A Carnival Atmosphere

1st March, 2009

carnival-of-mathematics

The Carnival of Mathematics is a fortnightly round-up of maths blogging, which has just reached its 50th incarnation. It’s a travelling show, and is currently docked at The Endeavour. Have a look, there’s some great stuff there (and a bit by me).

I will try to link to updates even when I’m not featured. But you can always find details here.

There’s also a brand new maths teachers at play carnival, focused more on school level mathematics and teaching ideas.

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Tied up in Knots

17th October, 2008

I’ve got an article about knot theory in this week’s New Scientist magazine.

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Bad Science 1 - Bad Medicine 0

15th September, 2008

The Guardian has won its legal battle against Matthias Rath - a vitamin-magnate who told desperate South Africans that his pills could cure AIDS, while “so-called anti-retroviral… drugs severely damage all cells in the body - including white blood cells - thereby not improving but rather worsening immune deficiencies and expanding the AIDS epidemic.” Ben Glodacre of Bad Science - who wrote the piece in the Graun that attracted Rath’s unsuccessful lawsuit - is justifiably pleased and proud. Meanwhile Rath is doubtless spitting mad, and hopefully, shortly, bust.

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Beginning With A Bang

22nd March, 2007

Greetings, and welcome to my blog! I’m afraid there’s nothing much here at the moment, so you might want to come back in a few weeks once I’ve got round to writing something.

My main aim for this place is to write about any general scientific issues and developments which appeal to me, such as the surprising fact that the Canadian Firm D-Wave Systems has recently unveiled what it claims is the world’s first commercially viable quantum computer (while their competitors are decades behind, tinkering with tiny configurations in labs, wondering whether a functional machine is a practical possibility at all).

So almost always the views expressed here will be those of an interested non-expert, and I’m happy to be corrected by people better informed than me. Hopefully I’ll learn something from researching the posts, and get into the habit of writing about science at least semi-regularly.

I may also write occasional expository pieces on subjects I know a little more about, which will usually mean maths.

Quite often though I expect I’ll take the easy option, and stick the boot in to the enemy. For instance did you know that Universities of Westminster, Central Lancashire, and Salford each currently offer Bachelor of Science degrees in Homeopathy? Shame. They may as well offer BSc’s in The Physics of Christianity or `how the God depicted by the Jews and Christians is completely consistent with the Cosmological Singularity, an entity whose existence is required by physics’.

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