Creativity: a scientific viewpoint

Last night I was lucky enough to be able to attend a wonderful two hour lecture and chat session with Margaret Boden OBE, Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex in my old home town of Brighton. She is here visiting the University of Canterbury as a Distinguished Erskine Fellow, and gave [...]

Illegality of military robots and questions of identity

Military robots - milbots, anyone? - play an increasing role in modern warfare. Robotic bomb disposal units have been around for some time, as have computer-assisted aircraft controls, but now the aim is to have robots autonomously plan and make kills. One example is the class of robots known as Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles, or [...]

Butterflies remember being caterpillars

For as long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by the process by which a caterpillar dissolves itself into a butterfly. It seemed astonishing that a life would destroy itself to birth a totally different creature with none of the characteristics or memories of its progenitor. But, how could memory possibly survive the mushification [...]

The meaning of scientific literacy

The promotion of scientific and mathematical literacy is always to be applauded. Looking at the world honestly, and drawing conclusions based on the evidence, are two important skills for making a human whole. Alone, they lead to a lifeless vision of terrifying sterility, but combined with compassion, creativity, imagination, and love, they have the power [...]

Radical shifts in perspective

A few minutes ago I posted about a wonderful Scientific American slideshow in which the brilliant science plays second fiddle to the new and jaw-dropping perspective on humankind it produces. Then there is another article also over at SciAm, asking “Do Microbes Make Snow?” It turns out that the answer could be yes, and they [...]

The long view of our night view

Scientific American have surpassed themselves again with a beautiful slideshow taking the long view of how the night sky seen from Earth has changed in the past and will change in the future. The images themselves are striking as works of art, but what really hits home is the brevity of recorded human history in [...]

New paper on arXiv

Well, it’s not much of an achievement, but the paper that was recently rejected by a peer-reviewed journal, is no available from the open access preprint archive, arXiv. You can read it for free here.
P.S. The first figure looks awful for some reason, but please don’t hold that against the paper!
P.P.S. I’ve held back from [...]

Nature accused of rejecting science in favour of bias

Scientific American has a surprisingly frank and critical assessment of Nature’s recent decision not to move to a double-blind peer review process. It is hard not to form the conclusion that Nature’s editors are scraping the barrel of barely-rational excuses simply to avoid a bit of hard work implementing such a system. (This is the [...]

Peer review

Oh, woe. My latest oeuvre has been rejected outright by the journal I submitted it to. This is my first real rejection. The first paper I wrote was accepted almost without change in a pretty good journal. My second paper, in perhaps the number two journal in the field of fluid mechanics required a bit [...]

Scientific Fundamentalism

The September 2007 edition of Physics World, the in-house magazine of the Institute of Physics, featured an article by Joanne Brunker entitled “Physglish: our coded speech”. This was one of a series of short essays under the heading “Lateral Thoughts”, essays supposed to be a bit fun and to provoke some thinking in the [...]