School Science -1 BBC Science - 0

Over at Bad Science, Ben Goldacre has done a wonderfully efficient demolition job of the recent BBC Panorama program on Wi-Fi.  From it comes this revelation:

Three weeks ago I received my favourite email of all time, from a science teacher. “I’ve just had to ask a BBC Panorama film crew not to film in my school or in my class because of the bad science they were trying to carry out,” it began, describing in perfect detail the Panorama which aired this week.

The Panorama crew were booted out of a school for their shoddy science!  Read the rest of the post for details.  Maybe the BBC should take on a few secondary school science teachers as consultants?

However, the root of the problem appears to be that journalists are not so much concerned with getting at the truth as with producing stories, and this should be borne in mind when assessing their output (and when deciding to renew your TV license).

Deer at Ascot

On Wednesday afternoon there was a deer walking alongside the track as my train came into Ascot station.  On Google Maps its location was here. 

No Running With Fish

A week or so ago this delicious sign appeared beside on of the lakes between Frimley and Farnborough North stations. I think that the intended meaning is that you must not take away any fish you catch in the lakes, you must put them back.

Young Egyptian Goose

We went for a walk round the university lakes this afternoon. The 8 Egyptian goslings now look quite smart in their adult plumage. I took this picture of one of them.

QLink Deception

From an article on the QLink pendant by Ben Goldacre:

Last summer I obtained one of these devices (from somewhere cheaper than Holford’s shop) and took it to Camp Dorkbot, an annual festival for dorks held - in a joke taken too far - at a scout camp outside Dorking. Here in the sunshine, some of the nation’s cheekiest electronics geeks examined the QLink. We chucked probes at it, and tried to detect any “frequencies” emitted, with no joy. And then we did what any proper dork does when presented with an interesting device: we broke it open. Drilling down, the first thing we came to was the circuit board. This, we noted with some amusement, was not in any sense connected to the copper coil, and therefore is not powered by it.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this device was designed with the deliberate intention of deceiving people.

The closer you look at alternative medicine, the less ethical it becomes.