Voyager 1, Golden Record, NASA (c)
Alice Gorman is an Australian Space Archaeologist known for being one of the pioneers of her field. Her areas of interest cover a wide range of topics including Indigenous heritage management, Aboriginal culture, archaeoastronomy, orbital debris and the cultural heritage of space exploration. She works currently as a heritage consultant and a lecturer at Flinders University. Here is the transcript of our interview : Continue reading
“Rescue them from their bed of thistles” – Paul Flynn
Yesterday (October 12th) the House of Commons had a debate on the e-petition to make the production, sale, and use of cannabis legal. The Government has already made an official statement regarding the petition saying that “Substantial scientific evidence shows cannabis is a harmful drug that can damage human health. There are no plans to legalise cannabis as it would not address the harm to individuals and communities.” However this debate gave members of the House a chance to share their opinions on the matter, and to send a signal to the government. The results of the debate have no role in the official production of government policies. Continue reading
Google and Facebook are currently in another race. With the increased use of mobile technology for accessing the internet (now a greater amount of time than computer access to the internet) both Google and Facebook have realised the need for faster and less data intensive ways to allow users to access articles on linked sites. Facebook announced their Instant Articles, which imbeds striped down versions of the linked article onto the Facebook stream, and Google just announced their AMP, Accelerated Mobile Pages. I’m not so interested in the fast download speeds or on the question of whether or not Google will be boosting the search rankings of APM pages. What I think is so very important about these changes is the effect it can have on advertising. Continue reading
The peer-review process is meant to be a guardian of scientific integrity. That is not to say that it maintains the integrity of individual scientists, but that it attempts to ensure that results of these scientists’ intellectual endeavours are presented and discussed in a way that conforms to the ideals of the scientific community as a whole. Ideally, this means that the papers published in journals contribute positively towards scientific debates rather than being mistakes, distractions, or unhelpful repetition. Continue reading
A plane flying over Yosemite national park by Kristal Leonard (https://www.flickr.com/photos/isntthatbeautiful/8197899031/)
Flying, it’s sort of amazing. You literally ‘fly’ – think about that; FLY. No road, no rail, no water, not even any strings holding it up like a Thunderbirds rocket – just a tin box hurling through thin air at 500 miles per hour at several thousand feet. But we don’t even fly for that phenomenal experience, we do it out of convenience. Flying is a cheap, fast and easy way of getting from A to B
, when B is particularly far away, and land or sea travel would take too long. Most of the time it’s actually far far cheaper than land or sea travel as well. We all do it, and it enables us to meet people and see places that we would not otherwise see. For instance, I really want to go to Stockholm, and I could go this Friday and be back on Sunday night for £90 with no prior booking. The flight takes 2 hours from London. Ninety pounds, to disappear above the clouds and magically descend in Sweden for the weekend. Continue reading
I find it wonderful to talk to people about something that they are passionate about. When they get that glint in their eye and the speed at which they talk starts to get faster and faster and their hands start to gesticulate wildly as though they are fighting the invisible manifestations of whatever it is that is preventing them from reaching their desired goal.
More often than not I find that the topics that people are most passionate about are ones where they want to see more action being taken by others, or by governments. They want less people to eat meat or more regulations to be placed on the meat industry. They want better government support of affordable housing. They want to save the snow leopard, or the rhino, or the elephant. They want businesses to pay better, or for governments to change the minimum wage requirements. They want more people to buy local, and for better aid to be given to countries in trouble. They want the legal system to be tougher on bankers and easier on drug users. They want better education and cheaper education. They want people to treat each other fairly, no matter the colour of their skin. They want better distribution of taxation and better use of the money collected. They want to be safe from terrorism, and to stop atrocities happening abroad.
I, too, want the majority of these things, and I will actively engage with people who are trying to enact change. But at the moment I feel entirely overwhelmed. Continue reading
André Gorz, French philosopher & friend of Paul Sartre, wrote this is 1983 – yet it is the most relevant thing I have read yet concerning the global food system. I was sad to find that there is no version of this text anywhere on the internet, but happy that this meant I am able to share it with the world.
Gorz was a very thoughtful man. Others may know him & his partner as the inspiration behind the Palm D’Or winning film ‘Amour’. Or for his 75 page love letter to his dying wife (“Lettre a D”). With his wife facing terminal illness, they died together by lethal injection in 2007.
If you care about world hunger, or about eating healthier in equal measure, then this very short essay is all you need to read. This is “Their famine, our food”…. Continue reading
Photo: James Boardman
I don’t know much about the pollution that has engulfed the South-East of England recently, & I’d kind of like to proceed whilst habouring that ignorance. I know that it was on page 2 of the Saturday’s Guardian, & I’m thinking that it must be fairly serious, but what I’ve picked up on is the nonchalance & indifference that most of us seem to have towards it. I imagine the editorial team at the Guardian doing a bit of head scratching over what kind of exposure it warrants, and perhaps the esteemed role as a slightly more environmental newspaper pushed the story to the dizzy heights of page 2, taking an obvious backseat to election build-up news.
Having spent much of the weekend pondering if a mysterious and invisible smog was upon us, I felt the full force of the pollution on Monday evening, leaving the sunny, tranquil and slightly elevated meadows of Sussex campus on my bike down to the cold, fog deluged Brighton seafront. It had a different feel to it than ordinary sea mist (or ‘mizzle’), which, coming from Cornwall, I’m very familiar with. It was thicker but in a peculiarly less visible way – not imminently sight impairing but more like anything 30 metres away just wasn’t there, and it wasn’t moist but definitely chilling.
It’s high time to re-evaluate laws and attitudes to psychedelic drug research.
There is a gigantic, hulking elephant in the UK policy room. Attempts to curb and reduce recreational drug use through strict criminalisation laws have failed. Vulnerable people are sent to jail, take substances of unknown quality and origin and support an often hyper-violent, caustic and predatory global underground drug trade. More than this, the ranking of severity of punishments for drug related crimes defies logic and evidence, pandering to fear and misinformation. These arguments are familiar tropes in the popular media, yet decriminalisation remains a taboo topic. And although there are a few encouraging voices beginning to make themselves heard, UK policy continues to be frustratingly stubborn to reform.
There is another, perhaps less obvious consequence of the UK’s attitude to drugs: it is incredibly difficult to conduct research to investigate precisely how psychedelic drugs affects the body and brain. Researchers hoping to study these effects will invariably meet twin barriers of excessively cautious funding bodies and prohibitively restrictive licensing and procurement regulations. Although there is massive potential for these drugs to be used medicinally, the fear of damaged reputation by both scientists and research councils is significant.
-“Hey, have you heard about the new Samsung Galaxy, it’s meant to be even sexier than the iPhone!”
– “Damn, I only just got the iPhone 6”.
-“Well, on the bright side you could get the Apple watch to go with it.”
-“But what about the new android series?”
This sort of conversation is completely normal to me. Any discussion of new science or technology becomes a series of segues into other announcements or discoveries. It has gotten to the point where scientific and technological change is now ubiquitous with modern life.
Change in this context is usually taken as a good thing. The announcement for a new medical treatment means that more people (possibly you) can live longer lives with more opportunities, new telescopes or other astronomical exploratory equipment can result in a deeper understanding of our place in the universe, and more efficient renewable technologies provide hope for a zero carbon future. However, there are also negative reactions. People voice their displeasure at having their private emails and online activities read and monitored by new and complex computer systems, we worry about the effect of new and expensive technologies on financial inequality, and we balk at the development of new and powerful military applications.
No matter how we react to novelty though, it still remains that we expect it. The constancy of scientific ‘progress’ in western culture is so complete that novelty has become normalised.
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