In the comedy The Switch, the protagonist early on briefly encounters a homeless person who appears to be narrating his inner thoughts out loud, in a continuous, verbal, stream-of-consciousness. Taxi. Taxi driver. Taxi, taxi, taxi, taxi. Fat, pedaling, hooker-looking bitch. Pig-faced… Pig-faced, gimpy, limping mama. Man-boy. Little man-boy. Beady-eyed little
Owen Cumming Owen is a science communicator with a background in ecology and evolutionary biology. Owen enjoys surfing, hiking and convincing himself that his terrible woodworking has a “rustic” look. He firmly believes that quokkas’ smiles imply malicious intent. particle.scitech.org.au Tides are the natural rise and fall
It’s strange how many supposed “mysteries” persist in the popular imagination, long after they’ve been pretty much solved. The Bermuda Triangle, Stonehenge, the Tunguska explosion, the “Missing Link”. And, of course, how the Great Pyramids were built. There’s not much mystery left about how the pyramids were
In the last few weeks, another comet was making an appearance in the sky. Unfortunately, it wasn’t visible to the naked eye until it was nearing its closest approach to the Sun. This meant that, like the planet closest to the Sun, Mercury, it was only visible at all
New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out with Science nzdsos.com In this article we highlight the ways in which scientific fraud is being used to predict catastrophic events and the ideology and funding behind these practices. The Club of Rome An early computerised predictive model was used more than 50 years
Owen Jennings Owen Jennings is a former ACT MP bassettbrashandhide.com I am old enough to remember getting out of bed at 3.00am on cold mornings to listen to the radio broadcast by Winston McCarthy of the All Blacks playing in South Africa. No TV’s back then. McCarthy’
brownstone.org Is academic freedom becoming a casualty of the modern university, as the latter is transformed by the public-private partnerships that increasingly dominate our political life? Just before Easter, a Montreal man, father of four and full professor at a university founded shortly after Harvard, was informed of his
History is littered with the corpses left behind by utopian revolutionaries. As Jordan Peterson points out, it’s pointless to condemn the grim toll of, say, the Maoists or the Stalinists, if we don’t forensically examine the ideologies that motivated their crimes and catastrophes. For instance, the Maoists insisted
Early in its history, the Earth was routinely bombarded with meteorites and even other planets. Thankfully for those of us who call it home, that cosmic smash-up derby has eased off over time. This is partly due to outer planets like Jupiter, and even our own Moon, acting as something
In Australian author Greig Beck’s ripping Lost World Primordia series, a group of moderns are time-transported into the primeval South American jungle. They encounter all sorts of prehistoric beasties, all very much alive and hungry. But the ‘boss’ monster is a terrifying gigantic snake: the aptly named Titanoboa: 14m
It’s often said that all Western philosophy is ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’. Of course, Plato was the successor to Socrates (and if you pronounced that ‘Soh-krayts’, you’re clearly a person of culture and distinction), and the contemporary of Aristotle, but it’s certainly indisputable that Plato’
Those of us of a certain age will remember when global cooling was the big End of the World story of the day. Even the Clash got in on it: The Ice Age is coming! At the time, a bright-eyed young, teenaged me did an internship at a leading scientific
I rather suspect that the fad for “indigenous maths and science” among Humanities academics is driven by their own inability to comprehend maths and science. Anyone can be a maths genius, after all, if your mathematics doesn’t involve counting past ten — twenty, if you take your shoes off. And
Some kids have all the luck. Like most kids, I was a dinosaur fanatic. I still am. I was lucky enough, at least, to go on a bona fide fossil dig, in my early teens. I’ve fossicked a handful of minor fossils since. But nothing like little Lily Wilder’
As I’ve written before, so many conventional wisdoms are built on foundations of quicksand. From the firmly held belief in “Settler Colonialism” in the New World to the endlessly asserted claims of low immigrant crime, so much that we’re furiously finger-wagged is “fact”, is anything but. Interviewing Jello
The space race was as much about geopolitics as it was about science, adventure, or the spirit of man, or whatever palaver Kennedy was prone to speechifyin’. The simple fact was the Soviet Union had humiliated its Cold War rival by launching the first satellite, then the first human into
