Psychology Professor Michael Inzlicht has a confession to make . He’s been peddling shoddy wares – his words. And he's feeling quite bad about the whole thing. The work wasn’t just intellectually weak. It did real harm. Though his own proposals to popularise his ideas were kno...

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There was an ostensible “news” article on the ABC news site about Trump’s executive order (EO) titled “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.” The capitalisation is not mine; it is in the executive order FFS! Th...

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Michael Polanyi was highly suspicious of the hyper-reductionism of neo-Darwinism. It’s reduction of the evolution of a thing so vast as life into a single causal mechanism. And it was a good call. Darwin himself had proposed that natural selection was a major mechanism of evol...

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[video width="640" height="360" mp4="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Science-v-inhabiting-our-own-world.mp4"][/video] From a recent podcast interview with Tyson Yunkaporta This post began as a comment on David Walker's post on David Card's Nobel Prize for h...

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The Nobel Prize for Economics got announced and I was pleased to hear it went to David Card, Josh Angrist, and Guido Imbens. Among the best picks in years, I think. A lot will be written elsewhere about the many things they did, but what I want to honour them for is that I kno...

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It's here, the booklet I am sure you have all been waiting for. The one which Gigi Foster and Michael Baker slaved over for 10 months . It is also on Kindle . It is dedicated to all the victims of the Panic, in poor countries and rich countries. They include our children, the...

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Since I learned in April 2020 that transmission of covid was mainly via extremely small aerosols, I have regarded face masks as a placebo: they are to aerosols what garden gates are to mosquitoes. Yet, placebos have a role so I wasn't too against them and willing to have my as...

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Let us divide the countries in Europe that have at least 1 million inhabitants into three groups: the ones that had high movement restrictions in 2020, the ones with almost no restrictions, and the ones in between. The graph below gives you the punchline that countries with mo...

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I have been a utilitarian for about 30 years now and am seen in my academic work as an extreme version of the genre. I did my Phd on the topic . I do not merely say that governments should make policy for the benefit of the wellbeing of the population, but have spent years in...

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Wellbeing & Policy Making Book Launch Event on 1st July 5-6.30pm London Time. Attending the Launch is Free, the book is not! [blurb from Nancy Hey, director of the WW Centre for Wellbeing]: The What Works Centre for Wellbeing , and our commissioning partners at the ESRC: Econo...

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Wellbeing science has behaved very honourably during this pandemic in my opinion, particularly in the UK, where many of the best-known wellbeing researchers openly pointed to the disproportionate costs of lockdowns compared to their (dubious) benefits . Many stood up in newspa...

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Following a recent online conversation with Timothy Wilcox , I read Wordsworth’s extraordinary poem “We are seven” which I reproduce below. As you’ll see, it chimes with my own preoccupation with communication and mutual benefit across the chasm of difference. My own preoccupa...

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Now and then one should look up and see if there are any trends that are not usually talked about in the media but that say something big about how humanity is going. I here want to briefly discuss the latest data on four big trends: war, food, (hunger?) deaths, and inequality...

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Ed Diener , one of the best-known scholars of happiness died this week at the age of 76. He was known as Dr Happiness in the United States, well-known for his 7-item scale on wellbeing and his constant refrain that the secret to happiness is in warm social relations. I met Ed...

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Martin Lally is a kiwi economist who late in 2020 decided to calculate for himself what his own country was losing by locking itself away from the world, coming to the conclusion that New Zealand was sacrificing something like 26 life-years in the future to 'save' 1 life-year....

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Compared to the trends on January 2020, has Australia or Sweden lost more wellbeing in 2020? And which has seen the greater damage to expected future wellbeing years for after 2020? The Table below summarizes the answers to this. For the first calculation, let us only count th...

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As one the best illustrations of the way our minds deal with uncertainty, consider the following video. Please listen and watch at least 30 seconds so you can experience the three sequences of spoken words. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWGeUztTkRA[/embed] Pretty much...

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The essential governance problem in March 2020 in Western countries was the overwhelming demand of the vast majority of the population to do something dramatic in response to their fear. There was a clamour to be ‘led to safety’ by populations scared to death by images in the...

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With a recent publication in Nature that reported lockdowns have no effect on covid-cases or covid-deaths, there are now over 30 studies that fail to find any covid-reducing benefits of lockdowns. Worse, across countries and time, more severe lockdowns are just leading to more...

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Guess which crackpot started his article on covid in that notorious right-wing publication 'The Guardian' with the sentence "The virus has been used as a pretext in many countries to crush dissent, criminalise freedoms and silence reporting"? It's that obvious conspiracy-nutte...

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While the hysteria marches on here in Europe, an interesting economics article came out in a decent journal on the political economy of that mass hysteria. Their abstract: In this article, we aim to develop a political economy of mass hysteria. Using the background of COVID-19...

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Consider the picture below of two hypothetical Accident and Emergency departments (A&E), one that has no covid-regulations and simply has the available nurses trying to help all comers as fast as possible. In the other one the nurses try to prevent mingling by testing newcomer...

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I. Given its astonishing success, modern minds are mesmerised by science. So much so that various disciplines adopted certain mannerisms of science in order to make themselves more ‘scientific’. This is the intellectual sin Hayek and others called ‘scientism’. Having come to u...

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“men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses more slowly, and one by one.” MacKay, 1841. Right now, London and much of Europe are in peak covid-mania, entering another two months of lockdowns on to...

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2020 was certainly a roller coaster for a social scientist, full of surprises. Let me not once again bemoan the increasingly coordinated attack on all sources of vitality in Western civilisation, but look ahead and openly wonder about what 2021 will bring in terms of 7 specifi...

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Guess which countries in Europe have had the lowest average restrictions on individual behaviour from March to December according to researchers at the Blavatnik school of government in Oxford ? Guess which countries in the world have had the most or least stringent government...

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The animosity between the Chinese and Australian authorities is heating up, so we Westerners need to understand some of Chinese culture and politics. I do not have all the answers, but some 10 years of working and teaching on China have taught me about three traits that I hope...

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How are we going to escape the authoritarian nightmare and regain our liberties and zest for life? This long read is written for organisers of new Covistance initiatives, explaining the logic of what others have done and what could further be done. So I am speaking to those of...

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Ramesh Thakur is one of many commentators inside the Covistance who think government public health advisers have committed crimes against humanity . His anger was raised by reports of desperate parents in India selling their children into virtual slavery, including sexual expl...

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Sweden is a rich, spacious country famous for IKEA, ABBA, dark cold winters, and its unique covid-policies. We escaped London for a few days to see for ourselves what the deal was with this Scandinavian country of 10 million. It is as rich and well-run as the statistics say it...

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Those who already in March foretold the folly of lockdowns and social distancing did not dream we'd still be in the same place after 7 months. Only slowly has it dawned that the panic would become an enduring business model . For a long time, we believed sanity would soon prev...

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A group of senior medical scientists have gotten together to pen an open petition to governments and society, calling for a herd immunity approach to the coronavirus. Signatories already include over 3000 "Medical & Public Health Scientists", 4000 "Medical Practitioners", and...

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Have a look at the graph below which summarises (excess) deaths per week in 24 European regions , roughly the EU, over the last few years. Note how the vertical axis only starts at 40,000 and that hence the fluctuations relative to baseline are smaller than they seem here. The...

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Till 20 year ago, IQ scores in the West increased about 3 points per decade ever since the 1920s, a phenomenon known as the “Flynn effect”. That rise in IQ test scores, which have an average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, was attributed to improved schooling, improved...

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[Bottom line: the conflicting forces now being created in the UK and Australia are truly frightening.] The UK government has just announced a nationwide return of one of the most destructive elements of lock downs: mandatory social isolation. Gatherings of more than 6 people a...

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[below the exact text (with different font/highlight) as Gigi Foster's submission to the Victorian parliamentary library in mid-August here . To see her health-related notes, including on topics like non-linearities and Sweden, see here , and to see all documents of that inqui...

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For months now, demographers and other social scientists have been predicting a covid baby bust because marriages were postponed , pubs were closed, anxiety levels were up, measured fertility intentions were down, sexual activity went down (in some reports), and economic uncer...

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Suppose you agree with me that containment and elimination strategies pursued regarding Covid-19 do far more harm than good. Suppose you also believe that having an open economy and a vibrant close-contact social life is vital for the long-run health of the country. You want t...

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The UK Office of National Statistics data on the wellbeing of the British population shows a unprecedented drop of about 10% in average wellbeing in the UK since March 2020. Anxiety levels almost doubled, slowly returning to normal, but wellbeing remains low as people are prev...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=fEHYX3J8Jm4 Note, this essay was published in three parts in the Mandarin and is published in consolidated form (complete with its footnotes) here. It is impossible to remember, until one gets in the country … that they care about th...

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Cross posted from The Mandarin Premium . Government leaders understanding what they need to do when faced with impending issues is one thing. But here, in the first of a three-part series, Nicholas Gruen gets into the nitty-gritty of coming to terms with the 'how' of what need...

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There have long been scientists who were celebrities in their own time. Galileo, Keppler, Goodall, Linneus, Cousteau, Darwin, Smith, Leeuwenhoek, Da Vinci, Ibn Khaldhun, Curie, and many others in the last 800 years were followed and admired. They in many ways performed their s...

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Here is a new paper from Imperial College , this time by a team with David Miles, Mike Stedman, and A drian Heald, looking into the implicit cost per QALY that the UK spent via lock downs and other repression policies. They use a somewhat different methodology from mine , esti...

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There are 5 aspects of the covid-19 pandemic I really did not see coming, all pointing to a phenomenon that European sociologists of a century ago spent their whole lives describing, coming up with theories about crowds and their behaviour - theories now largely forgotten. Sch...

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Find below the video of a seminar for the Australian Institute for Progress done a few weeks ago detailing the basic cost-benefit view of the current pandemic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TS2DE-D1TA The slides of this presentation are here: Presentation CBA Covid May 2020...

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The management of the University of Queensland, and in particular Peter Hoj and Peter Varghese, stand condemned today by the international media, by both Labor and Liberal politicians, by both left-wing and right-wing Australians, by its own students, and by the powerful pro-...

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[in progress: will add more references, links and latest numbers when I get the time] In this note, I want to deal with three related issues: the main lessons on the corona virus from the reported deaths across countries with different policies; the feasibility of different “e...

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Did you know that Australia has over 13,000 IVF babies born per year, the UK over 20,000 , the West as a whole (Europe+US+offshoots) over 200,000 and the world as a whole 500,000 ? And did you know that due to the corona panic these services have been halted pretty much everyw...

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My first prediction is an easy one: many countries are going to ease their restrictions on social isolation in the coming weeks, including many countries with an ongoing corona problem. They simply have to if they want to have any economy left. You can see this happening to di...

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How much unhappiness is created by the unemployment of millions of people in Western countries (mainly N-Am +Europe) caused by the corona panic? How much unhappiness has been created due to the vast expansion of loneliness and physical inactivity? And in terms of the tradeoff...

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The mass hysteria of the corona crisis is raging, with the resulting self-isolation of whole economies and populations. The loss seems greater with every new forecast on the economic collapse than I initially though t, and the benefit of imprisoning and terrorizing the populat...

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Consider the shown picture where you are the decision maker who can pull the lever of the train tracks to avoid the coming train from going straight. If you do not divert the train, one person, John, will get run over. He is elderly and suffering from many diseases. You know h...

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This is now the whole article. Comments have been closed on the previous post . Part One To command nature, we must obey it Francis Bacon, 1624 The commitments that bind us to the social body are obligatory only because they are mutual; and their nature is such that, in fulfil...

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The number of people worldwide who have died from the coronavirus stands at 8,000 at the moment, equivalent to the death toll of two days of the world's traffic accidents. The fear is of course that millions more will follow. The panic over what the virus might do has now lead...

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I wrote this essay a few years ago as part one of a two-part article that would illustrate some parallels between intellectual authoritarianism in neo-Darwinism and in neoclassical economics. In some ways my response to Paul Krugman’s response to me was Part Two. But, wanting...

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In 1900, the modern nation states of Europe faced many challenges in terms of how they were run, with poverty and disease still prevalent. The largest problems were more or less successfully addressed by 2000. The road involved world wars and civil wars, but the essential reci...

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[note to self] Economics, sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, and the other social sciences are currently taught in an unorganised manner. The undergraduate degree in any of these disciplines consists of about 20 separate courses that each differ markedly from the ot...

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The probability of a massive nuclear war the next 10 years between any of the 8 current nuclear powers (US, UK, France, Russia, India, Pakistan, NK, Israel) seems low. The bluster of the leaders is supposed to make the threat look a bit bigger than it is in order to get negoti...

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One of the best pieces of scientific news the last decades has been the spectacular improvements in solar energy generation. The current world price was set in 2017 when the Dubai government bought a large future solar contract for 7.3 US cents per Kilowatt Hour, a mere 1/6 th...

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I was looking for something on economic method, and found this section of Paul Romer's "The Trouble with Macroeconomics" which I thought was worth posting. Some of the economists who agree about the state of macro in private conversations will not say so in public. This is con...

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When the financial crisis struck, it was back to the economics Max Corden learned in the 40s and 50s -- a golden age of economics in which conceptual simplicity was a feature not a bug and the central criterion of good work was its generality and usefulness -- rather than the...

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[just a thought] US total fertility rates were bobbing along very placidly around 2.05 live births per woman from 1990 to 2010, when suddenly there was a clear drop to 1.8 in 2010-2017. That drop has even continued to 1.76 births per woman in 2017 . When I asked myself what co...

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In an exchange, John Burnheim sent me an email which seemed to me to be the effective condensation of a lot of good thinking. It certainly chimed with my own thoughts. So I suggested he clean it up and I'd reproduce it here, which I reproduce below. Because it is the conclusio...

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Humanity is at a high point. What our ancestors dreamed of is slowly becoming a reality: a world without hunger in which the vast majority of mankind live peaceful and long lives. We are not there yet, but in Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and even in Africa (our cradle), m...

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[expanded from the post on JohnMenadue] When Bitcoin went public in 2009 it introduced to the world of finance and economics the technology of blockchain. Even the many who thought Bitcoin would never make it as a major currency were intrigued by the BlockChain technology and...

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Sometimes, it feels like 1910 all over again. Then, a confident Germany was the up-and-coming industrial power house, fearing an even more up-and-coming Russia, with the UK and France desperately holding on to their colonial empires. Now, a confident China is the up-and-coming...

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[Note to self. Geeks only] Over the fold I muse on the nature of human intelligence, social intelligence, and the options for artificial intelligence to become 'smarter than humans' in the areas of social power and law-making. It is taken for granted that you accept that in ha...

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The Effects of Marijuana Liberalizations: Evidence from Monitoring the Future by Angela K. Dills, Sietse Goffard, Jeffrey Miron - #23779 (HE LE PE) Abstract: By the end of 2016, 28 states had liberalized their marijuana laws: by decriminalizing possession, by legalizing for me...

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Let me indulge, purely for entertainment value, in some fan-speculation on what we will see on-screen after the Long Night is over and the final 6 episodes Of Game of Thrones are run in 2019. Let me first talk about the end-game aspects I think the books and the tv-series seem...

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Have you ever reflected on what a strange concept the notion of a 'cause of death' really is? We use the term so often that it wouldn't quickly register as a cultural oddity, but it really is a quirky beast and has an odd history. I have a bit of a professional interest in thi...

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Beetles: Biased Promotions and Persistence of False Belief by George Akerlof, Pascal Michaillat - #23523 (LS PR) Abstract: This paper develops a theory of promotion based on evaluations by the already promoted. The already promoted show some favoritism toward candidates for pr...

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Via Andrew Gelman's site , here's a TED talk by US philanthropist Laura Arnold entitled "The Four Most Dangerous Words? A New Study Shows". It details her journey through the world of social, medical, psychological and other research. It's a lively and concise summary of the d...

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An Economic Approach to Alleviate the Crises of Confidence in Science: With an Application to the Public Goods Game by Luigi Butera, John A. List - #23335 (PE) Novel empirical insights by their very nature tend to be unanticipated, and in some cases at odds with the current st...

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I am seeking a lawyer to run an Adverse Action case connected to the recent Fair Work Commission verdict that found systematic breaches of procedures and procedural fairness in the University of Queensland's actions against me following my research on racial attitudes in Brisb...

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Academic publishing keeps you on the straight and narrow of everyone else's ideas? Who'da thunk? Bias against Novelty in Science: A Cautionary Tale for Users of Bibliometric Indicators by Jian Wang, Reinhilde Veugelers, Paula Stephan - #22180 (LS PR) Abstract: Research which e...

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If Rex can give us his guide to Gravitational Waves - a very impressive performance I have to say, then I can dust off an old document from my days at the ANU law school - in the late 1980s. Concept Split: Shockwaves Shock waves spread from the policy making community through...

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Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time? by Pierre Azoulay, Christian Fons-Rosen, Joshua S. Graff Zivin Abstract: We study the extent to which eminent scientists shape the vitality of their fields by examining entry rates into the fields of 452 academic life scientists who...

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With the Internet being a regular feature of our lives for about 20 years now, what have been the related developments that were hard to pick at the outset? What are the lessons? Five thoughts: Communication and personal expression is the main business of the Internet. That wa...

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Here's yesterday's op ed for the Fin published as Technology education is about more than funding : STEM is all the rage in education – that’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Part culture war against Australian mediocrity, part cargo cult, a principal goal is more...

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Geo-engineering is increasingly looking like the only politically viable way of averting temperature rises above 2 degrees in the coming century. This is for three interlocking reasons: i) Any mayor country can try geo-engineering on its own without permission from anyone else...

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[caption id="attachment_26366" align="alignright" width="584"] A Soyuz spacecraft docking with the International Space Station. As the picture makes plain, typical human-occupied spacecraft orbits are very close to Earth; SpaceShipTwo wouldn't get even this high. NASA photo.[/...

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In the last 5 years, I have made a point of giving clear predictions on complex socio-economic issues. I give predictions partially to improve my own understanding of humanity: nothing sharpens the thoughts as much as having to actually predict something. Another reason is as...

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The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer came back into the news on Monday (11 November), with reports [i] on a paper published in Nature Geoscience which finds that reductions in chlorinated fluorocarbon (CFC) emissions achieved under the Montreal Prot...

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Remarkable article about how our social experience and the way we come to frame our lives influences gene-expression. I would’ve bet my eyeteeth that we’d get a lot of noisy results that are inconsistent from one realm to another. And at the level of individual genes that’s ki...

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Paul Fritjers is lamenting the loss of intellectual freedom and freedom of expression produced by an odd rule of social interaction: the person in pain gets to own the truth and those without pain adjust. So for example, people with undesired traits such as low intelligence or...

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On a previous thread, my counter-intuitive claim that verbal definitions are superfluous to science survived objections. I have been wondering if some further unconventional notions would survive a Troppodile attack. Because natural science is effective, I suggested that we sh...

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As I've said before, the PM's Science Prize is a blast . And they're now taking nominations . So if you have or had a great science teacher, or know or are a great Australian scientist. Now's the time to nominate.

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ASIDE from war, corruption is probably the biggest obstacle to economic and social development in poor countries. But it's best we see ourselves as being on a continuum with them, rather than as having solved the problem. Even if no law was broken, Wall Street financiers impos...

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Last Thursday I posed the question of how often the water you drink has been pissed by a vertebrate already. If the number is very small, then those who baulk at drinking recycled water have more cause to complain than if the number is very high. As some commentators to that p...

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"The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date" was released a last week. It's dedicated to the idea that knowledge not only changes, but changes in a systematic way. From the blurb: Just as we know that a chunk of uranium can break down in a measurable...

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I couldn’t resist buying a copy of Daniel Kahneman’s best-seller when returning from holidays. Several friends and colleagues told me it was a great book; it got great reviews; and Kahneman’s journal articles are invariably a good read, so I was curious. Its general message is...

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Why hasn't (Darwinian) evolution evolved the building blocks of Lamarkian evolution? Well it has once - with us - but why hasn't it done so at the biological rather than the cultural level? Perhaps smuggled into Lamarkianism is the idea of telos, which can exist within conscio...

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http://youtu.be/uiyMuHuCFo4 HT Brad Delong

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Here's a great picture of the sub-assemblies of the Boeing 787 (Dreamliner - ok it's a silly name, but it's somehow fun to say). Its touted by Deloitte as an example of how disaggregated industries are. But looking at it I wondered, might it tell us something else. What (the h...

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Here's a picture of the moon and the sun juxtaposed. They cycle between being the same size in our heavens and being a bit bigger or smaller than each other. It's spooky. Just the right size to deliver a total eclipse, or an annular one, depending on how they are feeling at th...

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A highlight of my calendar I have to say - since I inadvertently morphed into Mr Innovation and they started inviting me. Did you have an absolutely fantastic science teacher? Now's the time to get them some recognition. NOMINATION CALL 2012 PRIME MINISTER’S PRIZES FOR SCIENCE...

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Human beings only play when they are in the full sense of the word human and they are only fully human when they play. Friedrich Shiller Games seem frivolous. They can stand as metaphors for life, but typically, the outcome of games doesn't really matter. I wanted Collingwood...

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Well the ABC God bless its cotton socks can't quite bring itself to mount videos that can be embedded elsewhere - or I can't see a way to do it, but they did a great story on Kaggle tonight - so I thought I'd post it here. Just click here and all will be revealed. Update: some...

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As Philip Tetlock so powerfully showed, most expertise isn't worth nix if the criterion of expertise is whether you can demonstrate superior predictions about what will happen in the future. As he showed, most experts can't predict any better than tolerably informed non-expert...

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Herewith my column for Today's Fin on the Government's proposed new R&D Tax Credit. The paper on which it is based is on the Lateral Economics Website . The politics of compromise can work to solve problems by taking everyone’s needs into account. But sometimes we just get cau...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="498" caption="And what is this fetching picture doing here? Ask Google Images which popped this up when I entered the search string "the rise of science""] [/caption] In discussing 'open science' with someone today I thought I'd be able...

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We examine how multitasking affects performance and check whether women are indeed better at multitasking. Subjects in our experiment perform two different tasks according to three treatments: one where they perform the tasks sequentially, one where they are forced to multitas...

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Well it's an overused word right now but have a look at this if you've not seen it before - it's lovely. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkGeOWYOFoA

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When the SL-1 nuclear reactor exploded in Idaho releasing a radioactive plume and killing three workers, a local paper reported the accident on page 12 . That was 1961. Today some residents of Idaho are so worried about the nuclear accident 8000 kilometers away that they're bu...

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The latest situation with damaged Japanese nuclear power plants seems if anything more potentially dire and apocalyptic than what prompted my comment on Don Arthur's post : Seems to me that whatever now happens the nuclear power option is almost certainly a dead duck in all we...

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According to recent media reports an explosion has blown the roof off an unstable reactor north of Tokyo. The reactor is Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station's unit no 1. World Nuclear News reports : Television cameras trained on the plant captured a dramatic explosion surr...

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* Below is a guest post written by Ken G, a long-time Darwin resident and media/IT professional. Ken discussed his ideas not only with Darwin "storm chaser" enthusiasts but with Darwin residents who went through Cyclone Tracy. It's a keen amateur perspective on a frightening w...

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I'm seriously conflicted by the debate over Labor's National Broadband Network. On one hand, the future of CDU's online Bachelor of Laws programs, whose creation and development I oversee, is heavily dependent on the availability of almost universal truly fast broadband within...

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Saturday 11 to Wed 15, 10 am to 5 in the Great Hall . My treasures: all in practically "as new" condition. Peter Medawar, Pluto's Republic (not a missprint). $3. Review . The editor of the Age Monthly Review would not let me write that the cover photo depicted Medwar demonstra...

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Popper is often perceived as an eccentric kind of positivist who adopted a slightly different take on the demarcation of science with the criterion of falsification in place of verification. People like Habermas and the late Richard Rorty regarded Popper as a positivist for al...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM No doubt some have already seen this vid. I only just discovered it. Pretty gripping I think you'll agree.

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HT Michael Neilsen Tweet via one of my favourite websites .

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Doctor Labyrinth, like most people who read a great deal and who have too much time on their hands, had become convinced that our civilization was going the way of Rome. He saw, I think , the same cracks forming that had sundered the ancient world, the world of Greece and Rome...

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By Maggie Koerth-Baker . HT: Peter Martin

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Hint - it's not a comet!

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This book sounds like a lot of fun. A history of science with a touch of humour and a good flavour of the characters involved. Reviewed here . In order to structure his big, sweeping book about such issues, Mr. Holmes uses two exploratory voyages as bookends. The first, a trip...

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[caption id="attachment_30918" align="alignright" width="580" caption="Artist concept of Kepler in space. Credit: NASA/JPL"] [/caption] From Universe Today The checkout and calibration phase for the Kepler spacecraft has been completed, and now the telescope will begin one of...

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Tim Blair reports on Yvonne Ridley the British journalist who converted to Islam after being kidnapped by the Taliban who has won a case for unfair dismissal against the Islam News Channel. Earlier in the year she won nearly £14,000 in damages after winning a four-year unfair...

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Architecture of the Heart No's 1, 2 and 3. For more follow this link.

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Read all about it here , or over the fold. The US Naval Observatory operates 70 cesium atomic clocks. Credit: USNO If you ever feel like you need more time, here's some great news: you're actually going to get it. On December 31, 2008 a leap second will be added to the worlds...

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For more detail click here .

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Last week I was privileged enough to go to the PM's Science Awards in Parliament House. Kevin was, as usual enjoying his place in the centre of the stage, and gave a good speech which impressed his audience. But the highlight was the scientists. Just five got awards - two were...

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The Australian Skeptics Prize for Critical Thinking has been won this year by Peter Ellerton, a Queensland teacher who established a network promoting critical thinking in schools. The prize is worth $10,000. For a decade up to 2006 it was awarded as a part of the Australian M...

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A companion site to the 200 years of Australian technology, " Bright Sparcs ", hosted by the University of Melbourne. A register of people involved in the development of science, technology, engineering and medicine in Australia, including references to their archival material...

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The recent post on architectural delights reminded me that during the Beaconsfield mining disaster I googled Beaconsfield and turned up some pictures of the Batman Bridge nearby. That led to some more pictures of Tasmanian bridges and one of them led to some other bridges in V...

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From Universe Today , here's the Wednesday quiz. It's time for another "Where In The Universe" (WITU) challenge to test your visual knowledge of the cosmos. This one might be relatively easy, but I'm feeling generous today. Guess what this image is, and give yourself extra poi...

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If you loved The Wisdom of Crowds , easily the best economic bestseller I've read since The Theory of Moral Sentiments and that was published in 1759, you'll lerve this post by Michael Nielsen. Michael himself is quite an achiever. A graduate of the Uni of Queensland, he's not...

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Well no doubt others have posted this around the traps, but Tim Watts posted this truly spooky argument for the existence of God. You might think the arguments are obvious, but that's always the case once things are pointed out.

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From the 'being grateful for small mercies department, and from this website , here is extrasolar planet HD 209458b (also unofficially known as "Osiris", which orbits a star in the constellation of Pegasus) revealed the strongest ever spectroscopic signature for a giant extras...

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Verily this is a cool new development. Boeing is building super airships to double the capacity that can be airlifted around the world. These babys will be the size of football fields (not ours but America's) and fitted with four helicopter rotors and able to drag 40 tons of s...

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I was going on about the renewed importance of public goods to the Review Panel on the Innovation System and so they asked me and another economists on the panel to do a bit of a write up for them. For various logistical reasons, the ultimate document was run up by me the nigh...

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In writing this article , it occured to me that one way to describe my own approach to economics is the search for the $100 bill on the pavement. That is, if you can find ways of bringing new ideas into some well developed framework (well new-ish ideas or just ideas that are c...

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A fascinating review of Craig Venter's autobiography . Naturally I'm sympathetic to this guy who looks like he values scientific creativity and achievement above other things, and will improvise through the miasma of institutions that exist to further science to get what he's...

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Meanwhile, an avalanche on Mars, the first extra-terrestrial avalanche observed by humangoes. And just to remind you of your place in the world, here's a bit of a galaxy - which appropriately enough is part of one of your standard galaxy clusters. It's 50,000 light years acros...

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I've just been asked by the Department of PM&C to nominate someone to go to the 202o Summit. Who should I nominate - and why? This post will be moderated strictly. Suggestions should be serious and I hope you'll provide good reasons. Of course there will be people who want to...

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Only marginally related to the post, but a great image just the same - from turtblu on Flickr Readers with prodigious memories may recall a post I wrote a couple of years ago about the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt on the cognitive basis for human morality. Haidt has dev...

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There are 100,000 times as many stars in the universe as sounds and words ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived. This is the tenth of ten big facts about the universe. See how many you know here .

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Strange but true - in case you haven't heard, the world is full of amazing people with amazing stories who do amazing things . Perhaps this is a portent that the hideous catastrophes of the twentieth century are behind us. Well - obviously they're behind us. What I mean is, he...

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I'd like to know what's wrong with all the studies using different methodologies that find a link. Intuitively I find that using a hand held in a car is distracting at least when I'm dialling. It's all in the paper from the looks of it, but I won't get round to reading it and...

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From a back-issue of the ABC Law Report . A patient at UCLA's School of Medicine named John Moore, went in and was diagnosed as having hairy cell leukaemia. His treatment was to have the spleen removed, but before the doctors did that, they did blood tests and found he had a v...

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This is the best op ed length informative article I've ever read. It's 713 words. It's by Freeman Dyson and every sentence is worth a book, every paragraph worth a sub-discipline. It explains how Darwinian evolution was (yes - 'was') a special period of the earth's history pre...

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the BBC website alerted me today to the linked paper by my ex - Free University colleague Richard Tol, who is still an environmental economist but has become somewhat famous since. The paper and the i nterview makes fascinating and sobering reading. Let me give you some highli...

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Holden reports a 120 million loss . Ouch: Despite the Commodore maintaining its position as the number one selling vehicle down under in 2006, total revenues were down 7.8% over the period, which meant that Holden ended up with a substantial $123.7 million loss. That is about...

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This post follows on from a discussion begun by Paul Fritjers and continued HERE . Most human activity has changed drastically over our lifetimes. And the rate of change is increasing see for instance the next generations user interface for computers. You would hope academics...

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What would you do with an academic economic journal if you were given control over it? What innovations would you enforce designed to make the journal more to your liking? Below I list some ideas talked about in the corridors of academia and ask you to give your opinion on the...

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Does relative poverty matter? If differences in income just mean that some people have bigger, shinier barbeques then probably not. Big shiny propane guzzling barbeques are nice but, as Clive Hamilton says , living without one doesn't amount to hardship. To many people it seem...

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As I've mentioned to Troppodillians previously , Melvin Brag has an interesting show on BBC radio called 'In our time'. It's a kind of amateur hour with a professional broadcaster. He (usually) interviews three 'experts' about something that he's interested in but ignorant abo...

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Courtesy of Joe Cambria who observes - quite rightly - that I seem to like this kind of thing .

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Ubiquitous blogosphere commenter Joe Cambria has posted a really interesting contribution on Rex Ringschott's coal thread , suggesting a variey of greenhouse gas reduction policies as an alternative to either carbon taxes or tradeable emissions permits. Joe's ideas deserve a t...

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The Sydney Morning Herald has an odd story about a woman with a worm in her eye . Doctors at a clinic in Kragujevac, central Serbia, have removed an 11 centimetre-long intestinal worm from a woman's eye socket. According to preliminary results, the worm taken from the 37-year-...

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