no longer an anti-social networker...

Farewell Google+.  Your interface was always clunky and annoying, but you had an interesting set of users.

For my 3.5 followers, you can still watch my eccentricities at my blog site (where I was always “archiving” my G+ posts anyway, in preparation for this day…)

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For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

It's About Time

O brave new world, That has such people in ’t!

It’s your job

an excellent post about honesty in science

No, it’s not The Incentives—it’s you

... a good reason why you should avoid hanging bad behavior on The Incentives is that you’re a scientist, and trying to get closer to the truth, and not just to tenure, is in your fucking job description. Taxpayers don’t fund you because they care about your career; they fund you to learn shit, cure shit, and build shit. If you can’t do your job without having to regularly excuse sloppiness on the grounds that you have no incentive to be less sloppy, at least have the decency not to say that out loud in a crowded room or Twitter feed full of people who indirectly pay your salary. Complaining that you would surely do the right thing if only these terrible Incentives didn’t exist doesn’t make you the noble martyr you think it does; to almost anybody outside your field who has a modicum of integrity, it just makes you sound like you’re looking for an easy out. It’s not sophisticated or worldly or politically astute, it’s just dishonest and lazy. If you find yourself unable to do your job without regularly engaging in practices that clearly devalue the very science you claim to care about, and this doesn’t bother you deeply, then maybe the problem is not actually The Incentives—or at least, not The Incentives alone. Maybe the problem is You.

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For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

Nobel Prize in Physics 2018

Congratulations to Donna Strickland.

Wikipedia rejected an entry on a Nobel Prize winner because she wasn’t famous enough

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For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

sequestering carbon, several books at a time LXXXIX

The latest batch, including the eight we bought on holiday in Hay-on-Wye:

full moon at sunrise

The sun has just risen; the full moon is just setting.

7:07 BST, looking west

bits of ancient history

We drove from Westonbirt to Avebury, to see the the largest megalithic stone circle in the world.

some of the stones are big, taller than a person, ...

... some are smaller, and some are missing, marked by little concrete obelisks (like the one nearest the camera)

it’s possible to walk all the way round the circle (with some small detours), and to touch the stones; some people were clearly deeply communing with them (maybe because it is the autumn equinox today?)

here we can see the ditch and the bank (in the left foreground; I’m standing on the bank to take the photo)

Having walked round the circle, we followed the "Avenue" of stones (by car) down to Silbury Hill, the tallest prehistoric man-made mound in Europe.

this is as close as we were allowed to get

Over the road is the West Kennet Long Barrow, a Neolithic tomb.

view from the road: the barrow is that little line on the horizon

wow, we’re allowed just to walk into it

it’s dark in there (although there are a couple of skylights recently drilled through the rock ceiling)

view of Silbury Hill from the barrow

That’s enough tramping round the past: we’re off to our next B&B for some modern comforts.