Random Thoughts

Why I've been away and why I'm back. I'm 79yo now.  I receive a state pension which falls short by about £50 a week from what I need to keep paying bills.  I took a break from social media…

Richard Garwin, who died on May 13, 2025, at the age of 97, was sometimes called “the most influential scientist you’ve never heard of.” He got his Ph.D. in physics at 21 under Enrico Fermi – a Nobel…

If the supply chain collapsed tomorrow, could you build a toaster?  Would you really even want to try? People make homemade jam and all-natural weedkillers that are ironically stuffed with…

On this day, April 25, in 1929, the world learned how astronomer Edwin Hubble had discovered that the universe was much larger than we had believed. On this day in 2025, you can preorder a book and…

Lard culture wasn't that long ago. Given the renewed prevalence of Health Whisperers, those progressive forms of trad wives who fetishize the ancient ways, lard is now an alternative food fad, sold…

(Image by Henry Reich)        One thing, singular. Two or more things, plural. Subjects must agree with verbs in number: It is, they are. Of all the cows in the meadow…

In 2023, I bit the bullet by signing a book contract with Springer to work on a difficult compilation of scientific misconduct and problematic science publishing practice. It was planned as an edited…

As we approach the fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 lockdowns, there has been ample time to look at what went wrong, and perhaps how we didn't learn much from history. There are many examples and…

During Christmas holidays I tend to indulge in online chess playing a bit too much, wasting several hours a day that could be used to get back on track with the gazillion research projects I am…

I rarely win when it comes to cultural language stuff. Before 1999, an attractive older woman, for example, was to me a "Momshell" and no woman had any objection to a portmanteau of mom and bombshell…