by Richard Easther | Dec 20, 2023 | Astronomy, Education, New Zealand, Personal
Amongst everything else that happened in 2023, a key anniversary of a huge leap in our understanding of the Universe passed largely unnoticed – the centenary of the realisation that not only was our Sun one of many stars in the Milky Way galaxy but that our galaxy was...
by Richard Easther | Oct 17, 2023 | Data, New Zealand, Personal, Science in Our Lives
There is insight in the stories that numbers can tell, and for some of us that insight offers a sense of calm in turbulent times. Which may be why in the midst of this year’s rains I started making graphs of the accumulated rainfall and how it stacked up against...
by Richard Easther | Oct 11, 2023 | Data, New Zealand, Personal
I’ve been using social media since I found Usenet as a PhD student in the early 1990s. I was teaching at Yale when Facebook arrived from Harvard (one day it wasn’t there, then suddenly it was), I remember the debates about whether blogging was a risk to one’s academic...
by Richard Easther | Jun 13, 2023 | Bad Science, Featured, New Zealand, Science in Our Lives
New Zealand is suddenly and unexpectedly a “spacefaring nation”, with locally built rockets regularly launched to orbit and even the Moon. This is a shock to many – it certainly surprised me, and I live and breathe this stuff. But now that we find ourselves with an...
by Richard Easther | Jan 11, 2023 | Academia, Bad Science, Physics
Last week, Science Twitter was roiled by claims that “disruptive science” was on the wane and that this might be reversed by “reading widely”, taking “year long sabbaticals” and “focussing less on quantity … and more on …quality”. It blew up, which is...
