I’m mainly blogging at the Guardian at the moment. Today I posted a piece on the fossil fuel disinvestment campaign, which has been rolling through US universities for a while. In essence, disinvestment is the opposite of investment, inviting people to think about how their money’s being used when they’re not using it themselves. There’s … Continue reading »
Filed under science …
“I’m a scientist. I shall be my own Minister for Science”
Via a mate who’s just read the new Thatcher biography by Charles Moore. On Thatcher, scientific advice and “the weather”: “Dr John Ashworth, the Chief Scientist, who worked within the Central Policy Review Staff, asked to see Mrs Thatcher shortly after she had arrived at No. 10. As he entered, the Prime Minister said: ‘Who … Continue reading »
A Life of Galileo: What Brecht can teach us about the public ownership of science
This post first appeared on New Left Project. The central tourist strip of Stratford-upon-Avon is not the sort of place you expect to find much Marxism. It’s all a bit Ye Olde Costa Coffee, Anne Hathaway fudge, postcards, postcards, postcards and pink fridge magnets quoting As You Like It. The most subversive it gets is … Continue reading »
Why “scientific literacy” is silly, again.
The prize of smugness for anyone who can correctly guess which event caused a friend to text me this last year. I spent an evening earlier this month doing some public engagement about public engagement. Or, talking about scientific literacy in a pub in Bloomsbury as part of the regular “Big Ideas” debates. If you … Continue reading »
Science policy and social media
ANNOUNCEMENT: I’m part of a new blog network at the Guardian, “Political Science“. I’ll keep this for more personal/ niche content though. My first post there considers the way the public (or forms of publicity) are used to help reform science in the All Trails campaign. It’s based on a short talk I gave at … Continue reading »
The Production of Nonknowledge
UCL’s Science and Society reading group discussed an interesting paper on the production of non-knowledge, what science decides not to look at, why and how. It’s interesting because the growing literature on the sociology of ignorance – e.g. agnotology – often sees it as a problem, but as this paper points out, it’s a routine … Continue reading »
Animal testing, activism around science, and brown dogs
Stuffed fox in Oxford Museum of Natural History. I don’t know how it died. My January column for Popular Science UK is now online. This one’s on the public debate about animals in research. I was interested in some debate surrounding some slightly dodgy reporting of a poll on animal testing. Except, considering the paucity of the … Continue reading »
The Science Museum is pants
Last night I gave a short talk at Museums Showoff. This is a slightly more coherent text version of my set. But first, here’s a picture of the world’s biggest tyre (ground floor of the Wellcome Wing). For several years in the mid-naughties, I was on the cover of the Science Museum guidebook. It was … Continue reading »
“Publishing” my PhD
I submitted my PhD thesis in Summer 2008 and am more than a little ashamed that it’s taken me this long to put it up here. There are lots of reasons for this. Mainly (a) Laziness. (b) A post-PhD feeling of ”Oh this is crap. I have to hide it, and possibly myself, under the largest … Continue reading »
Talking about climate change
Future it be now, Vancouver. My column for the December edition of Popular Science UK magazine is online (you have to subscribe to read January’s one, on animal testing). The column first went live just before the Doha climate talks, and focuses on what I see as a lack of government support on communicating climate change. I remembered Mike Shanahan’s blogpost … Continue reading »
