Snob
Says Terry Eagleton, in a Guardian Content..sorry..Comment is Free screed: For almost the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life. One might make an honourable exception of Harold Pinter, who has wisely decided that being a champagne…
Read More Eagleton: Intellectual SnobScienciness!
I finally realised what my Big Idea about the Triesman Scheme for National Phrenology was. It’s that British politics is afflicted with scienciness, by analogy to “truthiness”. Thinking about the obsession with biometric quackery, I realised that over the last 10 years we’ve been governed by people who like the idea of science, but not…
Read More Scienciness!Your circuit’s dead – there’s something wrong!
Charlie Stross’s space-colony überthread brings a couple of things to mind. First up, the best thought-through space elevator project is costed at $40bn, not far off £21-22bn. The Al-Yamamah contract was £43 billion – two space elevators. The degree of corruption involved is, literally, mindblowing. Perhaps the BAE managers and Tory bagmen I regularly insult…
Read More Your circuit’s dead – there’s something wrong!We’re so pretty…we’re vacant!
What is it with sodding “electrosensitivity”? Why has it suddenly achieved escape-from-reality velocity this spring? What is it with columnists like the Obscurer‘s Jasper Gerard, who this week chose to announce that, if you include the long-term sick, the total number of unemployed people in Britain is over 3 million. Wasn’t it like that under…
Read More We’re so pretty…we’re vacant!