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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. ...

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Patrick LockerbyRSS Feed of this column.

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 »

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Where Science Meets Poetry

Caveat:  it may strike the reader from what follows that I have an agendist stance against modern poetry.  I have no quarrel with that assessment.


Quite obviously, science meets poetry in the field of linguistics.  But what if scientists could embrace poetry?  What if a paper in, say, oceanography, were rendered in the media as poetry?  Would the public more readily grasp the core concepts?

As moontide drags her weary way
through ocean, sea, and gulf, and bay ...

I think you see my drift1.

Boring Science Produces Awesome results


The simple scientific observation that you can't use the same energy twice is absolutely awesome!

This is a further article in my occasional series about coal, engines and energy, heat and thermodynamics.


What is 'hot'; what is 'heat'?
Marc Morano - Global Superhero

In one of the most philanthropic gestures ever from a mere political journo-lobbyist, Marc Morano has taken upon his own shoulders the entire burden of global climate change.

Marc_Morano does not think global warming is anything to worry about.  He is utterly convinced that it is the greatest scam in history, a fraud, a pack of lies, etc. etc.
Knowledge Should Inform Belief


Unfortunately, belief is all too often used as an excuse for selectively ignoring knowledge.


... real-world knowledge does not exist simply to be cherry-picked according to one’s own beliefs, but to be made sense of, and to form one’s beliefs.
Kerr Jac - Ideas and Ego.
Pegasus - A Load Of Horse Feathers?


Evolution proceeds by producing variants of a life-form which may, or may not, thrive in their current environment.  An interesting question arises: "In an alternate history of Earth, could horses have evolved feathers?"


Image source: Wikimedia, public domain.

Rhubarb May, Or May Not, Fight Cancer

Current news reports about cancer-fighting chemicals in rhubarb may lead some people to think that eating a lot of rhubarb is a good idea.  Bad move!  Rhubarb is widely renowned as a laxative!

Researchers have found that the traditional favourite, like many red vegetables, contains cancer killing chemicals.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk
Eating baked rhubarb could help fight cancer, research suggests.