General Science OK, so Ares works 28 Oct 2009 I’m not proud. Well, not too proud. I admit I was wrong about the Ares 1-X – it seemed to work fine without excessive vibration and probably will work as a human rated booster. I still would have liked to see a shuttle derived main core, but given that time… Continue Reading
History Apologies to Turing 5 Sep 20094 Oct 2017 The Twentieth Century was a century of geniuses, but the greatest of all, in my opinion, was Alan Turing. Turing invented, both the logic and the first hardware, the computer you are now using to read this post. More than any other invention, Turing’s changed our world; more than Gutenberg,… Continue Reading
Australian stuff On preventive censorship versus punishment 2 Sep 2009 In the last few years, there has been an increasing tendency of so-called democratic governments to increase the amount of control they have over their population, under the guise of various “emergencies”: terrorism, child pornography and of course a slightly more honest concern over property rights. Just today, the Australian… Continue Reading
Social evolution We are natural villagers 20 Jul 2009 We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to… Continue Reading
History Not Good Ideas #1 26 Jun 2009 Yeah, like this isn’t going to end with Jeff Goldblum in the back of an SUV running away very quickly… Continue Reading
Politics NIAC at NASA 12 Jun 2009 Frank Sietzen at NASA Watch (a great blog, by the way) has asked if the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) should be revived. Most of his readers say yes. NIAC was where they came up with designs for wacky spacesuits, propulsion systems, and so on. It was poached to… Continue Reading
Media Plagiarism, citations, and fact checking 26 May 200922 Jun 2018 Some interesting things in the web lately. One is a new system that purports to find cases of plagiarism. Science reports on the new Dèjá Vu database [news summary here; both behind the Science paywall; check this and this if you don’t have access], which checks content of science papers… Continue Reading
Education Creative Commons and textbooks 18 May 2009 Anyone who has had to order textbooks for students knows how expensive they are. Here’s something that I hope may end up a trend amongst academics: Creative Commons licensed texts. P.D. Magnus wrote a logic textbook, forall x, which he made available under the CC license; and now David Morris… Continue Reading
Politics Various divers thingies 6 May 20094 Oct 2017 My union is calling a strike next Tuesday. I’m not sure what to do. I don’t teach, and have no administrative duties, so should I stop thinking from for 8 hours? I’m not sure the administration would notice… Rob Skipper at hpb etc. has a series of podcasts from the… Continue Reading
Censorship Political censorship of internet linkage begins in Australia 5 May 2009 The host ISP of Electronic Frontiers Australia has been served a take-down notice for linking to an R-rated “blackbanned” site, itself not in Australia, in a page that was a political comment on the merits (or demerits, rather) of mandatory internet filtering in Australia. I put the entire text of… Continue Reading