Blog Profile / Michael Hanlon's Science Blog
| URL : | http://hanlonblog.dailymail.co.uk/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Academics / General Science | |
| Posts on Regator: | 162 | |
| Posts / Week: | 1.6 | |
| Archived Since: | June 21, 2011 | |
Blog Post Archive
Why do so many people hate cyclists?
We live in a world where a young woman claims, in a tweet, to have knocked a cyclist into the ditch then boasts about doing a runner. The primordially stupid 'EmmaWay20' justifies her actions by pointing out that the cyclist, Toby Hockley, 'doesn't pay road tax'. Ms Way, if that...
Is Andrew Wakefield a bad man? Or merely the prisoner of his own hubris?
The measles outbreak in South Wales, which has affected more than a thousand people (mostly teenaged children) is appalling because it was almost wholly preventable. We see here the concrete results of an unsupported scare story, that said vaccines will brain damage your child. Note I said ‘vaccines’, not ‘MMR’....
Were the 1970s really that bad?
One of the tropes that has emerged, unquestioned in the past week or so, is that the Britain that Margaret Thatcher inherited in 1979 was a hopeless, broken and run down place - a European version of Zimbabwe, riven with internal strife, near-bankrupt and an international laughing stock. Well, having...
Look up into the sky and back into the past
Interesting piece by Stephen Bayley today on the Boeing 747, the original 'Jumbo Jet'. This aircraft is reported to be entering the final straight before the world's airlines finally begin to phase this colossal machine out, in favour of newer, more high-tech rivals such as Boeing's own 787 'Dreamliner'. Indeed,...
Just what do you need to do to go to jail?
Most of us, I would guess, have a pretty good idea of what constitutes a 'serious crime'. Anything that involves hitting people hard and hurting them. Murder, rape, torture, sexual assault, obviously, ditto offences against children. Burglary, robbery, blackmail, extortion, people-trafficking, serious harassment, driving dangerously/while drunk, setting fire to things...
What on earth is the point of Formula One?
Does anyone watch Formula One motor racing any more? I’m sure they do, but why? After the bizarre incident last weekend when Red Bull driver Sebastian Vettel ignored ‘team orders’ and overtook fellow Red Buller Mark Webber to take the chequered flag, F1 must now rank as the most stupid...
Speed cameras are turning us all into sneaks
Amid all the furore over the Huhne-Pryce affair, did they commit a crime? (yes), should they have been punished? (yes) should that punishment have been jail (no), we have forgotten the strange little kernel at the heart of this matter, the introduction of robot policing. According to various reports, more...
The Economic Crisis for Dummies (like me)
A thought-provoking article on the BBC’s website today explaining the roots of the current economic crisis – and a series of possible cures – for dummies like me who do not have a clue how money works. Lots of options are considered. The Bank of England could write the Treasury...
Why the Westboro Baptists should move to Pyongyang
What has North Korea got to do with the small town of Topeka in Kansas? Not a lot you’d think. One is a nuclear-tipped pariah-state that has just threatened to wage war on the Free World, the other a sleepy Mid-Western town that doesn’t really want to invade anywhere. But...
Bacon butties will not kill you
I hate ‘eating x gives you y’ stories. Nearly always, associations between particular foods and drinks and specific illnesses are weak, riddled with confounding variables and describe increases in marginal risks that shouldn’t really worry us. If eating pickled fish tongues, say, doubles your risk of developing cancer of the...
Badger cull - it will not happen
Owen Patterson, the Environment Secretary, seems to be doing his damnedest to drive Tory poll ratings down still further. His announcement that last year's delayed badger cull will now go ahead, in Gloucestershire, somewhere called 'West Somerset' and Dorset this summer. I stuck my head out last year and predicted...
Tito's crazy Mars plan may just come off
Imagine spending more than a year and a half in a cramped, dimly lit capsule about the size of a Ford Transit - a space you will have to share with one other person, who may or may not be your husband or wife. It will always be either too...
The Bank of England has gone mad
So let’s get this straight. Paul Tucker, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, wants to introduce negative interest rates in an effort to ‘kick start the British economy’. This would mean the high street banks would have to pay the UK’s central bank to hold funds rather than the...
Family snapshots and lunar myths
If something is said to be true often enough does it become true, even if it is not? I ask because a strange story emerged last week, concerning a 'lost' NASA photograph taken by the Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke in April 1972. The picture shows a Polaroid-type colour snapshot...
The weather's fine, but there may be a meteor shower
Earth is under attack! The extraordinary footage from Russia this morning shows an event of almost unprecedented rarity - a meteorite large enough to cause serious damage hitting, or at least coming close to, a centre of human population. So far, we hear, about 500 people were injured, some quite...
How you can stop the food frauds
First beef, now, it seems lamb. It’s easy to make jokes about the horsemeat scandal, and I have, but there is obviously a serious side to all this. Our food industry is being revealed to be something of a sick joke. Nothing, and no one, can be trusted. Look at...
Farewell Mr Fox?
Big wild animals, especially wild carnivores, do not really ‘work’ in high-density industrialised civilisations. The usual solution to the problem of man vs animal is the eradication of the latter by the former. That is why there are no wolves in Britain any more, or bears (did you know there...
Soylent Horse
Is it any longer possible to buy food that is Not Made Of Horse? As the list of equine mealstuff grows ever longer, it is interesting to speculate on what will be the last non-horsey groceries identified in the UK. Fish fingers? Nah (or neigh) … I’m sure you can...
Gay rights in the rainforest
Brett Mills, head of Media Studies at the University of East Anglia sounds, at first, like a made-up character – perhaps one of those hysterical PC types lampooned so brilliantly by the magazine Viz. He is in the news because he has criticised the BBC – and specifically the Natural...
Forget scaring migrants with our weather - just show them pictures of our food
Amusing to see that the government is planning to deter economic migrants coming to this country by lying about our weather. When restrictions are eased at the end of this year, it is feared that tens of thousands of people from Bulgaria and Romania will flood to the UK in...