- Blog
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Elstein loses it
Everybody says David Elstein is clever. I’ve met him once or twice and he’s certainly an entertaining critic of TV and media in general – a real Maverick from outside the liberal public service media consensus. So it’s disappointing to learn that he’s turned into a silly old git. In this week’s New Media Age…
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Scientific curiosity in action
Space scientists have been preoccupied for a while with the tantalising prospect of life in the ultra-cold oceans and ice-sheets and deserts of the solar system’s rockier lumps. Their readiness to believe that organic life might thrive even in these nasty, inhospitable places has got earth’s biologists thinking about life here. If there could be…
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What’s the point of inheritance tax?
The trouble with defending inheritance tax is that it’s impossible to do so without sounding like a miserable, money-grubbing pensioner-basher (although I suppose you’re actually bashing the kids). The best its defenders can manage is the obviously contradictory: “It’s worth £3Billion per year and hardly anyone pays it anyway.” The tax systems of the world…
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Three new planets: astrologers not bothered
Of course it turns out that the planetary scientists opted not to demote one planet but to promote three new ones. Brilliant. I can see Michael Hanlon’s Daily Mail story already: “Dumbing down is out of control: now even frozen lumps of rock qualify as planets. What next: asteroids?”. Remarkably, it looks like the new…
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What is profiling?
Psychologists, ethnographers, market researchers, coppers: correct me if I’ve got this wrong. I think profiling works like this. You start by watching the behaviour of lots of people (more likely a representative sample). From your laborious, systematic observations, you infer characteristics so that you can say, with some certainty, “this behaviour = this characteristic”. Then…
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It’s planetary correctness gone mad
The Mail‘s Science Editor Michael Hanlon can be relied upon to recruit even the most obscure and disinterested branch of science to the cause of rampant political correctness. Today he takes on the ‘loony’ planetary scientists who want to ‘demote’ poor Pluto, removing the plucky planetoid from the list of proper planets all together. He…
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Reuters and Photoshop
I’ve met Tom Szlukovenyi, Reuters Gobal Picture Editor, a few times and almost all we talked about was his practically pathological hatred of ‘photoshopping’ and all other kinds of doctoring, fixing, enhancing and otherwise fiddling with his precious news photographs. The idea – spread by the warbloggers and by the Israeli media – that he…
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Media bias?
Peter Wilby failed to endear himself to British Jews whilst editor of the New Statesman, what with that stupid Star of David cover and everything. Still, his media column in the redesigned mag is always worth a read – cynical, funny. This week’s piece examines allegations of bias in the British media from both sides…
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Unlikely neighbours
Right there, cheek by jowl, barely a cigarette paper between them in The Spectator: Melanie Philips on Iran’s plans for the West and Fergal Keane on the suffering of the Lebanese.
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Love this app
Diigo is kind of del.icio.us meets local browser bookmarks meets those sticky note apps that were all over the place a few years ago. Bookmark stuff, annotate it so other Diigo users can read your notes, highlight text, post to your blog, to del.icio.us and a dozen other sites. Everything even slightly bookmarky actually –…