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 readingYear: 2011
resistance 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 […]
Continue readingthe human family tree gets even more complex
Once upon a time, a long time ago when I was a high school student, I remember being taught about human evolution as a fairly linear, straightforward narrative. OK, there were those ‘robust’ australopiths (aka Paranthropus) on a dead-end side branch, but otherwise species followed species – beginning around 14 million years ago with Ramapithecus (or Sivapithecus) – until you […]
Continue readinghappy new year, & thanks for all the fish
Or so our cats might be forgiven for thinking. For among the many things that have occupied the family’s time in the last couple of weeks (along with moving house, having elderly relations to stay for Christmas, & cleaning up the old house for sale) has been the Great Goldfish Shift.
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