Archive for the ‘Science & technology’ Category
How did Covid variants go from Delta to Omnicon?
November 29th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
At the end of May 2021, the World Health Organisation (WHO) adopted a new system of naming Covid variants of concern or special interest with letters of the Greek alphabet. It did this to avoid stigmatising countries or regions where such a new variant was first identified. At the time, there were four variants of […]
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I bet you’ve never visited a materials testing house
November 7th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
It’s a (very) little known fact that, when I left school in Manchester, I thought I wanted to be a mechanical engineer. Indeed I obtained a place on a university degree course to study mechanical engineering, but deferred my entry by a year to go into industry for some practical training. I learned very quickly […]
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How did Bletchley Park break Nazi Germany’s Enigma code?
November 6th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
I’ve read the novel “Enigma” written by Robert Harris [my review here]; I’ve seen the film directed by Michael Apsted [my review here]; and this weekend, I visited Bletchley Park where a British team built on the work of Poles to break the Enigma code used by the German army, navy and air force during […]
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When and how did the Internet start?
October 29th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
International Internet Day is marked annually on 29 October. The day commemorates the anniversary of the first message that was sent between two computers on 29 October 1969 through ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet. They intended to transmit the word “LOGIN,” but the system crashed just after they had sent the first two letters. Hence, […]
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A review of an impressive new book: “Exponential” by Azeem Azhar
October 24th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Around a decade and a half ago, Azeem Azhar – what a wonderfully alliterative name – and I served together as members of the Consumer Panel of Ofcom. the UK’s regulator of telecommunications and broadcasting. He is much younger and much smarter than me and went on to become a tech entrepreneur and tech analyst. […]
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Word of the day: immiserate
October 6th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
I’m reading a book called “Exponential” by Azeem Azhar, someone I used to know when we sat together as members of Ofcom’s Consumer Panel. One of his favourite words – one I’ve hardly seen before- is ‘immiserate’, a verb meaning to make miserable or to cause to become impoverished. It seems that many new technologies […]
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How many covid deaths have there been now?
August 31st, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Each evening on the BBC’s News At Ten”, it announces the latest daily death toll but, for a long time now, it has failed to mention the total number of deaths. That figure for the UK, as of today, is 132,485. That’s almost twice the number of non-combatants killed in this country in the Second […]
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A review of “The Secret Body” by Daniel M Davis (2021)
August 4th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
There is a certain irony that, a year and a half into the global pandemic when I finally fell foul of the coronavirus and had to self-isolate, top of my reading list was this book with the sub-title “How the new science of the human body is changing the way we live”. Although the author […]
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Word of the day: aphelion
July 5th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
This is the point at which the Earth is furthest from the sun. It occurs because the earth’s orbit is not circular but mildly elliptical. The precise moment of its occurrence this year is 23.27 BST today 5 July. At this point, we will be 5M kilometres further from the sun than in early January […]
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How many men have walked on the Moon and how many of them are still alive?
June 8th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
In July 1969, the first men walked on the Moon and I watched it live on television. The previous year, the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” was released which portrayed a community on the Moon at the turn of the century. At that time, we assumed that there would be a growing programme of lunar […]
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