A little while back I wrote a post on the fact that so-called ‘intelligent design’ is simply creationism by another name, a name intended to obscure the link & to get around the US prohibition on teaching religion in science classes. When this was posted on the NZ Sciblogs site, one commenter said, Firstly, there […]
Continue readingMonth: January 2011
the improbability of an eye
Because I seem to have very little time on my hands at the moment, I thought I would re-post something I wrote very early on in my blogging career – it hasn’t dated & in fact is quite relevant to a more recent post on ‘intelligent design’ creationism The camera-type eye of humans (& in […]
Continue readingchanging the culture of science education at research universities
That’s the attention-grabbing title of a new paper in Science magazine’s ‘education forum’ section (Anderson et al. 2011). Most readers will know that science education is a subject dear to my heart, & a topic that Marcus & I write on from time to time (here & here, for example). The authors are all professors at the […]
Continue readingthe mind’s eye
I always enjoy reading Oliver Sacks’ books, not least for the wonderful anecdotes but also with the humane, compassionate way in which he described & discusses the various problems that his patients present with. And so I was delighted to get my hands on another one, The Mind’s Eye – as the title suggests, this volume examines the ways in […]
Continue readingresistance to science
One of the topics that comes up for discussion with my Sciblogs colleagues is the issue of ‘resistance to science’ – the tendency to prefer alternative explanations for various phenomena over science-based explanations for the same observations. It’s a topic that’s interested me for ages, as teaching any subject requires you to be aware of […]
Continue readingsomething old & something new
Due to popular request (oh, all right, one of my colleagues asked), I thought I’d upload some pictures of the old & new fishponds. Meant to do it when I first wrote about the Great Goldfish Shift but for some reason our VPN server kept cutting me off when I tried to upload the images, […]
Continue readingpesky little hoppers
With the new house came a long drive lined with agapanthus. My mother would have said, "the dreaded agapanthus", & she wouldn’t have been far wrong. I don’t like the things very much; they spread very vigorously & I tend to view them as a weed. (I see from Te Ara that Biosecurity New Zealand was […]
Continue readingplankton & philosophy – and critical thinking
Grant & I have stumbled across another NZ science blog, planktonandphilosophy (well, he did the stumbling & then pointed me there). We both particularly liked the excellent post on misreporting of statistics on armed bank robberies: if you took the headlines at face value, the number of armed heists soared last year. But this post […]
Continue readinggoldfish & duckweed
Well, our happy expectations of duckweed & waterfern carpeting the top of our nice new goldfish pond have been dashed – the little beggars (fish) scoffed the lot! We’ve restocked with weed from the old pond but somehow I suspect we might be doing that for a while. Which shows how ignorant I am about […]
Continue reading‘intelligent design is not creationism in any shape or form’ – yeah, right!
A few weeks ago one of my fellow SciBloggers, Siouxsie Wiles, wrote an interesting piece about a childrens’ film that she’d seen where the underlying message seemed to be: you don’t have to understand, you just have to believe. Which as she says, does rather encapsulate a lot of pseudo-scientific nonsense that’s promoted these days […]
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