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Wealth and technology make the death toll smaller, not larger
Matt Ridley
The biggest natural killers of the last decade — Haiti’s earthquake, Burma’s cyclone and Sumatra’s tsunami — were all far, far more lethal because they struck poor countries. Robert Hardman in the Daily Mail writes: Of course, the modern world is better equipped than the ancients to survive these cataclysmic disasters. We have stronger buildings, better […]
A martyred and plagiarized heretic
Matt Ridley
Let’s give credit to a great founder of the English language, and not a committee This is a draft of a piece that I wrote for The Times last week. The published version was slightly different. I strongly recommend Brian Moynahan’s wonderful book on Tyndale: This month, the celebrations for the 400th anniversary of the […]
Matt Ridley
Did the ancestors of modern humans beings spend a lot of time by the seaside? Latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Photo: Jon Erlandson Last week archaeologists working on the Channel Islands of California announced that they had found delicate stone tools of remarkable antiquity-possibly as old as 13,000 years. […]
Is a mobile signal now a necessity rather than a luxury?
Matt Ridley
The Times ran this column by me last week: When burglars broke into Vodafone’s Basingstoke exchange early on Monday morning, they plunged half of southern England into the dark ages. Desolate and desperate figures shuffled through the drizzle wearing sack-cloth and mortifying their flesh in expiation of the sins that had brought this calamity upon […]
Matt Ridley
Latest Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal: When did you last read an account of how microchips actually work? You know, replete with all that stuff about electrons and holes and “p-doping” and “n-doping” and the delights of gallium arsenide. The golden age of such articles, when you could read about them in […]
Your genes are your own to test
Matt Ridley
Don’t let physicians have a gate-keeping role between you and your genetic information Last week there was an excellent piece by Daniel MacArthur in Wired on how the doctors’ lobby is trying to asert its monopoly on genetic testing (hat tip John Hawks). The American Medical Association has written to the FDA demanding a gate-keeping role […]
Speaking in hands before tongues?
Matt Ridley
The intriguing theory that language evolved for gesture first and speech later My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Three years ago Queen Elizabeth II asked a group of speech therapists if her father’s stutter had been caused by his being forced to write with his right hand despite being a natural […]
Matt Ridley
Judith Curry has written two blogs here and here on the significance of the “hide the decline” email in the Climategate affair. They have attracted a torrent of comments, over 1400 so far, many of them interesting. I have left a comment there as follows: As a science journalist who first wrote about […]
Matt Ridley
The other day at a talk I was asked, as I often am, whether I agree that only putting the state in control can clean up the environment. I wish I had then read this, from the blog at Cafe Hayek: a letter sent to the Los Angeles Times: Three different readers write today in praise […]
Matt Ridley
Are the magnetic poles about the flip? Unlikely. My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is about the weakening of the magnetic field and, more generally, the question of how we scare ourselves by knowing more: The earth’s magnetic field is weakening at an accelerating rate. It is 15% weaker than […]
