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Entries Tagged as 'science'

Total Fail at the Kinect Galleries

August 8th, 2010 · 7 Comments

Apple
Yesterday, I went down to Covent Garden to check out the new Apple Store there (the largest in the world). About 300 people were queuing to pick up the iPhone 4, which is pretty astonishing given that it’s been out for a month now, but non-iPhone buyers could bypass the queue and go straight inside.
As [...]

Tags: adrian · apple · games · london · science

Educational games from 3500 years ago

June 13th, 2010 · 5 Comments

Freeborn children [of Greece] should learn as much of these things as the vast throngs of young in Egypt do with their alphabet. First as regards arithmetic, lessons have been devised there for absolute beginners based on enjoyment and games, distributing apples and garlands so that the same numbers are divided among larger and smaller [...]

Tags: edu · games · history · science

Reading on the iPad is fantastic

June 10th, 2010 · 5 Comments

Reading on the iPad is fantastic. I don’t care what other people have said, I just know that after using it for a fortnight, I can tell that it’s changed the way I’ll read forever.
I used to spend several hours a day in front of my iMac at home, using a combination of Google Reader [...]

Tags: adrian · apple · book · games · science · tech

Meaning and Magic on a Disney Cruise: Part 2

June 6th, 2010 · 1 Comment

Read Part 1 here…
Day 3: Valletta (Malta)
Malta isn’t a place that I would go out of my way to visit. Its capital, Valletta, has plenty of charm and interesting architecture – a legacy from the incessant invasions and occupations by Greeks, Romans, Sicilians, French, British, and a bunch of other people you haven’t heard of [...]

Tags: adrian · disney · future · games · science · travel

Writing Frankenstein

April 18th, 2010 · 1 Comment

When Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, Europe experienced a ‘Year Without a Summer’.
At the time, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (aged 18), and her lover (and later husband) Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron in Switzerland. With outdoor activities being unappealing due to the poor weather, they spent a lot of time indoors. It was during this [...]

Tags: adrian · games · science · writing

Can a Game Save the World?

March 9th, 2010 · 29 Comments

On December 9th 2007, a curious event took place at the University of South Carolina football stadium. As 29,000 people filed inside, each was given a piece of paper bearing four names and phone numbers. During the event, each person called those names and asked them to vote for Obama in the coming primary election.

Those [...]

Tags: future · games · philosophy · politics · science

Can the Science Museum be up-to-date?

February 25th, 2008 · 1 Comment

I visit the Science Museum in London at least twice a year, so I was interested to read an interview with their new Director, talking about how he’s going to change the place:
A month into his job, Professor Rapley is sitting in his South Kensington office, telling me that broadly the museum’s collection celebrates “the [...]

Tags: museum · science

Great Success = Some Talent + A Lot of Luck

February 18th, 2008 · 7 Comments

Spotted this wonderful, and very accurate, ‘equation’ by Daniel Kahneman:
The Secret of Regression to Mediocrity
Success = Some Talent + Luck
Great Success = Some Talent + A Lot of Luck
The term ‘regression to mediocrity’ (also known as ‘regression to the mean’) was first coined by Francis Galton in 1886. Galton showed that, on average, the children [...]

Tags: bio · philosophy · psych · science

Antimatter

October 8th, 2007 · No Comments

After six weeks of silence, I’ve finally updated my After Our Time weblog with a post about Antimatter. It’s the sort of thing that would otherwise have gone here, so if you’re missing my posts about science, check it out.

Tags: adrian · science

The Strength of Weak Ties

August 9th, 2007 · 1 Comment

Anyone who’s read about social networks and the ‘tipping point’ will know how important the connections between people are. It’s not enough to look at just the number and the individuals in the connections though – you have to look at their strength. While reading an article (I forget which) about social networks, I spotted [...]

Tags: science · web