Watching the mildly entertaining Man on the Inside on Netflix, I was struck by a painful mirror image of the bad old days. In the series Ted Danson plays a bored, retired engineering professor who takes on a job as an undercover investigator for a PI to investigate a theft in a retirement home. We get some stereotype old people behaviour, but also some embarrassingly hypocritical sexism. I'll come back to that in a moment, but to put it into context, I've also recently been rewatching the excellent 2006/7 TV series Life on Mars . In the show, the 2006 detective Sam Tyler played by John Simm hallucinates himself into a 1970s Manchester police team after a brain injury, working under the wonderfully unreconstructed Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister). Something Tyler constantly attempts to battle is the casual sexism of the male detectives, which (allegedly) had changed significantly by 2006. Now back to Man on the Inside (made in 2024, not the distant past). Two female inhabitants of...

REVISIT SERIES -  An edited post from October 2014 I find it interesting the way that the media gets in a state of outrage when someone defaces a Banksy artwork. It feels a touch hypocritical. The image shown here has according to Wikipedia been 'defaced by a paintball gun’. Actually the 'defacing' is quite effective as it looks as if someone has shot at the people with a paint gun, which itself could be interpreted artistically (in fact, I didn't know it was 'defaced' until I looked it up). Admittedly if all someone does is scrawl a tag over it, it's not a great contribution. But even so, I'm not sure we have any right to complain. The artists in question need to expect that their audiences may abandon the reverence that is adopted by the audience for traditional art. This occurred to me when a friend was describing attending a play at Bristol's fairly avant garde Old Vic Theatre. Apparently the performance was of a Samuel Beckett radio play, and a...

A lot of my friends on social media are academics - mostly scientists - and it sometimes seem they spend more time jetting around the world to conferences or other events than they do in the lecture theatre or undertaking research. I find this odd, as they are, on the whole, also the kind of people who are concerned about the environment. Of course, they will always come up with justifications for these jaunts, but do those excuses really stack up? As far as I can there are broadly five reasons for flying off to distant parts: Attending conference lectures/seminars Poster sessions The ability to network with other academics To undertake onsite research (e.g. an astronomer viewing an eclipse, a marine biologist visiting a coral reef, or an archaeological going for a dig) A free jolly to somewhere exotic Let's see how each of these stacks up as justification for the massive carbon footprint that goes with being a jet-setting academic. Attending lectures - Oh, come o...

In the first chapter of my recent book Extra Sensory I wrote this: Some scientists are scornful, claiming that it’s all over for paranormal abilities. They point out that traditionally many things that were once considered supernatural we now know to be either imaginary or the product of perfectly normal, natural phenomena. The supernatural aspects were first dismissed by science, and that dismissal has been gradually accepted by the general public. So, for instance, lightning was once seen as an unearthly force, quite possibly propelled by the wrath of the gods. Although there are technical aspects of the way that lightning is produced that we still don’t understand, there are few people indeed who don’t accept that lightning is a purely physical phenomenon, an electrical effect on a tremendous scale. It may be quite unlike the kind of thing that comes out of the socket at home, but it’s electricity nonetheless. If you look back at the remarkable summaries of thirteenth centur...