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Understanding The Voynich Manuscript #4

Understanding The Voynich Manuscript #4 If not Latin, then what? Please see the links at...

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #3

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #3 Plants and the moon. For thousands of years, people...

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #2

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #2 An i for an i ? Not nymphs: women! There are...

Understanding The Voynich Manuscript #1

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #1 Tom, Dick and Harry explain a statistical method. ...

Patrick Lockerby

Retired engineer, 73 years young. Computer builder and programmer. Linguist specialising in language acquisition and computational linguistics. Interested in every human endeavour except the scrooge... Read More »

Jellyfish Blooms

Jun 05 2013 | comment(s)

Jellyfish Blooms

Newspapers are currently reporting a surge in jellyfish numbers in the Mediterranean.

Along with the surge in jellyfish numbers, or bloom, is a surge in bad reporting about global warming. This is one occasion when I am on the side of the 'natural cycles' folks: jellyfish have a 20 year boom and bust natural cycle.

The Mousetrap Myth

Jun 02 2013 | comment(s)

The Mousetrap Myth

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. The metaphor of a better mousetrap suggests that any really useful invention will be eagerly adopted. In this series of articles I trace a history of invention and discovery which shows that resistance is more likely than acceptance, even for proven life-saving inventions and facilities.

A better mousetrap ?

Gerald Warner Blows Wind

Jun 02 2013 | comment(s)

Gerald Warner Blows Wind

Gerald Warner is not a scientist: he is a polemicist. A very good polemicist, if that means someone who knows how to make good use of the diatribe dictionary. If there is a word or phrase which will get Gerald Warner a high ranking in a Google search, you can be sure to find it in his latest anti-warmist diatribe.

I have four questions and a request for you, Gerald Warner.

Question #1
Why do you feel the need to use the loaded language which I cite below ?

Architectural Folly And Trumpery

May 31 2013 | comment(s)

Architectural Folly And Trumpery

In 1984 Prince Charles provoked controversy when he called a proposed extension to London's National Gallery a "monstrous carbuncle".

What is good and what is bad about architecture? Science and engineering can tell us how strong a building is, but not how beautiful or ugly. Psychology might help, but should we have regard to science when we design a building ?

... there is one prize that the profession does its best to avoid winning. The Carbuncle Cup, for the ugliest building of the year, was launched by Building Design magazine in 2006, "for crimes against architecture".

New Arctic - New Discoveries

May 30 2013 | comment(s)

New Arctic - New Discoveries

The world is warming, but the Arctic is warming fastest. The Arctic of today is not the Arctic which 18th or 19th century explorers knew. Where ships were once likely to be crushed in heavy ice there is now often no ice in summer. Where ice shove once built natural sea walls we find coastal erosion as waves are now free to erode melting permafrost. New islands are being discovered, even as older islands erode away into sandbanks.