Another one for legalisation?

Lots of excellent commentary on the controversial clause 14 (which creates a strict liability offence for paying for sex with a trafficked prostitute, regardless of the punter’s knowledge) on the Lords of the blog site. Exaggeration of...

Thanksgiving turkey physics

Turkey electrocution, according to Benjamin Franklin, is a way of creating the perfect Thanksgiving turkey. Not one for the faint of heart, and probably not for Ali Blah Blah. Happy Thanksgiving to all our American and ex-pat chums.

Signatures of consciousness

Astonishing Edge on consciousness. Experiments show a clear, repeatable non-linear threshold between new events being in consciousness and not (the example is the masking effect of showing a subliminal word and then a string of letters; varying the gap between the...

What’s to be done with science?

As #alanjohnsonnuttsack continues to rumble on, there is a deep question emerging: how do we present science effectively. If we hold to the fact that all current science could be wrong, we get Clive James and others telling us we are promoting hatred. If we try and...

What consensus means in science

I was unpleasantly annoyed by a Clive James item on the radio yesterday, which you can read in full. I enjoyed the discussion of the golf ball crisp, but then he moves on to scepticism about man’s responsibility for climate change, suggesting that because there...