Home

Daniel I. Scully

physics text books

The Teaching Ladder

Early this year the Department for Education put out a poster which attempted to encourage people into teaching physics with the promise that they could become managers sooner than in other walks of life. Understandably this received a negative reaction from the physics community (and has since vanished!). After all, wanting to become a manager is not the right motivation or mindset you need to teach and inspire students about physics. But although I agree with that criticism, it did remind me of another concern I have over how we run our schools. Read On…

bahrain flag

F1 in Bahrain

Last weekend’s Grand Prix in Bahrain gave us a thrilling race with plenty of overtaking and outstanding driving. But as in recent years it caused Formula 1 to attract attention from a wider audience for all the wrong reasons. Formula 1′s attitude to this criticism has also left me with a sour taste too. Read On…

numbers

Maths in Early HTML

Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML and the web while working at the particle physics lab CERN as a way for scientists to communicate ideas. It will come as no surprise to learn that a large part of science comes in the form of maths, so it’s surprising that even today maths has never really been given proper attention when it comes to display on websites. But it could all have been so different… Read On…

michelangelo

The Human Touch

One of the best presents I got at Christmas this year was “The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction” by Nate Silver. You may have come across Nate Silver from his successful predictions of recent US Presidential elections and the book is broadly about making predictions in various fields: finance, baseball, politics etc. There are many take-home messages on making good predictions, and not making bad ones, but there was one theme in particular which resonated with some of my own thinking. Read On…

authors

Sensible Attribution

Things used to be small and simple, for scientists anyway. Early in scientific history most research was conducted by a lone eccentric in a basement laboratory and even as science became a more mainstream occupation it was rare that more than a couple of scientists would ever be needed to collaborate together. Identifying where credit was due then was a simple task. But not any more. Read On…

A flock of Twitter birds

Two Years of Twitter

It is, give or take a couple of weeks, about two years since I first joined Twitter . I was told in an online discussion that I’d get bored of it within days, but I’m glad to say it’s been both a positive and rewarding experience. Read On…

top-question

Taking Questions

There are many skills other than giving a good talk which a speaker must develop if they are to do their job well. One of the most important, particularly for a science speaker, is taking questions. It’s also a skill which is more problematic than one might at first think. Although I’m still trying to improve this myself, I offer here a few lessons which I’ve learnt so far. Read On…

antarcitcstation

Antarctic Station

It’s a little out of my usual areaa of science and, to be honest, even the sort of thing I would read about casually. But recently I’ve quite enjoyed following the exploits of the Princess Elisabeth, Antactica station -  a Belgian research outpost about 220km inland from the icy continent’s East coast. Read On…

Windows_8_Start_Screen

First Encounters with Windows 8

Over this Christmas holiday I have had the opportunity to get hands on with Microsoft’s latest operating system: Windows 8. I have to say that I was initially very enthusiastic as the new “Metro” styling is, in my opinion, probably the most attractive looking interface I’ve seen in a long time. The usability of the new OS however, was a lot less clear. Read On…

top-colour

Choosing Colours for Grey-scale

There was an amusing photograph doing the rounds of data visualisation blogs this week (courtesy of @adamsinger) showing a map of American states in a newspaper. The graphic was meant to show which states voted for which presidential candidate but, after clearly being made in colour, the designer had neglected to consider what would happen to those colours when they were printed in a grey-scale newspaper. Read On…