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Hope lives here.
Hope vs Cope vs Mope: Hope – We’ll build a better future. The future is bright. Cope – Everything was better in the past. We need to slow down. Mope – Everything’s bad. We’re all going to die very soon. Credit: @_brightmirror (Twitter) “Value the future on a timescale longer than your own.” Richard Dawkins,…
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Atom puns & jokes 1/n
Everyone loves a pune (or pun) or joke. Here follows the first of some ‘atom’ puns/jokes – enjoy or groan or meh. More to follow! Professor: what do you know about atoms?Me: very littleProfessor: aside from that? PS: I love coffee. BuyMeACoffee, leave a message with a date and time and we can share it, remotely,…
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Pitfalls of Common Sense: courtesy of Carl Sagan – blog 2 of 11
– Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Continuing with Sagan’s twenty most common and perilous pitfalls — many of which are rooted in our chronic discomfort with ambiguity — with examples of each in action. One and two (blog 1 of 11) are here. The third and fourth of these…
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“Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine …”
— Isaac Asimov (2 Jan 1920 – 6 Apr 1992) American author (of Russian parentage) and professor of biochemistry at Boston University who was a prolific author and editor of science fiction and non-fiction. He was a regular commentator on science and society and atheism and developed the three laws of robotics. Asimov was also…
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Pitfalls of Common Sense: courtesy of Carl Sagan – blog 1 of 11
– Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark At the end of my last blog on Sagan’s baloney detection kit, Sagan admonishes against the twenty most common and perilous ones — many rooted in our chronic discomfort with ambiguity — with examples of each in action. The first two of these…
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Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” – blog 10 of 10
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark The opening quote, from Carl Sagan, for this series of blogs was: The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science. Science can be hard (can…
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Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” – blog 9 of 10
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Here is the ninth, and final, tool. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in…
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Happy International Asteroid Day – 30 June 2023
Today is the day where we highlight the risk to humanity of asteroids. This day was chosen to commemorate the “Tunguska Explosion”, which occurred this day in 1908 in Siberia. Asteroids are composed of rock and metal, and range in size from 1m to around 1,000km. Most are in the Asteroid Belt, which is about…
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Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” – blog 8 of 10
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Here is the eighth tool. When faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well, choose the simpler. Otherwise known as ‘Occam’s Razor’, which is a convenient rule-of-thumb for selection when there is nothing separating the data.…
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Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” – blog 7 of 10
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark On to the seventh tool. Too date you have got the facts (1 of 10), you had a substantive debate (2 of 10), you’ve covered arguments from authority (3 of 10), you have several hypotheses (4 of 10),…
Stargazing Guy
Connecting people to the Stars
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“Science Fiction Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.”
– Peter H. Diamandis, Metatrends substack, 17 July 2026 Why are people so pessimistic about the future – and view the past as some form of pastoral utopia? On these pages we promote hope – not cope or mope. Hope lives here. An interesting insight is from Peter H. Diamandis in his substack, where he…
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“I believe in evidence.”
– Isaac Asimov, The Roving Mind (1997), (2 January 2 1920 – 6 April 1992) Scientist and science fiction author Asimov’s output of novels and books popularising and explaining science was prodigious. As a rationalist he often railed against superstitious and pseudoscientific beliefs that tried to pass themselves off as genuine science and had this…
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What is a light-year?
A light-year is a measure of distance – not time (or anything to do with Disney’s Toy Story). It’s used to indicate the distance to stars and galaxies. It’s the distance light travels in one year in a vacuum, which is about: – 4.2465 light-years OR 5.88 trillion miles OR 9.46 trillion kilometres Light travels…
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How far is that star?
Basically, far! The Sun is the closest (and brightest) star. It is about: – 93 million miles – 150 million kilometres The next closest star (Proxima Centauri) is invisible to the unaided human eye and you need to be in the Southern Hemisphere to see it with a telescope (it’s too dim to see with…
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Death rates from disasters have fallen over the last century.
Good news. Recent data indicates that natural disasters are NOT going to kill us all. The global death rate from all natural disasters (drought, floods, storms, earthquakes, wildfires, extreme temperatures, etc.) has fallen by more than 90% over the last century. The total number of deaths has fallen substantially, despite there being four times as…
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“Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.”
– Maria Salomea Skłodowska Curie (Marie Curie) (7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934) She was a was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist. The first woman to win a Nobel Prize. The first person to win a Nobel Prize twice. The only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields.…
Stargazing Guy 