Belling the Cat is a fable also known under the titles The Bell and the Cat and The Mice in Council. In the story, a group of mice agree to attach a bell to a cat's neck to warn of its approach in the future, but they fail to find a volunteer to perform the job. The term has become an... Continue Reading →
Everybody knows (or chooses not to). On climate denial, Trump’s tariffs and what links them…
Another slapdash post (fixing a transcript of a great interview, but there's only so much you can do before you get, er, slapdash). As per that song by Leonard Cohen "everybody knows" - that we're heading for 3 or 4 degrees. That's been clear to numerate people with even a cursory understanding of how the... Continue Reading →
The most eco Doctor Who story ever? Take a bow…. Logopolis; IAM, CVE, it’s all the same
Doctor Who, the looooong-running TV show I used to be obsessed with, was ecologically-minded from the start. In the second story [broadcast from December 21, 1963] the Doctor (a Time Lord, from the planet Gallifrey, though we didn't know that at the time) and his companions land on a planet that has had a nuclear... Continue Reading →
Salvation rituals, the US election and what next: “The last records from Norse Greenland are of a Christian marriage and a burning for witchcraft.”
Talking to a super smart friend (1) last night about the State of The World, we got onto the fun and games to be had before, during and after November 5 (the US ‘elections’). I found myself saying that all of us - even those who should and do know better - find ourselves hoping... Continue Reading →
Seeing things that aren’t there (yet): “The promise and peril of sociotechnical visions of the future”
A Looting the Ivory Tower on Sovacool, B. 2024. The promise and peril of sociotechnical visions of the future. Nature Reviews Physics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-024-00774-5 Not all academic work is self-serving word-spinning helpfully quarantined behind paywalls and verbiage walls. I wouldn’t want to hazard a percentage, and it varies from a) field to field and b) taste to... Continue Reading →
Help me invent a career-making shoddy little neologism! Something with skeuomorphs
Help me internet, you're my only hope. If I can come up with some neat name for a kinda-new-maybe-"concept", I'll get cited lots by academics, my Hype-index will climb into the positive, and I won't get laughed at in the rare job interviews that I stumble into. The situation is this There are such things... Continue Reading →
“Two kinds of people” – fundamental attribution errors, shaping the rules and “the clap clinic”
Okay, so this cartoon below is amusing, but also limited. It's limited because it assumes that behaviour is mostly shaped by "what kind of person you are" (this is known in the trade as the fundamental attribution error). The problem with the FAE (or one of them) is that it leads to fatalism/shoulder-shrugging by people... Continue Reading →
Hype and hyper-politics
It's easy (1) to fall in love with a new word/concept and over-use it, not see its gaps. That is the stage I will be in or the next however-long around "hyper-politics" "the Tories embraced a phase of what the political theorist Anton Jäger terms ‘hyper-politics’, in which politics is ubiquitous and absurd, touching on... Continue Reading →
“You don’t know what hard work is like”: pre-Internet writing and collaboration
Quick post because am supposed to be doing other things, which scare me and I am (obviously) doing displacement activities, albeit Worthy Ones. We people who have spent most of our lives in/of the Internet (and full disclosure, I am 50:50) have no real understanding of just how much boring physical work went in to... Continue Reading →
More piss “We”ak stuff about Saving “Our”selves, from smart people who don’t seem to be able to know better
You don't get to be Chief Scientific Advisor to HMG (His Majesty's Government) if you are a complete dolt. You may be a bit obedient, and/or a bit blinkered (aren't we all?) but you aren't actually actively thick. Part of not being thick, you'd hope, is looking at your worldview, and the (in)actions of people... Continue Reading →
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