Mr Mistoffelees!

You ought to know Mr. Mistoffelees!
The Original Conjuring Cat -
(There can be no doubt about that).
Please listen to me and don’t scoff. All his
Inventions are off his own bat.
There’s no such Cat in the metropolis;
He holds all the patent monopolies
For performing surprising illusions
And creating eccentric confusions.
[...]

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Questions about the UK swine flu strategy

How accurate are the published figures about swine flu?
Once the decision was taken to skip swabs and diagnose on symptoms only, the figures have likely to have become very unreliable. Is anyone objectively studying the percentage of those who have a swine flu diagnosis from the questionnaire only, who actually have evidence of swine flu [...]

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What will change everything? – The End of Analytic Science

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s answer to Edge’s 2009 question is the view that it’s time now to start to focus on how branches of knowledge connect to, and influence each other, and to develop a new science which goes beyond the current complexity science by emphasising the relationships between phenomena rather than the phenomena themselves as discreet [...]

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to see ourselves as others see us

That famous line from Burns’ “To a Louse”…….Oh wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us – lovely sentiment, but just not possible! I was reminded of it as I read two related articles by Emily Pronin recently (published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,Vol. 28 No. 3, March [...]

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Lily pond

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Setting sunlight in the forest

Isn’t this a lovely effect? The colour of the light of the setting sun on the trees in the forest…..

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What will change everything? The idea of negative and iatrogenic science

EDGE questions attract such interesting responses every year. This year the question is “What will Change Everything?“
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, poses the response that “the idea of negative and iatrogenic science” will change everything. Here’s his main point…
I will conclude with the following statement: you cannot do anything with knowledge [...]

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Aix en Provence

What is Aix famous for? Fountains…..

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Bird warnings and bird life indicators of world health

You’ll be familiar with the idea the “canary down the mine” where a canary in a cage was carried down into the mine by the miners to give them early warning that the air conditions were deteriorating. Well, I just read an interesting variation on that tale in a French magazine called “Nouvelles cles”. The [...]

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Balance at the beach

you know, sometimes when things are in perfect balance, it seems like they’re levitating!

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