There's another letter in the TLS today - from Lord Leach of Fairford - criticising (Lord) Bob May (of Oxford)'s Respect the Facts piece:Sir, – As a non-scientist I cannot have read one-hundredth of the number of scientific articles read by Robert May, yet I am...
Third time lucky?
A while ago now, we mentioned that the Royal Society had dropped from its website all reference to 'on the word of no one', the traditional translation of its motto Nullius in Verba, and that its former president, Bob May, had re-translated it as 'respect the facts'....
All Over the Place
More apologies. We are still busier than ever, which makes blogging difficult. We will be back up to speed in about three weeks. Meanwhile, here are a few things to check out. Alexander Cockburn and George Monbiot have been battling it out for a while now over at...
Go Forth and Multiply
Anyone doubting that environmentalists' doomsday visions of the future owe more to religion than science should know that Greenpeace are building an ark on Mount Ararat. No, really.
Word of the Day: Extravagate
Sir Harry Kroto laments the fall in applications to science degrees at UK universities. "Without first-class science graduates, how will we understand and deal with the crises caused by global warming?" The facts that a) we use in one year an amount of fossil fuel...
Six Degrees
Josie Appleton has written an excellent review of Mark Lynas' book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet Appleton takes issue with many of Lynas' claims and dismal prophecies, and lucidly argues that catastrophic narratives offered by environmentalists may owe...
The Royal Society’s ‘motto-morphosis’
Nullius in Verba, the motto of the prestigious Royal Society in London, is usually translated as ‘on the word of no one’. When it was coined back in 1663, it was intended to distance science from the methods of the ancient universities, which relied heavily on the...
Respect the facts
Sir, – “Nullius in Verba”, the motto of the Royal Society, is usually translated as “on the word of no one”. That is a fine motto, the message being that knowledge about the material universe should be based on appeals to experimental evidence rather than authority....
Spaghetti Carbondrama
This post doesn't deserve a title as good as that. And it's not even a very good title. Where does carbon come into it? Maybe we're just hungry.Apologies. We have each been otherwise engaged to the extent that we don't appear to have posted very much. And even now,...
CR in TLS
We have a letter in this week's Times Literary Supplement on Bob May's translation of Nullius in Verba. It's not much different from our original post on the subject, except all the commas are in exactly the right place.Sir, – “Nullius in Verba”, the motto of the...