ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

Who stands to gain? What do they stand to gain?
Let’s start with a biblical quote I came across the other day…
For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there will be famines, plagues, and earthquakes in various places.Mark 13:8
This is then used by some people to justify that we are now approaching [...]

Read: Apocalypse Cui Bono »

Creationism should be discussed in school science lessons, rather than excluded, says the director of education at the Royal Society.BBC News
I have no objection to people being ‘Creationists’ or proponents of ‘Intelligent Design’. It may indeed be that an almighty being has chosen — via whatever mechanism — to create man as he is today, [...]

Read: Creationism isn’t science, but nor should it be taboo »

…only I wouldn’t like to predict exactly how nigh.
A huge particle accelerator experiment is about to start and a tiny group of people believe it could spell the end of the world. But why are we so obsessed with the possibility of apocalypse?BBC News Magazine
In summary, the basic theory is this. The Large Hadron Collider [...]

Read: The End of the World is Nigh… »

BTP’s first day at school.
In the last week, we’ve seen his final day at nursery school, and he’s a little bit sad in some ways, because his nursery school isn’t anywhere near his proper school, so none of the other kids he knows will be going to his new school. He’s going to miss [...]

Read: Big Day Tomorrow; Big Heads Now »

Britons told to leave New OrleansBBC News Headline
Well, technically, yes. But I rather think everyone has been advised to leave New Orleans, what with that big windy-blow Hurricane Gustav thingummy heading in that direction; the BBC’s headline would seem to imply that everyone else can stay…
It’s one of those things: when viewed from a [...]

Read: Gustav and others »

No, seriously…
Martian soil appears to contain sufficient nutrients to support life - or, at least, asparagus - Nasa scientists believe.BBC News
…it is surely only a matter of time before they start setting up some allotments… “I’m just popping down to the allotments, dear.. I’ll be back in six years.”

Read: The Asparagus Men Of Mars »

Imagine an eight-foot venemous scorpion, towering over you and ready to strike!

Living in the UK, you’d be surprised to find one of these crawling across your bedroom floor, wouldn’t you?
So would I, to be honest. There’s only one sort of scorpion found in the UK (Euscorpius flavicaudis) and this isn’t it. Nor did I find [...]

Read: The Scorpion King »

I’m reading a book called Quirkology by Professor Richard Wiseman. He looks at a lot of studies of quirky little things: how good people are at assessing whether or not someone is lying, how easy it is to suggest memories of events that never happened and so on. Oh, and that I was born in [...]

Read: Quirky, and mostly scientific »

Working class people have lower IQs than those from wealthy backgrounds and should not expect to win places at top universities, an academic has claimed.
Newcastle University’s Bruce Charlton said fewer working class students at elite universities was the “natural outcome” of class IQ differences.
BBC News
Bruce: fuck off.
Sorry, perhaps I should phrase that differently…

Read: And You Wonder Why I Don’t Like Toffs… »

And I don’t mean warm water, I mean water at what must presumably be around freezing point.
To explain what I mean, consider the following scenario. There is a sudden snowstorm, lasting about half an hour. If the ground was previously wet (e.g. it had been raining earlier), the snow will melt. If not, the snow [...]

Read: Why does water melt snow? »