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The Popularity of Counterintuition
Over at Wired, Clive Thompson has a short but initially reassuring post questioning the abundance of popular science books which promise to overturn your fundamental thoughts about absolutely anything....
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Statistics from the OED
Last month, when I was doing research for my exam on the history of the English language, I stumbled across some fascinating figures provided by the Oxford English Dictionary on the history of certain...
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An Elite for Everyone
Today, I came across yet another infographic claiming how just about anyone can foster their creativity, and it made me think that one of the biggest cons of modern culture that we gormlessly accept is...
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Messieurs Mangetout
In preparation for a piece of short fiction about pica – a disorder that causes people to crave and eat inedible substances such as sand, fabric, and even glass – I came across some interesting entries...
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Science the Usurper
Jonathan Jones has a thought-provoking and no doubt tremendously controversial article at The Guardian suggesting that science has ousted art from the role of “expanding minds and imaginations and...
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Anthony Burgess, Failed Composer
This week, I came across this fascinating article about Anthony Burgess, which describes how he was determined to become the next great English composer after hearing Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi...
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Reading the Unexpected
If you regularly use Google+, you’ll be aware of the recent introduction of ‘communities’, though the issue I wish to raise is relevant to everyone who reads news and commentary from any sources. This...
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The Book of Barely Imagined Beings
When unwrapping Christmas presents, particularly when they’re late, you’re never so confident as when you’re opening a gift from yourself – no one else knows your tastes quite so precisely, so these...
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Interdisciplinary Science Writing
My opinion of Scientific American has lessened quite considerably over the past year. It has some fairly reliable and interesting bloggers, but much of its mainstream output conforms to the...
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The Heroic Ideal
I don’t watch much TV, and when I do, I mostly watch documentaries and comedies of the kind typified by David Attenborough and Armando Iannucci. I occasionally flirt with fantasy, but I didn’t think...
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The Future is Never New: Part One
That’s it. I’ve finished my degree and there’s no going back. As I write this, I haven’t yet been told how well I remembered everything I had to remember, or how original were my arguments about...
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The Dark Side of Creativity
I just came across a review by Seana Moran of a 2010 book called The Dark Side of Creativity (ed. David Cropley and others), which brings together a number of essays that look at creativity from a...
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The Cause of Bad Science Communication
Will J. Grant and Luke Menzies have a post on the Australian website The Conversation in which they say that they’re making a documentary on science communication and public acceptance of science, and...
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Being Conscious of Writing
Last week, Laura Jane Martin posted an article on Scientific American about obtuse language in science journals. It reminded me of George Orwell’s great essay, Politics and the English Language (1946),...
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Current limits in the neuroscience of creativity
The science of creativity, particularly in neuroscience and experimental psychology, is an extremely popular field at the moment, and it’s not hard to understand why. Creativity has long been a...
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Musical Phi
Applying mathematics to music can be fun, but it’s even better to throw in music theory too. The 18th, I think, was Phi day (I say “think” because some sources on the web say it really ought to be in...
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Science the Usurper
The arts and sciences might compete for our awe, but they each have fundamentally separate roles in our lives. Jonathan Jones has a thought-provoking and no doubt tremendously controversial article at...
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Reading the Unexpected
The organisation of the internet can prevent us from discovering the best it has to offer, but small habits can change that. If you regularly use Google+, you’ll be aware of the recent introduction of...
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The Book of Barely Imagined Beings
Caspar Henderson’s Book of Barely Imagined Beings is a triumph of human curiosity in a long tradition of zoological literature. ‘The Book of Barely Imagined Beings’ When unwrapping Christmas presents,...
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The Heroic Ideal
Our feelings towards popular heroic narratives like Game of Thrones show how easily our morality can be manipulated. I don’t watch much TV, and when I do, I mostly watch documentaries and comedies of...
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