The title is a James Bond quote, from The Spy Who Loved Me. A brief web search suggests that Dom Perignon 1952 retails at £950 a bottle, which probably explains why I so rarely get to judge Dom Perignon drinkers. Dom Perignon is champagne of course, which is noted for its bubbles.
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Bennett, Baird, Miller and Wolford won the 2012 IgNobel prize in Neuroscience with their work with a dead (definitely dead, not just resting) salmon. There is a serious point to the work: The problem of false positives. This is a problem in statistics and is a real trap for the unwary.
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My Friday was made when I learnt that a good friend, Patrick Warren, had shared the 2012 IgNobel Prize in Physics. A few years ago, we did some work together on the surfaces of protein crystals. Patrick, together with three other scientists won the prize for work on ponytails. I wrote a blog post on […]
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I have arranged the evening public lecture programme for the local Institute of Physics branch. I’ll post some advertisements to the individual talks closer to the times, but here is a summary, with full details appearing at the IoP website. Wed 24th Oct: Discovery at the Large Hadron Collider – Prof Jon Butterworth, UCL Wed […]
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I am quite proud of my Erdös number of 4. An Erdös number of 4 means via a trail of 4 papers I can reach the prolific Hungarian-born mathematician Paul Erdös. Erdös published papers with an astonishing 511 other mathematicians. The path of papers is here, but basically I have written a paper with a good friend Jon […]
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Argentinosaurus is believed to be the largest land animal to have ever lived. It was a dinosaur and at maybe 100 tons and 30 m, it was a very big dinosaur. I wanted to know the largest land animal for the lectures on biological physics I am giving this coming semester, and Google and Wikipedia provided. Anyway, in the lectures my question will be: Why was the largest animal 100 tons, not say 10 tons, or 1000 tons?
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