(I wrote this as an assessment piece for a climate change science and policy course I'm taking this semester. 800 word limit so I didn't get into as much detail as I'd have liked, unfortunately). The Gish Gallop (also known as proof by verbosity) is the fallacious debate tactic of drowning your … [Read more...]
Turning up the Heat – AusPol and Climate Policy
With an election just around the corner, I thought it would be timely to discuss some issues related to climate science policy, including the CSIRO job cuts, Great Barrier Reef bleaching and climate adaptation. In February this year CSIRO announced they would be cutting 350 jobs across their … [Read more...]
A Reflection on STEM Education
(I wrote this blog post over a period of three days; from moving out of home to settling in at ANU) So earlier this week I gave a talk at my high school to the new Year 10 cohort about "Science and the Importance of Being Curious". Talking about science, curiosity and STEM (science, technology, … [Read more...]
The Science Fiction and Philosophy of Video Games
Recently, I've been playing two new and very popular video games; Fallout 4 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. Both are decisively science-fiction, but are very different games; the former being a modern day equivalent of Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game (RPG) set in post-apocalyptic Boston, and … [Read more...]
Reflections on a Summer at MIT
Having been back in sunny old Noosa for a week now, the past 6 weeks at the Research Science Institute at MIT seem like a strange dream. Sure I have 80+ new friends on facebook, a paper written on nuclear material science and a couple of souvenirs, but it's difficult to not help but wonder - wow, … [Read more...]
Perspectives, Cats, Einstein and Quantum Physics
So my friend Blake Walker started his segment "Walker's Wisdom" earlier this week, and his first topic was on Perspectives. That is, in a philosophical and perhaps psychological sense, how our perspective can change not only the way we approach things, but our experience of them too. It was funny he … [Read more...]