Richard P Grant
Scientist, poet, gadfly
Creator and sustainer of
Occam's Typewriteremail: rpgrant at gmail.com
twitter: @rpg7twit
home: rg-d.com-
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
- rpg on A Long December
- Henry on A Long December
- Our House | Confessions of a (former) Lab Rat on Three Little Birds
- rpg on We need medicine
- Henry on We need medicine
- rpg on Sweet home Alabama
- Henry Gee on Sweet home Alabama
- rpg on Sweet home Alabama
- Austin Elliott on Sweet home Alabama
- rpg on The Times They Are A-Changin’
Archives
-
Buy me a coffee:
Categories
- A momentary lapse of reason
- Art
- Birds
- Careers
- Don't try this at home
- ethics
- F1000
- Friday afternoon
- Funding
- Gardening
- Guest posts
- Homeopathy
- Ill-considered rants
- Internet
- Lab ratting
- Literature
- London
- Magirism
- Me
- meta
- Music
- Nature
- Nonsense
- Office life
- Offspring
- Penguins
- People
- Personal
- Photography
- Politics
- Public Engagement
- Rants
- Science
- Science is Vital
- Science-less Sunday
- Scio11
- Shooting
- Shopping lists
- Silliness
- Talks
- The stupid, it burns
- Uncategorized
- Video
- wank
- War stories
- wibbling
- Work
- you
Meta
Author Archives: rpg
On philosophy
At this point Festus interrupted Paul’s defense. “You are out of your mind, Paul!” he shouted. “Your great learning is driving you insane.” Acts 26:24, NIV Theodore Zeldin is a philosopher. As far as I can work out, this means … Continue reading
On boggling
You know, I really hate to send traffic over to Pharyngula, because it’s rather tiresome and whatnot, but Henry Gee just alerted me to something quite extraordinary. There’s a lovely, well-crafted Futures this week (sorry, subscription required) by Shelly Li. … Continue reading
Whicker’s World
A “mammoth of news” is about to rise behind London’s Fleet Street, a printing press costing £600m and housing about 1,250 “cutting-edge” journalists. Ask not its value. Journalism jeers at the idea. The UK Press Commission has already been dubbed … Continue reading
Posted in Public Engagement, The stupid, it burns
4 Comments
On being dull
In case you missed it, Web of Stories has just uploaded a load of videos of one of the most notorious of all Nobel Prize winners, Jim Watson. In this video (there’s also a transcript), Watson talks about The Double … Continue reading
Posted in People
2 Comments
On impact factors
They’re crap, aren’t they? Seriously. Jenny writes that scientists need metrics that reward effort as well as luck. While that’s true, we also need metrics that aren’t capricious and as susceptible to gaming. At the day job, Bob Grant (no … Continue reading
On all sorts of wrong
Just in case you haven’t seen it elsewhere, here’s a quick one. A tweet from mjrobbins (also at the Lay Scientist) left me quite unable to work, this morning. I was seriously angered and sickened. Whatever your views on female … Continue reading
On the unkindest cut of all
We’ve been talking about the deficit, budget cuts, what this means for science and whether we should fight our corner and all sorts of stuff in the last couple of months or so. So, through the wonders of Facebook last … Continue reading
Posted in Funding
25 Comments
On advertising
Now, we know that advertisers lie to us. It’s right there in the DNA. But here’s a little competition for you. This is (part of) an advert in this week’s Nature. Can you tell what made me so cross about … Continue reading
Posted in Rants, The stupid, it burns
18 Comments
On coupling
No, not that sort of coupling. I was writing up today’s Faculty Dailies, catching up on (yet) another paper about how ribosomes control the rate of transcription. As has been known for decades, bacterial transcription and translation are tightly coupled. … Continue reading
Posted in Literature, Science
2 Comments
On #FAIL
What century are we living in, again? Could be worse, I guess. They might have been running MT4.
Posted in Rants, Science-less Sunday
15 Comments
