I haven’t managed to settle to blogging for a few days – like everyone else I know, I’ve followed the dreadful events in Christchurch and wondered what on earth I could do (settling on dispensing hugs both real & virtual, offering beds to friends & family if they need to leave home, and making a donation […]
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a (shaky) date for your diaries
I noticed an intriguing headline in Saturday’s Waikato Times: "Quake forecast a horoscope." On reading further I found it led to an article based on a prediction by Ken Ring, who claims to be able to use the Moon’s position relative to Earth to predict the weather, that there would be an earthquake somewhere in the […]
Continue readingthere are some questions that google can’t answer…
… and I’m afraid that Facebook isn’t the place to go looking either. I was happily reading Pharyngula while eating lunch (& trying to avoid dropping crumbs into my keyboard), and decided that as a good pharyngulite I should perhaps pharyngulate a poll for once. (I was not at all surprised to find that ‘pharyngulate’ is now a word […]
Continue readingwhere do you find the ideas for your posts?
"Where do you find the ideas for your posts?" It’s a question I get asked reasonably often, by both colleagues & students. They probably think I bang on a bit in my answer, but it’s not as simple as a straightforward list 🙂
Continue readingwhy do people blog?
A while ago now I gave a seminar at work called something like The joys of science blogging. (Well, I enjoy it!) It was basically a case for the benefits to scientists and the community of having researchers who also blog about their science from time to time. Don’t think I made any converts at the time […]
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 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.
Continue readingtechnical hiccups
Well, it’s nice to be back on line! I haven’t had much chance to write anything in the last week, but it would have been nice to have been able to if I’d wanted… Reasons for not posting: a) the registrar & I have been incredibly busy at work, trying to process student enrolments before […]
Continue readingscience & innovation in education – your thoughts, please
I’ve just received an e-mail about a forum on Science & Innovation in Education, which’ll be held next year in Wellington on 19-20 April. Now, quite apart from the fact that I’d really like to go to this one, I thought I’d write a bit about the forum here because my correspondent is in the throes […]
Continue readingseven signs of bogus science
Over at Sciblogs there’s a lengthy comments thread on vaccination, following an excellent post by Darcy on some myths about vaccines. I hesitate to call the thread a ‘debate’ because, frankly, it’s impossible to actually debate someone who practices what evolutionary biologists would call the ‘Gish gallop’ – firing off so many factoids that you […]
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