Why everyone should pay attention to Stable Diffusion
Many of the people in my circles hadn’t heard of Stable Diffusion until I told them, and I was already two days late. Heralds of new technologies have a tendency to play up every new…
August 2022
When a teenager wants to solve poaching with machine-learning…
We always need more feel-good stories, but we need those feel-good stories more that withstand closer scrutiny instead of falling apart, and framed the right way. For example, Smithsonian magazine published an article with the…
The search for a powerful natural particle accelerator
And the promise of one distant supernova remnant.
In search of sandastros
About a week ago, I wrote to ICANN asking for a list of all the .com domains that were still available. After I received the file a few days later, I used two pieces of…
What makes ‘good science journalism’?
From ‘Your Doppelgänger Is Out There and You Probably Share DNA With Them’, The New York Times, August 23, 2022: Dr. Esteller also suggested that there could be links between facial features and behavioral patterns,…
On the record about a source of irritation
I need to go on the record about a source of mild irritation that seems to resurface in periodic fashion: the recent Current Affairs article about the “dangerous populist science of Yuval Noah Harari”. It’s an excellent…
Dams are bad for rivers. Are skyscrapers bad for winds?
The effects of wind on buildings are relatively more popular than the effects of tall buildings on the wind itself.
UAE: Straws in the wind
At the Ajman Museum (in the UAE), there is on display a traditional architectural design called barjeel, to cool homes and other small places of human occupation. It is essentially a cooling tower, also called…
A salvage
Why do you write? is a very difficult question to answer, so when an answer presents itself, you treasure it.
A trip to Jebel Jais
A peak of the Al Hajar mountains in the UAE and an important part of the country’s future.
The importance of sensible politics to good science
Stuart Ritchie writes a newsletter-blog that I quite like, called Science Fictions. On May 30, he published a post on this blog entitled ‘Science is political – and that’s a bad thing’. I thought the post…