It's been a while. There's a point that you sail past, when you've moved to a new place, when it stops being a New Life and just becomes Life. I think that's the point at which the impetus for updating a personal blog totally evaporates. It certainly did in my case! Facebook also infected Australia, which meant that quite a few people got my news that way.
But now there is news. I have a presence in the blogosphere once again - just not here. In fact, I've started a whole new website. It's about science and stuff. It's here:
There is quite a team behind it, but the site itself mostly my baby. It aims to do 2 things. Firstly, we want to entertain people with science. I firmly believe that science has huge power to entertain and divert, something for which it is not given enough credit in the popular press. There are some great examples (like Eureka! in the Times, or the Economist's science section), but they are vastly outnumbered by fleeting scare stories or overblown New Cure headlines. The second thing we want to do, through providing this entertainment, is promote critical, scientific thinking. We want people to 'switch their brains on' whether they are dealing with science (What were the experiments? The controls?) or with the world (What was that claim? Where is the evidence?). Again, there is already quite a community of "skeptics" promoting just this sort of thing - people like Ben Goldacre - but rather than just exposing quackery we want to bundle switched-on thinking with an appreciation for good science, a few laughs and even a few good tunes!
As such, I warmly invite you to check out Nerd Alert and add it to your RSS reader, iTunes or subscribe by email. We have a blog, we have a podcast and we have awesome science wallpapers, updated weekly. Drop in and say hello!
What's He Doing Over There is dead. Long live Nerd Alert.
JW.
