Garret Hardin's idea that the emotion of shame can help to manage a common resource has always been a favourite for me. Up to 150 people, as Hardin suggested, can help one another do the right thing (for them all) by instilling a feeling of shame in transgressors. Seems he and I have been wrong. Not about the role of shame, but about what to call it. Brené Brown told me so in her TED talk, listening to Shame.

Occasionally I try to impart some elements of good science storytelling to people, and one of the points I make (based entirely on Garrett Hardin) is the big difference between literacy and numeracy. Literacy understands full well that the difference between a million and a billion is one letter. And that a billion is bigger than a million. But how much bigger? My example is simple enough. If a million seconds is 11 days (which it is, give or take), how long is a billion seconds?

It's especially worrying when the big numbers refer to big money. US Senator Everett Dirksen was clearly onto something when he said, "a billion here, a billion there ... pretty soon you're talking about real money". ¹

Sitting on a long flight from Paris to DC, watching a Tedtalk by Helen Fisher. She's a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, and she has been studying love in its various guises; lust, romantic love and attachment ("so that you can stand living with someone"). A fine talk it was, which...

Brave new world. I’ve read all about how easy it is to foist podcasts on an unsuspecting audience, but never had the need, until now. And even now I am pretty sure that I do not fully understand the business of making the podcast available to subscribers. But I’m told that Feedburner will do the nee...