Random Thoughts

Last week it was Science, with a swath of Ardipithecus papers. This week Nature has an above-average issue. I can't vouch for the quality of the papers (since I havent' finished them yet), but these…

This just in: Berlusconi is not above the law. In a reassuring sentence the judges of the Italian "Consulta" of the constitutional court have ruled today that the "Lodo Alfano", a law strongly wanted…

Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been…

To test whether my belief that homeopathy is not an evidence-based rational system of medicine is reasonable or just prejudice on my part, I did a quick experiment using Google Scholar. (This was…

I was reading Charlie Brooker's excellent column in The Guardian and was disappointed to learn that our educational system, underfunded though it is, seems to have bought into the wave of pseudo-…

Following on from a debate I had some time ago, in relation to alternative medicine (see my "Life Energy" rant) I tried to summarise the materialist view of the universe, to try and explain the…

Polly Toynbee has written a great article titled Quackery and superstition - available soon on the NHS"A sharp line has to be drawn between fact and fiction when it comes to spending public funds on…

Not a bad way to end a paper: The past is difficult to recover because it was built on the foundation of its own history, one irrevocably different from that of the present and its many possible…

The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific "truth." But what is the source of knowledge?…

I have been a CrackBerry user for several years, and am rarely seen without it in my hand or on my belt. Last week I traded my 8700 for the Bold (9000) -- wow, what a good move! The Bold is faster,…