James Wimberley

It’s been our trendsetting exoplanet week at the RBC. After the heavy stuff from Mike on tenured stargropers with too much immunity and from me on Renaissance cranks with not enough, here is something lighter for a rainy Sunday. Fan image of Niven’s puppeteer We love Bruno-style speculations about intelligent aliens fron other stars. Thrint, […]

The Campo dei Fiori piazza in Rome holds a tony street-market: funghi porcini, ecological olive oil, and not a Chinese T-shirt or fake Vuitton bag in sight. In the middle of the bustle stands a sombre statue of a hooded monk, put up by anticlericals in 1889. It commemorates Giordano Bruno, a Dominican friar who […]

Michael Vadon/Wikimedia Commons Donald Trump said this about Ben Carson, a rival for the Republican nomination : He was a doctor, perhaps an OK doctor, by the way. The trope usually goes by Pope’s phrase “damning with faint praise”, but I’m sure RBC readers do not need reminding that its technical Greek name in rhetoric […]

Yesterday Catalonia held elections for the regional government. Since Madrid frustrated their hopes of an independence referendum, the tactic if the secessionists has been to try to turn every election from rat-catcher up into an independence plebiscite. From that perspective, yesterday was not a win. Pro-independence parties narrowly failed to get a majority of votes. […]

Mariordo Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz/Wikimedia Commons (h/t to a famous campaign of the 1970s against Nestlé’s marketing of baby formula in Africa) How many people did Volkswagen kill with their conspiracy to rig the diesel emissions tests? Kevin Drum has come up with a back-of-the envelope estimate of 12 in California. For the world, it’s […]

Bede writes history, 8th century The British SF writer Charles Stross posts a challenge: Assume you are a historian in the 30th century, compiling a pop history text about the period 1700-2300AD. What are the five most influential factors in that period of history? …. For the sake of argument we assume: no singularity/rapture of […]

.. with an assist from Ur-Nammu of Sumer. At Copenhagen in 2009, rich countries committed rather vaguely to putting up $100 billion a year from 2020 in long-term financing for climate mitigation and adaptation. The centrepiece of this effort was supposed to be the Green Climate Fund. So far they have pledged $10.2 bn to […]

Keith wrote, of deaths caused by drunk driving: But if we think of tragedy as the Ancient Greeks did — something that was unavoidable — drink driving deaths aren’t a tragedy but an outrage. Dead right on the outrage. But did the Greeks really see tragedy this way? SFIK the Ancient Greeks did not use […]

We don’t get the technical progress we need, but what comes easiest. Cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s? They will be in the post, some day soon. Multi-player role-playing video games, that we never missed before they showed up: step this way. Sometimes need and feasibility coincide, as with the smartphone: the prototype of the universal […]

How safe is Obama’s Clean Power Plan, adopted on Monday with conspicuous lack of ostentation, from legal attack? It’s a regulation implementing the Clean Air Act of 1963 and its many later additions. The Supreme Court agreed in 2007 in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency that carbon dioxide was a pollutant for the purposes of […]