Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Science
-
Tell me this is not a gatekeeper to the Elder Gods’ lair under the Mountains of Madness. And a hairy chested yeti crab? We are doomed once the ice melts … doomed …
-
I’m way too busy at the moment to make substantial contributions to the internet[1]. I am snowed under trying to prepare two papers for publication, revise another, preparing a project connected to the health consequences of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, and getting my first PhD student through the submission process. I got…
-
The Guardian reports that recent scientific experiments confirm the use of Icelandic spar (a type of calcite) may have enabled the vikings to navigate without a compass even in cloudy weather. Apparently this stone is described in an Icelandic legend about a sailor called Sigurd, who used such a stone on a cloudy day to…
-
Continuing to flog the dead horse of post-scarcity fantasy, I thought I’d bring my day job to bear on the task, and test the cost-effectiveness of a cleric-based public health measure to reduce infant mortality in a developing (medieval) nation. Introduction Infant mortality was a significant public health problem in the medieval era, and in…
-
Following my previous post on post-scarcity fantasy, what would scientific inquiry look like in a world where economic and social relations are dominated by magic? As we saw in the previous post, even if only a small number of people have magical power, and only a small number of them have more than a little,…
-
When I was a student of physics I remember having to answer a question about what faster-than-light travel would look like, from the windows of a spaceship. I think it was in Mathematical Methods and Classical Field Theory[1], though it may have been Relativistic Field Theory[7], and I vaguely recall the answer involved stars from…
-
The Australian census is due soon. In 2001, 0.37% of the population wrote “Jedi” as their religion. Will Yoda triumph this time around?
-
The French soldiers at the Battle of Agincourt were so exhausted by the time that they entered battle that they could barely have fought, according to new research reported in the Guardian. A professor of biomechanics asked staff from the Royal Armouries Museum to walk and run in replica armour from the 15th century, based…
-
The Daily Mash tells me that it’s one year since Neptune was discovered. A lot has happened in that time – Pluto was demoted to junk-planet status, we discovered the possibility of planets around other stars and explored to within a few seconds (?) of the Big Bang. But Neptune is still going strong, doing…
Compromise and Conceit 