April 2006
Monthly Archive
Chandra Deep Field
Posted on Apr 28 2006 | Tagged as: Work, Science
I finally managed to dig out this image.
This is what I spent the majority of last year looking at (when I wasn’t looking at pages on Quark).
It’s an image of the Chandra Deep Field taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope.
Everything circled in green (the computer detects objects - I didn’t just scribble on the image) […]
Er, no Charles. Just no.
Posted on Apr 26 2006 | Tagged as: Politics, Blogistan, The Stupid, Media
Charles Clarke responds to criticisms of the stream of news laws encroaching on civil liberties.
As with Tony’s response to Henry Porter in the Observer, the gist of the argument seems to be that people need protecting from terror/asbo-magnets/paedophiles.
Isaiah Berlin developed thinking on the balance of liberties - the balance between the freedom to act and […]
Recantation 3: Darwin
Posted on Apr 26 2006 | Tagged as: Religion, Science
Just because Darwin may have reverted to creationism toward the end of his life, doesn’t mean his evolutionary theory wasn’t right.
Recantation 2: Stephen Hawking
Posted on Apr 26 2006 | Tagged as: Literature, Science
I was going to write about Free Will.
I was going to quote Shakespeare’s Richard III: “I am determinèd to prove a villain…”, and question whether that meant ‘predetermined’, as in Richard was destined to be a usurping fratricide. (Does it? I don’t know.)
I was going to refer to Stephen Hawking’s essay Is Everything Determined? in […]
Recantation 1: mine
Posted on Apr 26 2006 | Tagged as: Yours truly, The Stupid, Media, Culture, Science
I was wrong. Quite, quite wrong.
I claimed that Aids-awareness adverts were completely barking up the wrong tree, that we didn’t need to hammer home how disease spreads, and that people are not ignorant but rather simply irresponsible.
But…
Colin Richardson writes:
There is still a great deal of ignorance about HIV in this country, after all these years. […]
A confession
Posted on Apr 22 2006 | Tagged as: The Stupid, Religion, Literature, Science
I quite like The Da Vinci Code.
I don’t like the fact that people find it convincing, and actually start to believe the conspiracy theory.
I hope that the inevitable success of its transition to film will result in a film also being made of its predecessor, Angels and Demons, simply because there’s some spectacularly bad science […]
Funny old world
Posted on Apr 22 2006 | Tagged as: Media, Culture, TV, Comedy, Literature
Jonathan Freedland has a novel out. Freedland claimed in a post on Comment is Free that there are a lot of parallels between writing a novel and reporting the news. It’ll be interesting to see how his own worldview comes through in the story, particularly given that a novel could probably easily contain about a […]
Characters and the small rouge one
Posted on Apr 14 2006 | Tagged as: Culture, TV, Comedy
It’s probably too small to see on the picture, but the really wee text at the bottom says: “Over 4 hours of deleted scenes, outtakes, interviews and extras”.
Kerr-ist.
Given how thoroughly awful the material that actually aired was I can’t imagine how dreadful the deleted scenes must be.
It went wrong long before then, with the downward […]