Listening to Lord Bragg and his guests discussing random and pseudorandom numbers taught me a thing or two, and raised a couple of “issues”. One, trivial, can be dismissed at once: why was there no discussion of the amazing prescience of the shuffle function on so many people’s iPods? Because it interests no-one except the iPod listener. Trickier was the way the various guests seemed to skirt around the predestination issue. In answer to the general question of whether, if you knew all the existing preconditions of a coin-toss, you could predict the outcome, the answer seemed to be a less than convincing “Well, you can never really know all the preconditions.”

OK, but ...

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Here’s a lazy journalistic trope: o·pin·ion / əˈpinyən/ n. a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge. I know of no other way to approach an “Opinion” by someone called Doug Saunders at The Globe and Mail in Canada. Saunders writes breathlessly about havi...

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No, not fallen. Never-risen. I should have known better than to trumpet the satisfaction my bread-making gives me; yesterday’s experiment was a colossal failure. Bad inventory management left me without any white bread flour and an excess of yummy durum flour. I don’t normally bake 100% durum anyt...

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Tech Transfer is a self-published first novel.

If that rings alarm bells, silence them. Daniel S. Greenberg knows science, especially science funding, administration and politics in the US, better than anyone else alive today. Add the book’s subtitle -- Science, Money, Love and the Ivory Tower --...

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Deep philosophical musings have once again been prompted by a reader, who complains of losing the way when following links from my posts. They open in the same window, and lead to distractions that move further and further away, and then they realize they can’t get back to where they started, right...

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