homunculus

Physics, ultimate reality, and an awful lot of money [A dramatically truncated version of this comment appears in the Diary section of the l...

Nature’s Patterns The first volume ( Shapes ) of my trilogy on pattern formation, Nature’s Patterns (OUP), is now out . Sort of. At any eve...

The right honourable Nigel Lawson At a university talk I gave recently, a member of the department suggested that I might look at Nigel Laws...

There’s more to life than sequences [This is the pre-edited version of my latest Muse for Nature News.] Shape might be one of the key facto...

Who should bear the carbon cost of exports? [This is the pre-edited version of my latest Muse column for Nature News. (So far it seems only...

What does it all mean? [This is the pre-edited version of my latest Muse for Nature News.] Science depends on clear terms and definitions –...

Catching up The lack of activity here in the past month or so doesn’t reflect any on my part; rather, frantic preparations in respect of the...

The Devil’s Doctor on tour The title of this blog reiterates that which I used for my ‘virtual’ theatre company, in which guise I put on sev...

Nature versus naturoid [This is my Materials Witness column for the January 2009 issue of Nature Materials .] Are there metameric devices in...

Dark matter and DIY genomics [This is my column for the January 2009 issue of Prospect .] Physicists’ understandable embarrassment that we...

Who knows what ET is thinking? [My early New Year resolution is to stop giving my Nature colleagues a hard time by forcing them to edit sto...

Una poca lettura For any of you who reads Italian (I am sure there are many), there is a little essay of mine up on the Italian science ...

DIY economics There I am, performing a bit of rotary sanding on top of a piece of the newspaper that I’d considered disposable (the Business...

What you don’t learn at school about the economy [Why, you might wonder, would I want to expose myself to more flak from economists by writ...

Epidemics, tipping points and phase transitions I just came across this comment in the FT about the kind of social dynamics I discussed in...

Fractal calligraphy Everyone got very excited several years ago when some guys claimed that Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings were fractals ...

The drip, drip, drip of environmental change [You know how I like to give you added value here, which is to say, the full-blown (who said o...