March 2017

I tend to use a lot of commas; probably using them a bit too frequently.  But there is method in it all, and the use of the so-called serial (or 'Oxford') comma can remove ambiguity.  Here's the Guardian style guide...

Hans Rosling died earlier this year.  He was the statistician who brought world population (and other) data to life, especially through his TED talks and YouTube videos. He was the co-founder of Gapminder.org, which continues his work.  In his final BBC...

I wrote the other day about the new Head of Ofsted's first unsuccessful foray into curriculum, and in particular about the lack of mention of 'balance' in what she said.  She preferred to focus on 'broad' rather than 'balanced' despite...

A while back, The Economist's Erasmus column carried a feature article on a clutch of Islamic scholars joining the chorus of religious voices calling for the planet to be cooled.  It quotes some apposite verses, and ends with this: Of course, one...

The new head of Ofsted, Amanda Spielman, having announced a new investigation into the curriculum, gave her first interview last week on BBC radio 4's TWAO.  I didn't find it impressive as her answers were mostly much less precise than the questions...

So, the new head of the US EPA doesn't think that CO2 has much of a role in global warming.  What a pity Eunice Foote isn't still around to enlighten him. It was the American scientist Eunice Foote who first...

I went to the I-SEE event the other night and managed to hang in through a whole evening of Density Functional Theory.  Here's a beginners' guide.  I thought I might struggle when the speaker, Aron Walsh, began by saying that he'd be talking at...

This is not my headline.  It comes from a Spectator column by James Delingpole.  You can read it here.  It begins in typical Delingpolian style: Who do you think was responsible for Europe’s biggest environmental disaster of the past three decades;...

OECD had a workshop in Paris the other week on Measuring Business Impacts on People’s Well-being.  Here's the webpage. The workshop "discussed the foundations to measuring business impacts on well-being through the creation of new measurement standards in close collaboration with the...

I watched a BBC film about Blencathra (a year in the life of) the other week.  In my younger life, I spent considerable time on that mountain and the film did justice to its fine sculpture: think blooming heather, time-lapse scudding...