Jack's Blog

Below is an article I wrote at the request of someone I met when I was on the education panel. I never sent it to him because it took me months to say exactly what I wanted to, and by that time I thought it was probably a bit late. So here it is, for the first time.

As far back as 1818 with the first publication of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, people have been afraid of science. (more…)

I’ve been watching quite a few new TV shows recently, and it’s got me thinking about the phases you go through watching a new show. Not just how you react to one show individually, but how watching one show affects others, and how watching a programme after all the episodes have been released affects your viewing of it. (more…)

There are essentially two kinds of ways that countries around the world are run. They are:

• A democracy of some sort, where by which a person or party is selected by a majority to govern.
• An oligarchy, where one person (or a small group of people) assume total control for an extended period of time. They are normally not voted upon or, if they are, the voting is usually rigged.

One is clearly infinitely preferable to the other. When we look at oligarchies around the world, we just see a string of failures (Libya is a perfect example). When we look at democracies, on the other hand, we just global superpowers and paragons of modern culture and technology.

So obviously, we like democracy. Being able to choose who governs the country means that there is an element of fear for whoever is voted in – “if I don’t do a good job, people won’t vote me in next time”. It also means that we can choose between policies if we don’t like what one party is doing.

So far so good. But there are a number of flaws inherent in this system.

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When I was young and still in primary school, there were some little toys cars made out of plastic and metal that you could use between lessons to pass the time. Some of the other kids were careless with these though, and a lot of them wound up broken. What I used to do is find these broken ones, and take the little pieces of car (axels, wheels, a door, the front half of a chassis) home and fix them together to try and make a new toy car that you could actually play with.

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In the future when we all live in space, it’s going to be very tricky talking to each other. When you call someone on a phone, you take for granted that you hear what they are saying as they are saying it, but this is not the case. Coming from the phone are radio waves, which travel at the speed of light from them to you, taking a small detour in to space to avoid having to go through the Earth (which is always in the way). At small, inter-continental distances, this isn’t really that noticeable, but even going out to Mars it proves to be a very serious problem. It takes about 10 minutes for light to reach Mars, so there is a 20 minute delay between pressing forwards on a control panel, and seeing a rover on a screen move forwards. A rover could easily have driven off a cliff in that time.

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I’ve spent the last few weeks working my way through Douglas Crockford’s superb Crockford On Javascript, and so far I’ve made it up to the fourth episode, The Metamorphosis of Ajax. He talks fairly extensively about not only the birth of Ajax, but also the birth of the web as a whole and the birth of HTML and CSS. The upshot of the hour-and-a-half-long lecture is: everything sucks but JavaScript.

Now, I’m inclined to disagree with him (CSS is great at what it does, and it’s certainly better than the alternative, tables *shudder*), but I had a look on his site and he actually outlines a few great improvements to HTML.

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Dear Sir or Madam,

Ok, a few things here: I am a scientist. I know a quite a bit about science for a boy my age. I do physics and further maths at school, and I’m not too bad at it (if you’ll pardon my egotism there). The scientific method is very important to me, and presenting data (especially to young, impressionable people) in a fair, unbiased manner is really the cornerstone that holds the scientific community together and the only way that we as citizens can retain a shred of credibility. (more…)