August 2022

Suppose you were in the market for 20 widgets.  You might put out a call for makers to submit prices.  So far so good. Now suppose one maker offered you 19 at 2p per widget, but that was all they...

As part of the BBC's celebration of the birth of Philip Larkin, 100 years ago, there was a series of programmes where poems were "road-tested" by Simon Armitage who travelled the country trying out poems on various audiences. He took...

Last Saturday the power station on my roof (Semington A) generated 22.3 kWh of electrical power.  It would have been larger had the temperature been a bit lower, say 21 rather than 35 degrees, and the sun a bit higher...

I got an email the other day with this written at the bottom: "Please don’t take offence if I don’t reply to say ‘thank you’. If every UK adult sent one less courtesy email a day, we’d save over 16,400...

Kemi Badenoch MP wrote in the Sunday Times recently of her experiences with civil servants when she was a minister.  It turned out that these well-meaning, expensively-educated, dedicated servants of the people would rather she had thought little and then...

I see that recent remarks by Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng has caused the shares in the Drax Group to plunge.  All he said was that it made no sense to him to transport wood chips across the Atlantic to burn in...

Philip Larkin was born 100 years ago this week.  It's said that he had a difficult childhood (who didn't).  But, as Alan Bennett once remarked, poets should be grateful for tricky beginnings as it gave them something to write about....

The fate of the natural history GCSE is now in the hands of the DfE and OfQual.  Fate as in quality rather than any question of whether it will exist because that battle has been won in the gritted teeth...

To mark the recent death of the brilliant James Lovelock, here is an edited version of the text on Gaia that Paul Vare and I wrote for our book: The World we'll Leave Behind: grasping the sustainability challenge Gaia In ancient...