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  • Disneyworld Day 5: Kennedy Space Center

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    1–2 minutes

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    We booked a trip to Kennedy Space Center today with Gray Line, which looked like the best choice for people staying at Disneyworld who don’t (or in our case, can’t) drive. By and large it worked out pretty well – we got picked up directly from our hotel. Unfortunately, our coach driver provided wholly unwelcome…

  • Initial Thoughts on KSR's Aurora

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    4–6 minutes

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    Spoilers abound for the entire plot of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy changed my life. I was 14 and reading plenty of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov when I idly flipped through our monthly book club brochure. They usually didn’t have any…

  • A History of the Future in 100 Objects

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    2–3 minutes

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    Last year, I listened to a programme on Radio 4 called A History of the World in 100 Objects. It took 25 hours, or 1500 minutes. In the show, the BBC and the British Museum attempted to describe the entire span of human history through 100 objects – from a 2 million year-old Olduvai stone…

  • Bits and Pieces: Centuries

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    3–4 minutes

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    1 comment on Bits and Pieces: Centuries

    Weather In a book about weather (called ‘Weather’) that I’m reading, there’s a fact that blithely states: Driest location: The Atacama Desert in Chile has virtually no rainfall (0.08mm annually), except for a passing shower several times a century. Not several times a year. Several times a century. What impresses me about this is not…

  • Termination Shock

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    Termination shock – ‘the termination shock is the boundary marking one of the outer limits of the sun’s influence’. How cool. I found this on one of my random meanderings through Wikipedia.

  • Star formation

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    4–6 minutes

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    Another long-haul flight, another blog post. After I’ve exhausted the in-flight movies, this month’s issues of Scientific American and the New Yorker, listened to one and a half episodes of In Our Time, and even done some work, I’ve had to fall back to the option of last resort – writing a post for this…

  • Accelerating Mass

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    2–3 minutes

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    The last couple of episodes of In Our Time on Radio 4 have been particularly good. The first was on Pragmatism, not a topic that I initially had much interest in until I discovered that the philosophy of pragmatism, especially that of Charles Peirce, is rather close to what I support – unsurprising, given that…

  • Aliens hacking Earth via SETI

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    1–2 minutes

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    Scientists, be on guard … ET might be a malicious hacker – nice to see people starting to think about the possibility of a viral attack by aliens. Doesn’t seem too outlandish to me (honestly) and brings to mind shades of Vernor Vinge.

  • Space Odyssey

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    2–3 minutes

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    When you think of big budget BBC documentaries, Walking with Dinosaurs normally comes up top. While it was a big hit, I wasn’t too fond of it because I didn’t think the CGI looked quite as good as Jurassic Park and hence looked a bit too shiny and unrealistic. However, their latest documentary, Space Odyssey:…

  • Fight the good fight

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    2–3 minutes

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    3 comments on Fight the good fight

    I’ve often wondered what it is I’d like to do in my life. Science, Mars, politics (of the non-traditional sort), education, alternate reality games have all appealed and continue to appeal. But perhaps one of the things I feel most passionately about is intelligent thinking and rational thought – science and the enlightenment, in short.…