Sat 2006-12-30 Over at Bad Science, Ben Goldacre has a summary of the 'best' Bad Science stories of the last year. How many of these did you fall for? I think this could be the basis of a rather nice end-of-the-year radio or television quiz program.
Thu 2006-12-28 Via Ned Wright and Joe Polchinski, Hinchliffe's Rule for interpreting the titles of scientific papers:
If the title is a question, the answer is 'no'.
This reminds me of a 'principle' I myself formulated a few years ago:
The truth of a sentence is invariant under the substitution of 'not' for all occurrences of 'arguably'.
While it is fairly easy to construct sentences which violate this 'principle', these do not seem to occur in practice.
Hinchliffe's Rule currently has a fairly small profile on Google and hasn't yet made it to Wikipedia, but it deserves to be better known. It has even spawned a self-referential spoof paper!
Wed 2006-12-27 Yesterday I was out shopping with my daughter and we got to discussing a price tag that said "Two for the Price of One". She asked "What would it cost if you wanted 3?" and I explained that you could work it out by splitting the 3 into 2 + 1. The "Two for One" would only apply to the 2, and you would have to pay the full price for the 1. I then summed it up as "Half Price for Even Quantities". Thinking about this now, a better way to sum it up would be as (p div 2) + (p mod 2), where p is the original price in pennies.
Sat 2006-12-23 
A week ago we had a run of days in which the temperature stayed between 10C and 12C both day and night. Now we have just had three days when it has been between -1C and +2C. With very little wind, it has been foggy and the trees have been covered with a sort of icy dew which continually drips from them. Some of the drops splash when they hit the ground, others bounce and roll around, like hailstones. Spiders webs are covered in ice and water droplets.
Fri 2006-12-22 
I was talking with my father last night and he mentioned that he thought he had discovered a new optical illusion. He was about to boil an egg and had put it into a saucepan with a small amount of water in it. Then he just happened to spin the egg so it rotated in the pan and was immediately struck by the fact that the egg looked as if it was changing shape rather than rotating. It was as if the shell was flexible and something inside it was pressing outwards at different places to give an impression of rotation. He said he spent quite a time playing around with the egg to confirm that the the illusion of changing shape was quite persistent.
Now, I don't think my father is senile (yet) so, this evening, I set out to try to investigate this 'illusion' for myself. Waiting till Zoe had gone to bed (I didn't want her to think I have gone senile), I took one fresh egg, one hard-boiled egg and saucepan and had a little play with them. I found that with the fresh egg I definitely could 'see' it as changing shape although I had to look carefully to do so. However, I do not think this is due to some sort of 'optical illusion' but is rather a consequence of the way fresh eggs rotate: they do not rotate smoothly. The liquid inside must 'slosh about' and cause the angular momentum (rotation speed) to vary in a pulsating sort of way, and this is what gives the impression of 'something inside pushing out'. This seems to be confirmed by the behaviour of the hard-boiled egg which rotated fast and smoothly and did not give any impression of changing shape.
Incidentally there are quite a lot of basic science articles on spinning eggs available on the web: do a search on Google.
