Friday 25 November 2022

The P-Value Podcast

I don't normally get on that well with podcasts, annoyingly. They rarely seem to hold my attention adequately, and my mind starts wandering onto something else while it fades into background noise, then i realise i've missed a bit, but im not sure how much. It's really hard work to keep attending to it properly.

But i've nevertheless been meaning to listen to this one for a while, because it features my close friend and awesome philosopher Rachael Brown, and I had a feeling it would be something special. I was unprepared for quite how *cool* and engaging it is though! 

I love the series on the role of values in science, and I think my students will love it too. I know many people are different from me, and find podcasts easier to attend to than text, so its great when i'm able to offer further resources in a variety of different modalities. 

Rachael is based in Australia, but in the UK at least, academics get little to no formal recognition for creating this sort of resource, which I think is a great shame, because it is hard to carve out time for anything that isn't essential to one's career. All the more reason then to thank Rachael for making this freely available!

Listen here!

https://thep-value.buzzsprout.com/ 

Monday 21 November 2022

Stats

According to the (basic) blogger stats function, this blog gets a fair number of views. I mean, not that many. Nearly 110k since i started it ten years ago. The interweb seems to think I'd need that many *every month* for it to be commercially viable - ie to generate enough money that I could be a full-time blogger. Luckily I have a job!

But i'm curious about it. I get weird spikes where I'll suddenly get 600 views in a day for no reason that i can discern. And i only very very rarely get comments. So it seems plausible that the views are mostly bots, especially when there are spikes, but i don't really understand how it all works.

I'd love to get more comments from readers. 

So do us a favour: drop a quick line in the comments if you're a human!



Friday 4 November 2022

My job is insane


As in, you have to be a bit weird to do it, I think. And before you think I'm being ablist, I'm using 'insane' in its reclaimed sense, to mean unusual, non-standard, special, rather than anything perjorative. 

This semester has been relentless.

Wednesday 2 November 2022

Philosophy for physicists

I teamed up with some colleagues last week to produce a short video promoting philosophy of science to physics undergraduates. All credit to Ben Hanson and Tim Moorsom for the smooth editing!


Facepalm moment for suggesting Descrates was a Medieval Philosopher though. This is why I don't do hps...........