Robot insects on the march
3D printed flexoskeletons. In English, that would be “a cheap army of robot insects”: Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a new method that doesn’t require any special...
View ArticleWhen you write two trilogies and only realise it afterwards
Matt Ridley: Without planning to, I realise I’ve written two trilogies. The first trilogy was my three books on genetics: Genome, Nature via Nurture and Francis Crick. The second was my three books on...
View ArticleA Twitter dump
For several months now, as alluded to tangentially already today, I have a ever heightening heap of, in particular, tweets piling up in my computer, which I have in mind to say clever things about, and...
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Shark skin under microscope
Is this for steering, or just to damage you if you rub them up the wrong way? With thanks to Matt Ridley’s Twitter feed. According to a commenter, these are “dermodenticles”, but google asks: Did you...
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Signs of our time
Regulars here will know that I love to photo signs and notices. So evocative. So precise for defining a time, a place, a mood, or an official attitude. And never more so than right now: Those are some...
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Lockdown chat with Patrick
On June 2nd, Patrick Crozier and I had another of our recorded conversations, this time about Lockdown. In the course of this, I refer to a photo that I did take, and a photo that I didn’t take. The...
View ArticleFriday creatures Twitter dump (2): Confirmation that Nature sucks
More evolved ghastliness news from Steve Stewart-Williams: This unfortunate snail is infested with a parasitic worm, which is mimicking a caterpillar so a bird will eat it. The worm will then reproduce...
View ArticleQuite a lot of links to Steve Stewart-Willams creature tweets
Steve Stewart-Williams does great tweets, and his animal tweets are especially appealing. If you just want cute, there’s plenty of that. But if you want to tell yourself that you are also learning some...
View ArticlePaul Graham on how and why universities are in decline
I like this, by Paul Graham, and I especially like, towards the end of this, this: On the other hand, perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within universities is as much the symptom of the...
View ArticleMatt Ridley tells how vaccination became established in England
I have started reading Matt Ridley’s book about How Innovation Works. Here (pages 50-55) is his description of how vaccinating people against smallpox went from being fiercely criticised by the medical...
View ArticleCovid-19 is all over bar the “Casedemic”!
I got to this ten minute video lecture by Ivor Cummins via a Facebook posting by David Ramsay Steele. Steele had earlier written a piece which I half noticed a few days ago, as a result of someone...
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Cardboard face
It’s a common experience. I’m making absolutely no claim to originality here. We humans regularly see faces where we know, even as we see these faces, that there are no real faces to be seen. Yet, we...
View Article“I love it when Dawkins admitted that!”
I recently watched this duet rant by David Wood and, when he can get a word in, Robert Spencer. David Wood, a new name to me, is a Christian, but not the sort of Christian who believes in turning the...
View ArticleFive pendulums getting into step
Or should it be “pendula”? Probably not, because that sound vaguely sexual in a rather creepy way. I am now assuming that this video is showing the same phenomenon as the wobbling of the Millennium...
View ArticleA couple of recommendations for understanding The Plague
I am no doubt biased, by my libertarian politics to start with, and by the guesses I have already expressed in (what passes for me as) public. Nevertheless, for whatever it may be worth, I found this...
View ArticleNico Metten describes the “casedemic”
Facebook friend and actual friend Nico Metten, on Facebook, puts the case against “cases”: One very simple thing for everyone to understand. Cases mean nothing. Deaths is what counts. There is no...
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Blue mountains in the far distance
Here is a panoramic photo by 6k, of a striking local (to him) scene. Panoramic presumably means that he photoed a big spread of photos and then some cunning computer programme stitched them together...
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Ivor Cummins speaks to Niall Boylan
Yesterday. As an (I hope) intelligent layman, I am finding this radio interview to be at a very helpful level, so to speak, of scientific complexity. There’s plenty of science, but it is well...
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Butterfly on wall
Via the latest clutch of David Thompson ephemera, my favourite of these: A somewhat nicer way to apply colourful decoration than what’s in this photo, I think. Besides which, applied colour need only...
View ArticleHow politics and sport are spreading the truth about Covid
I still think that this earlier posting here was right about the direction that British public opinion is moving on the subject of lockdown, but I was clearly wrong about how far it had already changed...
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