Why do bad things happen? – a review of “The Magic Of Reality”
July 25th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Popular science books and programmes have become, well, popular because we all want to understand our world and our universe.
Richard Dawkins in a master in explaining complicated science in understandable language and I’ve just finished reading his 2011 book “The Magic Of Reality”. You can read my review here.
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My 20th short story: “It isn’t over …”
July 24th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
One of my favourite sayings is: “It isn’t over till it’s over … and then it isn’t over”. What do I mean?
Well, I illustrated the notion in this short story that I wrote five years ago.
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The cost of ending slavery in the British Empire
July 23rd, 2015 by Roger Darlington
BBC television has just broadcast two remarkable programme entitled “Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners”. The writer and presenter is David Olusoga, a half British, half Nigerian academic.
The programmes explain how in 1834 slavery was officially abolished by the British parliament but the slave owners were handsomely compensated. The Slavery Compensation Commission paid out a total sum equivalent to £17 bullion in today’s money to some 46,000 claimants stretching across the British Empire. Not a penny, of course, went to the 800,000 African slaves.
The programmes bring out the horror of the slave trade and follow how the compensation money was used. It is an account that is unsettling and upsetting but important to know.
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U.S. presidential election (9): now a total of 21 politicians declared as candidate for their party’s nomination
July 22nd, 2015 by Roger Darlington
On the day that I did a posting explaining that there are now 20 candidates seeking to win the US presidency next year, yet another candidate declared. He is John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio.
This makes the Republican field especially crowded with no less than 15 bidders for their party’s nomination. Probabaly all the potential candidates in both parties have now declared. The primaries will now progressively reduce the field.
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U.S. presidential election (8): no less than 20 politicians now declared as candidate for their party’s nomination
July 21st, 2015 by Roger Darlington
My last posting on the American presidential election was a month ago when I noted that the number of candidates in the two parties had risen to 15. That number is now an incredible 20 – five Democrats and 15 Republicans. You can see the full list here.
On the Democratic side, all the excitement is coming from the better than expected performance of Bernie Sanders, but nobody expects him to win the party nomination. Hillary Clinton is widely expected to do that. Meanwhile my American friend, a strong supporter of Sanders, has written about the need to turn the presidential campaign into a sustained mass movement. You can read his piece here.
On the Republican side, the most recent development was the ridiculous assertion from Donald Trump – who managed to evade the Vietnam draft – that former presidential Republican candidate John McCain was not a war hero. But again nobody expects Trump to win his party’s nomination. Currently there is no clear runner but Jeb Bush and Scott Walker are expected to do well.
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The need for a stronger consumer and citizen voice in regulated markets
July 20th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
I recently gave my first media interview as Chair of Consumer Forum for Communications. It was to Ellen Branagh, chief journalist at Cable.co.uk, a price comparison website accredited by Ofcom.
I took the opportunity to call for a stronger voice for consumer and citizen groups in regulated markets such as communications, broadcasting, energy and water. You can read the interview here.
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The discovery of a new sub-atomic particle: the pentaquark
July 20th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Although the relevant data was accumulated more than three years ago, those clever people at CERN on the French/Swiss border chose to announce the discovery of a new sub-atomic particle on the same day as the New Horizons photographs of Pluto were published by NASA, so you won’t have heard about it.
The particle is called the pentaquark. As the name suggests, this is a particle made up of five quarks ; actually four quarks and one anti-quark.
Now, until recently, all the known hadrons consist of either three quarks, or one quark and one antiquark. Particles made of two quarks and two antiquarks (known as tetraquarks) have been seen, but the pentaquark is something new.
Excited? Thoroughly confused? Want to know more? See here.
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A review of my weekend movie: “Ant-Man”
July 19th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Like “Guardians Of The Galaxy”, this one is played for humour but with lots of special effects – and it works well. See my review here.
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Ever heard of “powernoia” or “nomophobia”? Well you’ve probably suffered from both.
July 19th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
You’ll find this explanation in this short article by Eva Wiseman who admits to her dependence on her mobile phone. I understand her feelings: these days, if my iPhone 6 is not charged and nearby, not only do I not have connectivity, but my Apple Watch will only really tell the time and remind me to stand up after one hour of sitting.
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How many other planets have we discovered – and does any other planet support intelligent life?
July 18th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
This week, we saw fantastic pictures of Pluto which we used to call a planet and now call a dwarf planet. Whatever we call it, Pluto is on the very edge of our solar system – but we’ve been able to detect other planets in other solar systems.
I’m currently reading “The Magic Of Reality”, a science book by Richard Dawkins which was published in 2011. He writes of discoveries of other planets that “the present grand total is 519 planets orbiting stars in our galaxy other than the sun”.
But that was four years ago. As this report makes clear, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has now located more than 1,000 planets bringing the total number of planets that we have discovered to around 2,000.
But there are something like 10,000 billion billion stars in the universe and about 10% of known stars are described by astronomers as ‘sun-like’, meaning that they are likely to have planets that might be able to sustain life.
So the odds are that intelligent life has evolved on other planets too. Dawkins writes: “I think there probably are [aliens]”.
So why haven’t we heard from them? There are two major complications: time and distance. The universe is around 13.8 billion years old – other life forms could well have been and gone by now. The universe is huge and expanding rapidly – the distances are so great that any communications from other beings could take millions and millions of years to reach us.
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