When a tree dies, or when we run across decaying wood in a forest, our first reaction is to think we should remove it. However, the ecology of the forest is such that saproxylic organisms, including…

Dear Mr. Trump, Please Can We Study Our Climate? To the President-elect, Sir,     please consider that if climate scientists of the past had not been supported by wealthy patrons we…

Back to Square 1 - First Steps in Climate Science Step 1 - we humans discover that the Arctic accumulates more heat on a summer's day then the equatorial regions. Step 2 - we realise that our…

The Pitch and the Pendulum (Pace1 Edgar Allan Poe) Some people take comfort in the back-and-forth sway of the political pendulum. It is part of the greatness of our ‘two-party system’, they contend;…

A new paper by the ATLAS collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider produces results in good agreement with standard model predictions: the unitarity of the cross section of the vector-boson…

A recent news post on an exciting breakthrough in prostate cancer, which appeared this month of November 2016, piqued my interest since the subject was close to the research I worked on myself as a…

Mark Bittman, cookbook guru and former New York Times columnist for those who self-identify as being the latest nutritional trend followers, has had success telling other people how to run their…

I had previously discussed the amplitude of the ~0.88-day signal of Boyajian's star (or KIC 8462852.) If you look at the amplitude series alongside gradual dimming of the star throughout the…

An Interconnection Between All Things? All matter within the universe is interconnected and holds within it, the memory of its interconnection. The laws of motion are an example of this…

Did Donald Trump Really Win Bigly? Did President-elect Donald Trump Win Bigly, or did he suffer an attack of the mumpsimus? We all know that the Donald loves to use superlatives, but 'bigly'? …

Data visualization is a key tool in Data Science. You should always look at your data. Invariably, you will discover aspects of the data you might not notice if you just blindly run algorithms on it…

Environmentalists almost certainly cost Secretary Hillary Clinton the election and now they want to act as a violent alternative to President-elect Trump. President Obama had consistently sided with…

Etiquette for PoliticiansSome burning questions of the day for President-elect Donald Trump. Etiquette for Politicians Should a democrat not curtsey to a monarch?Should a communist ask favours from…

INPI - a treasure trove of French inventions Do you have French ancestors?  Perhaps, somewhere in the archives, is a patent for something your ancestor invented. INPI - Institut National de la…

Allegation - a new -ism Having marked my return to blogging with one new word - egestatism - I thought I may as well invent another. We already have handwaving and whataboutery which appear to be de…

All the life has been sucked out of our economy in the last few decades, and somehow we do not know what to do about it. Maybe that is because we are socialized into accepting our lives in modern…

The Neglected Majority In every nation, state or county that I am aware of there is a tendency for lawmakers to discriminate against the poor, whether directly or indirectly. Some politicians favour…

As Hurricane Matthew dissipated and we all realized it was not as bad as predicted, we were relieved. Did we feel anger at the governor and the press for over-predicting the storm? No – how…

[Update 11/12/2016: Is it all an optical illusion? Read the follow-up.] [Update 11/7/2016: Visually, fast drops in a time series, like those of D140 and D260, will tend to appear to squash any noise…

The premise of this two-part blog post is that this presidential campaign has outdone every other. This time, the altered reality has already transpired and the election itself will be an anti-climax…