Month: March 2014

I’ve been on Twitter since June 2007, I wasn’t particularly active early on, as you can see from the frequency of tweets in my archive. But for those of you worried that I changed over the years, here’s a screengrab from my archive showing the first clutch of tweets and their relevance then to what I still post about now – Songs, Snaps, Science. Not that, as far as I know, anyone cares…but you were warned early on. ;-)

Incidentally, there is a quick way to reveal your very first tweet here. You could put my twitter handle in there if you really want to see my totally lame and embarassing first tweet.

You can say what you like about politicians…but deep, deep down, they’re all self-serving, money-grubbing, knee-jerking, U-turning bustards. It seems that here in Brit Land we have a particularly peculiar penchant for those that are also dullards and bores. But, at least, come budget time, they get their priorities right in terms of voter retention: no extra tax and beer nor bingo. And we get a new pound coin that looks ironically like the old threepenny bit we had until decimalisation. You know that era of endless food rationing, world wars, abject poverty, no national health service, no antibiotics nor vaccines, tuberculosis, polio, diptheria, workhouses etc…

Interesting additional point, the 12-faced (14-faced not counting indentations, grooves, lettering, Queen’s mugshot etc) coin would be easily recognisable jangling around during a game of pocket billiards in a blackout. A blackout you say? Like wot they had during WWII? Indeed…could be quite timely given the resurrection of the Cold War and fears of WWIII…

A beautiful bearded dragon, Pogona vitticeps, or beardie, snapped it at our school summer fair back in 2006.

According to Wiki P. vitticeps, the central (or inland) bearded dragon, is a species of agamid lizard occurring in a wide range of arid to semiarid regions of Australia. This species is very popularly kept as a pet and exhibited in zoos.

Scientists today announced that they have observed gravity waves – ancient ripples from the Big Bang. Here’s a conversation piece about the science and Nature has something on the BICEP2 discovery of primordial gravity waves too. And, here’s a gravitational playlist to give you something to listen to while you get your head around this concept, try eating an apple, it might provide nourishment for your brain too…you could of course have anything by The Fall.

NB It seems a lot of the reporting on this discovery is confusing gravitational waves with gravity waves. They are not the same thing. Gravitational waves are ripples in the curvature of spacetime that propagate as a wave as predicted in general relativity by Einstein in 1916. By contrast, gravity waves are waves formed when a liquid sloshes around, the wind waves on the sea are an example of gravity waves. Carolyn Porco is trying to educate the wider media on this point as editors seem to be using the words gravitational and gravity interchangeably in reports on the BICEP2 discovery.

Words ending with “oid” often have their root in the Latinized form of the Greek -oeides, from eidos meaning form and so the suffix is used to suggest that something is like something else but isn’t actually the thing itself. Viz: ovoid means egglike, android mean manlike, humanoid means like a human. There are lots of examples in medicine and science: opioid, cannabinoid, haemorrhoid, paraboloid etc etc. Then, there’s factoid…

…now that’s a funny one. Most people use the word factoid to mean a neat little fact, but that would be factette, surely from the French-derived suffix “ette”, which feminizes a noun, the rather sexist implication being that an “ette” is smaller than the full-sized item. As in kitchenette (small kitchen), serviette (a napkin rather than a tablecloth), launderette (a small laundry) etc.

But…factoid means “like a fact” more precisely, something that is like a fact has only the appearance of a fact, it’s not a fact, it’s often Deceived Wisdom, Things like being able to see the Great Wall of China from the Moon (you cannot), Al Gore claiming to have invented the Internet (he never did make that claim) or that one about Apple Macs never getting viruses (yeah, right, Mr Jobs).

I doubt any of this will stick and it’s why I didn’t call my book Factoids, it would’ve been confusing. The fact that factoid means “like a fact and not actually a fact” and should more correctly be called a factette will remain the archetypal self-referring factoid…

It was twenty five years ago that Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN came up with a technology that would revolutionise communication – it was based on hypertext markup language (HTML) – and they gave it the rather unwieldy name of the World Wide Web.

It was just under twenty five years ago that a wet-behind-the-ears science journalist pitched a story to perhaps the most popular of popular science magazines in the UK. The pitch was about a new technology that was being developed by scientists at CERN that would revolutionise communication…

Unfortunately, for said rookie science journalist, he was not persuasive enough and was told by the desk editor at the magazine that all this html and www nonsense sounded like nothing more than shuffling files around on computers and that we already had FTP, the file-transfer protocol, to do that. And the pitch was spiked.

How short-sighted that editor was. How frustrated that young science journalist with his world-changing scoop was…

…oh well.

It seems to me that too many people take pride in declaring that they don’t understand mathematics, science, computers, technology and stuff, but wouldn’t dream of admitting they didn’t know about politics nor of holding back in expressing an opinion about the economy, art, music etc. On #WorldMathsDay and the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web, isn’t it time we shrugged off the notion that mathematics is only for the geeks? Our brains are actually hard-wired to understand maths, indeed without that inbuilt pattern recognition, the primordial building blocks of grammar and syntax, we wouldn’y have the spoken word. It’s not always easy to understand or explain…but neither is Shakespeare or the Ukraine crisis…

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