Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Phil Plait writes about the “The Great Kersten Blunder”, the story of a probe to Venus that was lost because a programmer made a stupid mistake. OK, first the actual story. The great Kersten Blunder is about the error made by Kersten (programmer) on the Vigor space probe’s converting program. He made an error in the … Read more
You might have become rather excited if you spotted the news about the detection of an apparently artificial signal coming from a distant star, for example The Observer published this on 29th Aug … Not a Drill: SETI Is Investigating a Possible Extraterrestrial Signal From Deep Space If the signal is truly from an alien world, … Read more
Once a view is adopted and embraced, is that it, or can humans break free? The answer is of course that people can and do break free from previous ideas and instead accept that they were once wrong. Generally however it does take time, and they also need to work it out for themselves. Chad Myers … Read more
Peter Wadhams, perhaps one of the world authorities on sea ice, has a new book that might be of interest. It is quite rightly called “A Farewell to Ice“. Well OK, not quite published yet, because publication date is 1st Sep in the UK (alas US folks, it is not out there until next Feb, but hey … Read more
There are a few stories doing the rounds of the clash on live Australian TV between UK Physicist Brian Cox and the Climate change denying senior Australian politician, Malcolm Roberts, so let’s take a look and see what happened. The background here is that Mr Roberts had earlier issued a challenge for anybody to show him evidence that … Read more
Well, its official, the numbers are now in for last July and as expected it was hot on a global scale. To be precise, it was the hottest July ever recorded in human history and broke all previous records. What is quite frankly astonishing is that every single month this year has been a record … Read more