homunculus

Postings from the interface of science and culture

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Want to win £1000?

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I have a piece in the Guardian online on the Mpemba effect and the RSC’s £1000 prize for explaining it. The article is largely unchanged f...
Thursday, June 21, 2012

Society is a complex matter

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It is a book? A booklet? A brochure? Search me, but my, er, tract on social complexity is now published by Springer. This 70-page item ...
1 comment:
Friday, June 15, 2012

Silly names

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Here’s my Crucible column for the June issue of Chemistry World . Incidentally, since the magazine chose to illustrate its regular contribu...
Wednesday, June 13, 2012

New website articles

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I've just put two new pdfs on my website : extended versions of a piece on Turing patterns published in the June issue of Chemistry Worl...
1 comment:
Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Green fireworks

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An edited version of this piece has just gone up on the BBC Future site. ____________________________________________________ Some envi...
Saturday, May 26, 2012

Some books to browse

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The Browser has run an interview in which I recommend five books connected to Curiosity . (I cheat – one is a multi-volume series.) And I j...
Friday, May 25, 2012

Buckled up

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I have written a story for Physical Review Focus, of which the pre-edited version is below. There’s more on this topic in my book Shapes , ...
Wednesday, May 23, 2012

It's not only opposites that attract

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My latest news article for Nature is here – it was altered very little in the editing, so I shan’t include the original. Was this problem ...
1 comment:

Slippery slopes

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I often used to get asked if the image on the cover of the UK version of Critical Mass , shown here, is real (it is). It was a great ch...
3 comments:
Monday, May 21, 2012

Last word

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One of the sections of New Statesman I most enjoy is This England, which supplies little snippets of the poignantly weird, stupid and ridic...
Thursday, May 17, 2012

Galileo versus Bacon?

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Andrew Robinson gives me a kind review in this week’s New Scientist (not available free online, but Andrew has put it on his website here )....
1 comment:
Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Curioser...

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So: reviews. I read somewhere recently that some writers still feel it the proper thing to do, if not to never read them, then at least not ...
2 comments:
Sunday, May 13, 2012

Science and wonder

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This piece appeared in the 30 April issue of the New Statesman , a “ science special ”, for which I was asked to write about whether “scienc...
1 comment:

Who knew?

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I don’t really understand science reporting in the mainstream media. They tend to set a very high bar of originality and novelty, which is f...
Thursday, May 10, 2012

The start of curiosity

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Here’s essentially a brief overview of my new book Curiosity, published this month. The piece appears in the latest issue of New Humanist ...
5 comments:
Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Comment is free, for better or worse

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I’ve been meaning for ages to say something about the brief experience of writing a column for the Guardian . I’m prompted to do it belated...
3 comments:

Lip-reading the emotions

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And another BBC Future piece… I was interviewed on related issues recently (not terribly coherently, I fear) for the BBC’s See Hear program...
2 comments:
Thursday, May 03, 2012

The entropic sieve

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Here’s another of my (pre-edited) earlier pieces for the BBC Future site. Must catch up on these now – there are several more. ____________...

Below the surface

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Here’s my Crucible column for the May issue of Chemistry World . Arguably a bit parochial, but hopefully not without some resonance outside...
1 comment:
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About Me

Philip Ball
I am a London-based writer, and the author of several books on aspects of science and its interactions with other aspects of culture. My latest book is The Modern Myths (University of Chicago Press, 2021).
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