Small Beds and Large Bears

I said a couple of weeks ago that I was worried about fixing a shed. I had qualms which centred around how someone as ignorant of DIY and other practical matters as I could possibly supervise events to a sufficient level of safety and productivity that it would be suitable to ask any of my [...]

Our shed needs fixing. I’ve done the easy bit: I’ve bought ten square metres of felt and some things called clout nails which sound terribly exciting. I’ve even got felt glue, or maybe it’s felt sealant. Whatever: it goes between the two metre-wide strips I’ll need to cut, like the filthy filling in a disgusting [...]

Christmastime and Christmastide wait for no man, and there’s been plenty to prevent me from following up on my doom-laden thoughts about COP15 and what might happen if it failed: which it did. Before 2009 draws entirely to a close it’s probably worth a few brief words on the subject.
It’s important to acknowledge from the [...]

I admire skepticism. Being cool-headed about empirical situations helps you make informed conclusions, and hence decisions, even as you might labour under the pressure of those situations.
Science constitutes formalized skepticism: strictly so in its theoretical, dehumanized sense; more approximately so in the way that scientists as a whole practice their craft. But science’s skepticism is [...]

I’ve been a Popperian for years. That’s not to say I’m a fan of Robert Popper (although I am); rather that I susbscribe broadly to Karl Popper’s philosophy of science. The basic tenet of it is that science advances only through making audacious predictions; that such predictions are ones that ought, given our existing experience, [...]

French cuisine is fucking awful, isn’t it? Not French food so much: I know people who’ve eaten some and enjoyed it. But cuisine, the artistry and craftsmanship of cooking, is pretty much dead in France. Ignorant, thick-headed, ritualistic, closed to new innovations, and just plain bad. Like Parisian architecture and the French language under the [...]

Quick quiz: which side of the road do you drive on in the UK? That’s right: the left-hand side! Unless, that is, you’re AP05 DWW, a van from what appeared to be an utterly ungoogleable Oxford company called “Agency”. According to the stickers on their vehicles they’re something to do with putting out boards, but [...]

Tonight I cycled home during both a moonrise and a sunset. The sky to the west was cloudless, shading from a liquid blue to a sort of strawberry pink at the horizon, with the moon peach-coloured and sitting on it; over to the east, the sun was struggling down hunkering down through dark grey duvets [...]

Having an opinion diametrically opposed to a noted professor has hardly impeded politicians in the past, but you’d like to think it was worth our glorious leaders noting that almost everyone except the big music companies and their free-bun infrastructures agrees that the current state of copyright law is detrimental to the very talent it [...]

Every community has variety, and scientists—a lazy demographic shorthand used to describe people so fantastically different that the variation is far more important than the average—are no different. Despite the overwhelming majority of highly qualified climatologists who hold the opposing view, if you really try hard enough you will always find a respectable-sounding geocaust denier [...]