If you are not interested in Football Science [1,2], look away now. Normal service will be resumed shortly. Professor Gary Lineker has an intriguing idea: The earliest source I can find for this infamous quote is an article in the Berliner Zeitung from 1996 [3] –  in German, obviously. The English original is unfindable at the BBC where it probably came from. Strangely appropriate, nein? So it’s Germany vs.

… if it hasn’t done already In California the streets aren’t paved with Gold, they are paved with Silicon. Many a Californian has made their fame and fortune from Silicon-based commerce. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Oracle, Apple the list goes on and on. Silicon paves the streets of Silicon Valley. Silly Valley is often imitated but rarely […]

Mr David Rutley MP House of Commons London SW1A 0AA Dear David, The “Geek Manifesto” and the importance of science in politics Please find enclosed a copy of a new book by Mark Henderson, titled “The Geek Manifesto: Why Science Matters”. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.

Next weekend, a bunch of very distinguished computer scientists will rock up at the magnificent Manchester Town Hall for the Turing Centenary Conference in order to analyse the development of Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Alan Turing’s legacy [1]. There’s an impressive and stellar speaker line-up including: Rodney Brooks, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Fred Brooks, University of North Carolina […]

It’s Friday, so here’s another one of those cool RSA Animate videos by Cognitive Media. This one is narrated by Microsoftie Manuel Lima and describes how the tree structures that we know and love, such as the infamous tree of life are becoming inadequate for organising knowledge, despite having been useful for thousands of years. An error occurred.

Dear Professor Nurse Fellows of the Wiki Society? To improve public engagement with Science and Scientists, the Royal Society should employ a wikipedian in residence. Here’s why: The Royal Society is a National Academy of Science which represents some of the world’s leading scientists.

The Life Scientific is a series of interviews by Jim Al-Khalili of high profile scientists. It’s a bit like Desert Island Discs without the music and with more interesting guests. If you missed them on the radio, you can download the lot as a podcast. Here’s a good example of an interview with John Sulston on the […]

Advertising agencies are everywhere, there is no escaping them. But who’s the daddy of the advertising world? The mother of all ad agencies? According to wikipedia, WPP is the “world’s largest advertising group by revenues”. This is hogwash. Some of the world’s largest ad agences are technology companies. For example, in descending order of revenue: Google Inc. is […]

According to the software which runs this site, this is the 200th post here at O’Really?  To mark the occasion, here are some stats via WordPress with thoughts and general navel-gazing analysis paralysis [1] on web analytics. It all started just over six years ago at nodalpoint with help from Greg Tyrelle, the last four years have been WordPressed with help from Matt […]

If you are not interested in Football Science, look away now. Normal service will be resumed shortly. There is a controversial idea in football that money buys trophies, also known as Mancini’s Blue Moon hypothesis. Two rival Universities have led the way in testing this idea, The University of Old Trafford and the The University […]

When I first heard about Journal Fire, I thought, Great! someone is going to take all the closed-access scientific journals and make a big bonfire of them! At the top of this bonfire would be the burning effigy of a wicker man, representing the very worst of the vanity journals [1,2]. Unfortunately Journal Fire aren’t burning anything just yet, but […]