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.

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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

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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...

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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...

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