Dinner for One, or Der 90 Geburtstag, is the most repeated television programme of all time. It has become a national institution in Germany and Scandinavia, and is much watched in Switzerland, Austria and South Africa. It was written in the 1920s as a short comedy sketch for the theatre by Lauri Wylie (1880-1951). Both [...]
I see that my last article on ebooks was more than two and a half years ago. My attitude then was fairly hostile to publishers: The problem is that book publishers are not yet desperate. Their attitude seems to be that they would prefer to sell an ebook at a premium to a printed book, [...]
It is clear that for engineering everyone needs to use the same system of units (for example, the great Hubble space telescope debacle illustrates the perils of mixing different sets of units when trying to make something – Hubble was launched in April 1990, but it was soon realized that its main mirror had been [...]
Before moving on to consider momentum and energy, there is one other aspect of special relativity that I have so far neglected: the invariance of the interval. Given any two points, A and B, in ordinary Newtonian space, the distance between them is the same whatever coordinate system we use. This is almost obvious. In [...]
The current NHS story is confused by the fact that two quite different things are happening simultaneously. The first is that the Tories are pushing ahead with the semi-privatisation of the NHS started by New Labour. My last article on that was three months ago. The second is the “cuts”. There was a lengthy article [...]
