When Simon Jenkins wrote in The Guardian a couple of months back about science being a new religion we all scoffed. Oh, how we scoffed. Scoff, scoff, scoff, scoff, scoff. Scoff. But having been at the Edinburgh Fringe for a few days now, I’m wondering if he might have had a point.
Walter Clement Noel was famous in the wrong circles for the wrong reasons. He died in Grenada in 1916 aged just 32. Over fifty years later, in the first decade of my life, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was far and away my favourite film. I must have seen it six or seven times, a huge tally in the days before VCRs and DVDs. The magical tale of endangered children rescued with the help of a flying car captivated my boyish mind.
I came across this today and found it quite remarkable. I’m not going to say anything more right now but, if you have a minute, test yourself with this short video. No questions just yet – just take a look. If you’d like to learn a bit more, then listen in to this week’s excellent Guardian Science Weekly Podcast. Please don’t give anything away in the comments – at least for a day.
I read an article by Matthew Reisz in Times Higher Education last week about the strained writing style of academic publications and it really got my goat. Don’t get me wrong — it’s a good piece and makes some valid points, several of which resonated strongly with me. Reisz wonders at the lack of pleasure in academic writing among writers and readers, which leads to the inanimate style of much academic prose.
Yesterday morning I was at the Royal Institution to hear David Willetts, the UK Minister for Science, outline the new government’s policy on science. His speech comes at a time when the government is issuing all sorts of warnings about the parlous state of the British economy.
Nerds Many of you will already have seen this because I have been promoting it shamelessly on twitter. But this is the video of the talk I mentioned in a post back in March that my daughter Eleanor gave on a topic she feels passionately about: corduroy. I thought it might amuse some of you.
In a dramatic move today, the Government responded to an unprovoked attack on scientists from Guardian writer Simon Jenkins by announcing radical new priorities for UK science.
It is the day after the day after the fortnight before. I had hoped to write sooner about the relentless work and tremendous fun I had participating in I’m a Scientist, Get me Out of Here over the past two weeks. But such was the nervous energy expended in the last week that it has taken me till now to recover my bearings.
Week two of “I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here!” is now upon me. This week the evictions start, so the competition is hotting up. I had meant to get around to writing a blog-post about week one, but I have been preoccupied with more pressing matters – like getting ready for week two. I hope to serve up a digest of my experiences of this public engagement once the hurly burly of the week is over.
It starts tomorrow. The floodgates will open and will not close again for two whole weeks. I mean of course that “I’m a scientist, get me out of here!” starts tomorrow morning. I have signed up to submit myself for interrogation — on any topic — by children from participating schools from around the country. Image hosted at flickr
This is, to my mind, a quite astonishing report about Nature Publishing Group (NPG) hiking its proposed 2011 journal subscription charges to the University of California (UC) by 400%. (NPG is the company that runs the Nature Network blogging platform). That’s right: 400%. I know nothing about the ins and outs of this deal.