Also known as the Copenhagen Summit. I’m not going to go into the scientific evidence for man-made global warming here. I’ve read arguments from both sides, and for me the crucial factor is that the vast majority of scientists, while they might disagree about the amount of man-made global warming, all seem to think that [...]

Richard Dawkins annoys me at times. I find his anti-religion rhetoric haranguing, no more pleasant than that of a gentleman wandering round the centre of town yelling that all sinners will “burn in a lake of hellfire”. To me, it doesn’t really matter which of them are right; it’s not polite, it’s not nice to [...]

There was a lot in the press recently about English holidaymakers drinking a lot of alcohol whilst on holiday. One quote in particular caught my eye: English holidaymakers are turning to drink on their breaks with the average adult consuming eight alcoholic drinks a day, a survey suggests.BBC News: English Turn To Booze On Holiday [...]

In a post dating back to the start of July, I wrote about the Where Do You Think You’re Going digital transport event at Hoult’s Yard in Newcastle. One of the particular things which had interested me at this event was a five minute talk by someone called Margaret Bell from Newcastle University, who was [...]

…I feel slightly nauseous myself, having just used a Bon Jovi song title, but it’s perhaps the most one I could think of for this quotation I came across. To set the scene: the article talks about drugs used as a legal ‘high’ — stuff like Salvia, amyl nitrate and isobutyl nitrate, which do not [...]

Okay, it’s a reference to The Adverts, and in particular their song about the spree killer, Gary Gilmore, who was executed by firing squad in 1977, and who requested that his corneas be used for transplants (which they were). The Adverts released a song called Gary Gilmore’s Eyes, which was decried as being somewhat in [...]

I’ve got no objection to people who want to use complementary, alternative, holistic, wholefood sorts of therapies, as long as they can afford to spend their money on them and haven’t been conned into thinking that serious scientific tests have shown them to be worthwhile. After all, these are now generally termed complementary medicines; they [...]

Steven Johnson writes about something I vaguely knew about — London’s Broad Street cholera outbreak of 1854. This is the story of how it was identified that cholera was somehow water-borne, as opposed to the previous beliefs that it was somehow carried by the smells or miasma of the urban filth. The commonly understood legend [...]

I know a little about spiders. I know that they’ve got eight legs, I know that you can’t get spiders which would grow to ginormous sizes because they don’t actually have extensor muscles in their legs and they use hydraulic pressure to move ‘em, but I’m not what you’d call an expert. Also, I’d say [...]

Or, in reference to it’s previous name, the Hancock… I thought it was you… The Hancock Museum is near Haymarket Metro station in Newcastle. It’s been a Newcastle institution for years. I visited regularly as a child (mostly, I think, because every time I went, my parents would buy me a small plastic dinosaur to [...]