Richard FarrMar 29Covfefe-16 crisis solved?For three long years now America has been ravaged by the highly infectious and potentially lethal disease Covfefe-16. You may recall that it emerged in the i...
Richard FarrMar 17A storey on or about dinasuors in Teh GrauniadI love The Guardian: it's one of the best news sources in the world. I feel guilty about The Guardian: I use it every day and ought to send lots of money to ...
Richard FarrMar 17Testing, testing ... coronavirus and a dangerous drug called FictionA lot of people are being tested for the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. (Not enough in my neck of the planet, thanks to our communicable-disease-in-...
Richard FarrFeb 27Nasty viruses and a question about precisionListening to NPR yesterday, I was informed (is that the right word?): "There are only 60 confirmed cases of infection by the Covid-19 virus in the US, but ex...
Richard FarrFeb 18Kafka's progressToday's quote of the day from The Browser - which I recommend to everyone - struck a cord for me. It's a commonplace in our culture to talk of "advanced civi...
Richard FarrNov 20, 2019Al-chemieReading all the depressing news about plastic, which has now found its way to the bottom of the Marianas Trench – I’m reminded again of a gorgeous paragraph ...
Richard FarrAug 13, 2019No Reasonable AmericanThe latest mass shootings by home-grown American terrorists come during a massive corruption scandal at the organization popularly known as No Reasonable Ame...
Richard FarrMay 17, 2019The time traveler’s dilemma and techno-cultural prejudiceWhat if you had to move – not to another city or country but to either the future or the past? I ran across this Rawlesian thought experiment recently, and w...
Richard FarrOct 26, 2018This wonderful lifeI’ve just read a review by David Quammen of Dutch biologist Menno Schilthuizen’s Darwin Comes To Town. Apparently, rapid speciation is happening in our citie...
Richard FarrOct 18, 2018R.I.P Mary Midgley, 1919-2018The excellent and hugely underrated philosopher Mary Midgley has died at the age of 99, shortly after completing yet another book. (She later admitted that h...
Richard FarrOct 8, 2018Authoritarianism and its antidoteAfter so many headlines about the men who want to turn the world into kindling and warm their hands over the flames (in just this morning’s New York Times: ...
Richard FarrAug 22, 2018A Dad named Denis(ova)Not an actual picture of the individual in question Fascinating – working in the Russian cave where bones of Denisovans were first found, a team from Svante ...
Richard FarrMay 29, 2018Progress about ‘progress in philosophy’Philosophers are still reading Aristotle, and still arguing about whether there is free will: ergo, philosophy is useless. It has always been a popular sneer...
Richard FarrJan 29, 2018Early Homo sapiens – we were wrong, again!In the timeline at the end of Infinity’s Illusion, which isn’t even officially published until next week, I apologize slightly for stretching the known facts...
Richard FarrOct 11, 2017ICAN: a small nuclear winSumiteru Taniguchi, Nagasaki victim and lifelong anti-nuclear activist, died just over a month ago. It’s a shame he didn’t live to hear that this year’s Nobe...
Richard FarrAug 22, 2017Road trip to the dark side of the SunAfter a drive from Seattle to L.A., straight down I-5, I took a more easterly, more scenic route home through a swath of America I’d never seen. The Mojave, ...
Richard FarrSep 8, 2016Big numbers, immortality, and Jimbo Joyce’s hellGraham’s Number, folksily abbreviated to “g64,” was long famous as the largest number ever used in a serious mathematical proof. I quote here from Tim Urban’...
Richard FarrJul 20, 2016Trident: yet another depressing vote in the UKThirty six years ago, as a student, I wrote to the then Minister of Defense, Francis Pym, to argue that both the enormously expensive ‘Chevaline’ program to ...
Richard FarrJul 12, 2016Vesto Slipher and the expanding universeOne minor character in my Ghosts n the Machine is the Slipher Space Telescope. This is me giving a big fat fictional hint to NASA, in honor of Vesto Slipher,...
Richard FarrJul 9, 2016“Does the Bretz Erratic exist?”The Bretz Erratic, a giant rock, plays a minor role in the plot of Ghosts in the Machine, but it doesn’t exist, no—it just seemed like a nice gesture to inve...