For those who missed the annual Perseid meteor shower, there is another chance to see some debris vaporizing in our atmosphere this week. The Aurigids are a much rarer shower, generated by comet Kiess (C/1911 N1) passing near the sun around 4 C.E. Gravity from the Earth and other planets sometimes creates dust trails that [...]

Today’s Ottawa Citizen has an article about how the Canadian War Museum is being pressured to change some of the text in its Bomber Command exhibit. Veterans had complained that it makes them out to be war criminals. The text reads:
“The value and morality of the strategic bomber offensive against Germany remains bitterly contested. Bomber [...]

Just a word in passing: this phase in the long history of my blog has now run for two full years. a sibilant intake of breath first emerged on this day, back in 2005. Since then, I have started and finished an M.Phil at Oxford and moved into a relevant and interesting job. I wonder [...]

It is nearly always interesting to see complex data presented in a new way - particularly as a visualization. The way this one arose was actually very mathematical, based on equations for modeling the strength of electromagnetic fields.
The dense cluster on the left is a tangle of high school and undergrad. The much smaller grouping [...]

The World Resources Institute has produced an excellent flowchart showing the activities that generate greenhouse gas emissions and the magnitude of those flows in terms of CO2 equivalence.
The data is from 2000, but I would expect the relative magnitudes to be reasonably similar now. This graphic provides a powerful and intuitive view into where the [...]

The Senlis Council, an international policy think tank, has developed an alternative plan for dealing with Afghanistan’s record crop of opium poppies. Their Poppy for Medicine Project aims to address the global shortage in medicinal opiates (such as morphine) while also providing a sustainable basis for the Afghan economy. Providing poppies for legal medicinal purposes [...]