Nadine Dorries has withdrawn her bill to promote abstinence in sex education. Perhaps she would have had better luck if she had gone after boobies. Male blue-footed boobies. Two blue-footed boobies are shown in the picture above.
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So wrong it breaks your calculator
I will start to teach an introductory statistical physics in a few weeks. One of the things I will do is talk about why in a still room the air is uniformly distributed in the room. The reason is statistics, to take an extreme example there is no law stopping all the gas molecules in […]
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Do as I say, not as I do, say the banks
Numbers can be interesting, and there are some very striking ones in Whoops!, an excellent book by John Lancaster – on our current financial predicament. One is that (as of a couple of years ago) the RBS bank group (Royal Bank of Scotland, Natwest, etc., i.e., the one we now own) had £1.81 trillion of […]
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Sexy liquids
I like liquids, I have been studying them since my PhD. Mainly I have been trying to understand them, but many scientists and engineers study them because they are so useful. Over the last 10 to 20 years people have been developing what is called microfluidics, which is kind of playing around with lots of little droplets. But […]
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Like oil and water on a duck’s back
We, and many other animals, have colour vision, and so we are surrounded by our uses of colour, from football shirts to different colour iPods. The dyes used to make a football shirt red, for example, are just chemical substances that adsorb blue and green photons but reflect red photons. Then of the white light […]
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