markhaw.blogspot.com
From the restless middle world: We are all wasters
http://markhaw.blogspot.com/2007/01/we-are-all-wasters.html
From the restless middle world. A blog about science, writing, and science writing. Tuesday, January 09, 2007. We are all wasters. I recently stumbled across a peculiar analogy between the science of heat and energy- so called thermodynamics- and the socio-economic basis of society: an analogy whose implication, I'm afraid, is not very flattering for modern society. Whewell's book actually uses not 'work' but the term 'labouring force'. This is a nice clue to one of Whewell's other preoccupations (sh...
markhaw.blogspot.com
From the restless middle world: Terribly inspiring lecturers...?
http://markhaw.blogspot.com/2007/01/terribly-inspiring-lecturers.html
From the restless middle world. A blog about science, writing, and science writing. Friday, January 05, 2007. Is there an incompatibility between great visionary science and good teaching of science? I started to wonder about this yesterday as I read about a couple of the 'greats' of the past and their purported ineptitude in the lecture theatre. (Much of the detail below I owe to G. Crowther's 1968 book 'Scientific Types'.) Perhaps there are lessons we can learn here. For that whole story! What these 't...
markhaw.blogspot.com
From the restless middle world: January 2007
http://markhaw.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html
From the restless middle world. A blog about science, writing, and science writing. Wednesday, January 24, 2007. Thermodynamics was the scientific key to the Industrial Revolution: it set down the science of energy, heat, temperature and entropy; it defined at last, after a century of industrial stumbling-about-in-the-dark, the rules of how machines could be made to convert abundant (but not immediately useable) energy into useful work. We live on the surface of a vast engine! Posted by mark haw at 11:28...
markhaw.blogspot.com
From the restless middle world: Professional curiosity?
http://markhaw.blogspot.com/2006/12/professional-curiosity.html
From the restless middle world. A blog about science, writing, and science writing. Tuesday, December 05, 2006. Just a mention of a recent article I wrote for the website. Where I discuss what I think is a problem with modern-day curiosity. Do people do this anymore? Perhaps we know our world too well now for "ordinary" people (i.e. without the backing of vast laboratories, funds and high-spec equipment) to find out anything new about it? Academic literature, however, still presents a problem, perhaps th...
lablit.com
A culture of curiosity – What modern readers can learn from George Eliot
http://www.lablit.com/article/153
Jump to main content. A culture of curiosity. What modern readers can learn from George Eliot. Those crazy Victorians: the botany craze was just one symptom. Curiosity has been confined to scientists professionals of curiosity, if you will and the rest of us are not supposed to bother with it. About the world characters who care what’s going on around them? Are these novels equally rare? It hasn’t always been like this. Lewis Wolpert, elsewhere. Is distinguished in a broader sense it contains a number of...
markhaw.blogspot.com
From the restless middle world: December 2006
http://markhaw.blogspot.com/2006_12_01_archive.html
From the restless middle world. A blog about science, writing, and science writing. Saturday, December 09, 2006. Crick and Watson- a disaster for biological science? Here's a controversial statement that came up yesterday in a discussion I had with some polymer scientists:. That Crick and Watson's 'revolutionary' derivation of the structure of DNA, far from being the triumph of 20th century science, was actually the biggest disaster to hit biology since biological science began. Nowadays researchers are ...
markhaw.blogspot.com
From the restless middle world: February 2007
http://markhaw.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html
From the restless middle world. A blog about science, writing, and science writing. Monday, February 19, 2007. Oh so popular on LibraryThing. I have just discovered something called LibraryThing- a website where people list and share their bookshelves! Nice Anyway, the point of this is that one, yes just one, very special person has a copy of my recent book Middle World. On his/her shelf. This means that, as LibraryThing helpfully tells me, there are 1,289,793 books more popular than Middle World! Writin...
markhaw.blogspot.com
From the restless middle world: Reviews etc
http://markhaw.blogspot.com/2006/12/reviews-etc.html
From the restless middle world. A blog about science, writing, and science writing. Tuesday, December 05, 2006. Here is the text from a recent review in this month's. Review of 'Middle World' by Carol Stanier, (c) Royal Society of Chemistry. As we journey through Middle world we meet (as one might expect) numerous Nobel prize winners and other eminent scientists, but also philosophers and even playwrights, their work set in context of the story. Peculiar and intimate details of their lives, such as M...
markhaw.blogspot.com
From the restless middle world: November 2006
http://markhaw.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html
From the restless middle world. A blog about science, writing, and science writing. Wednesday, November 29, 2006. Sales ranks, Brownian motion, and cosmology. Middle World' is apparently officially 'out'. It would be interesting to study the statistical fluctuations of the Amazon sales ranking: do these follow the same mathematical laws as the book's subject, Brownian motion? I can't think why I didn't mention the Brownian motion-cosmology link in the book. Imagine Robert Brown the botanist's reactio...
markhaw.blogspot.com
From the restless middle world: oh so popular on LibraryThing
http://markhaw.blogspot.com/2007/02/oh-so-popular-on-librarything.html
From the restless middle world. A blog about science, writing, and science writing. Monday, February 19, 2007. Oh so popular on LibraryThing. I have just discovered something called LibraryThing- a website where people list and share their bookshelves! Nice Anyway, the point of this is that one, yes just one, very special person has a copy of my recent book Middle World. On his/her shelf. This means that, as LibraryThing helpfully tells me, there are 1,289,793 books more popular than Middle World! Sales ...