Richard pointed me at this wonderful life-expectancy simulation. Very sobering – a bit like visiting an ossuary – and fascinating, too.
It reminds me that I haven’t yet ported my Time’s Wingèd Chariot watchface to my Apple Watch. I’d better get working on it while I still can…
I picture a ne’er-do-well hobbit, probably an associate of Ted Sandyman’s, who is seldom seen, but is believed to be the source of much unexplained mischief at St Catharine’s College. He goes by the name of ‘Slippery’ Underfoot…
…may want to install their lavatories elsewhere?
Yesterday, I used my watch to buy entrance tickets at the Botanic Garden, and coffee at its café. This morning I paid for petrol using Paypal on my phone, and then used my watch to buy lunch at a local cafe and groceries at a local store.
I only had to get my wallet out today at the market, but that was to buy an old-fashioned apple pie, so I didn’t mind using an antique payment method.
I am looking forward to the day when wallets are things you see in costume dramas, though…
It’s an embarrassingly long time since I last visited Cambridge Botanic Gardens. Probably measurable in decades.
And that’s a pity, because it’s walking distance from my house and, as I discovered again today, it’s really a very pleasant spot.
From this interview with Tom Maudlin…
It’ s easy to prove that a ham sandwich is better than heaven, because:
I know, I keep taking photos of it, but, hey…
Pretty clouds today, stretching as far away across East Anglia as I could see.
They’re filming the new season of Grantchester in, well, Grantchester, at the moment. I wrote last year about spotting a favourite tree in one of the episodes. Well, it must have been a good location, because they were setting up for filming there again this morning as Tilly & I walked past.
Were I a true paperazzo, of course, I would have had something better than a zoomed iPhone camera with which to take the picture.
More importantly, it would not have been back in my pocket when, a few minutes later, the stars (James Norton and Morven Christie), in full costume and beautifully lit by the early morning sun, smiled their thanks at me as I stepped aside to let their LandRover cross the cattle grid. 🙂
Bird Hills, Ann Arbor, Michigan. This unusually-shaped tree changed its appearance completely as I walked around it, but this was my favourite angle. Click for larger image.
Here I am, almost visible on Google Streetview:
Or you can try to get a better view here if you’re curious! For future readers, it’s the April 2015 view…
I should have waved out of the window more vigorously when I saw the car, but then they’d just have blurred out my face anyway. (A wise precaution in any photo that includes me, for aesthetic reasons.)
The discussion below between Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins is mostly about atheism and belief, and the degree to which the atheist viewpoint can or should be promoted.
But at one point, about 1 hr 3 mins into the video, Tyson talks about why he’s worried that there aren’t more scientists in politics. Everyone seems to be a lawyer. And his concern is not for the perhaps more obvious reasons of, say, ensuring sufficient funding for research. It’s that lawyers are people trained to be good arguers of a point of view, regardless of whether it’s the view they necessarily hold themselves.
I want people who know how to make decisions in Congress, and I’m sorry, but I don’t count lawyers among those…
When we have two scientists, if we disagree, it’s because one of us is wrong, or the other is wrong, or we’re both wrong… and we both agree with that fact — that those are the three possibilities that exist, and we’re both waiting for more or better data, to resolve it — so that we will one day agree, and then go out and have a beer.
Lawyers don’t… it doesn’t happen that way… any time I’ve seen lawyers in conflict.
Now, I’d be a bit more generous to lawyers than that, perhaps because I’m married to one! Good lawyers are at least trained to examine all the possible arguments, which is a very valuable skill, not taught to everybody. In some ways, I think, they’re almost scientists. But this doesn’t change the fact that, at least outside the academic sphere, they are usually exploring these possibilities on the behalf of a client, so they’re looking to turn their awareness of the other arguments into a reinforcement of a predetermined point of view. This makes them effective, but undesirable, politicians.
It’s nice to think that, in theory at least, good scientists would be better…
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
RSS feed
Recent Comments