Month: July 2007

You know it makes sense. Brilliant. Love all the disclaimers at the end … lends that air of autheticity. [via Rivets]

I’ve never been a smoker, but I have to agree with Ray Girvan and say I too miss smoking in pubs. Some of the essential character seems lost. As Ray says, they’re going to have to work at their atmosphere. (Ray’s piece is principally about the importance of the sense of smell in cultural memory … baking bread and brewing coffee to make the house you’re trying to sell appear homely, etc.)

Oddly at my sister’s house last week, she had an electric “fire” room heater that involved small pieces of real coal laid on the heating element, to evoke that “real fire” smell in the room, as the volatile tarry hydrocarbons are released when the coal is warmed.

A smell I can instantly recall from the very thought itself … takes me back to a time making coal-gas over the kitchen stove in my youth …. don’t ask. Another meta-meme.

Nick Maxwell’s most recent work “Is Science Neurotic ?”, was published last year, coinciding with his formation of the “Friends of Wisdom“, a campaign to promote the values of wisdom – the wisdom of value – in science generally, from basic education to the highest academic research.

Nick’s message coincides very closely with my own, that “basic empiricism” – the accepted logic that “scientific” knowledge is and should be based entirely on the apparent objectivism of refutation by empirical testing – is a fallacy, and that the preservation of that “faith” in the face of reality is fundamentally a psychological problem, a neurosis. Furthermore that neurosis is such a serious problem “of our time” that the very existence of what we value in the cosmos is threatened unless we wake up and face the facts.

Unusually, rather than my normal one-liners, I was moved to write a fairly lengthy review of Nick’s latest work – here.

Yes that’s an erstwhile battery powered Sinclair C5, fitted with a turbojet. Mad. Via Rivets

Seems the people at Steorn just did a public demo of their anomalous energy machine. Link via Nova Spivak. But they had a technical hitch. Hmmm, oh well.

Nice link here from Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science”.

Still unread on my list I must confess, but came across his official website promoting his latest work “Spook Country” via Rivets.

The (retiring age) chairman of a previous employer made an impression by naming Gibson’s “Neuromancer” as a must read for anyone participating in the information age. Still catching up.