Search for "anthropomorphise"
Asteroids: Angst, amazement and avarice
October 14, 2022
On planet earth it is extremely difficult to change people’s, especially politicians’, behaviour to avert, say, climate catastrophe. Not so in space. Here humans boldly achieve the unthinkable, namely changing the motion of something that’s going in a dangerous direction. What I am talking about is, of course, NASA’s “first-ever mission dedicated to investigating and …
Percy and Ginny: Science and politics in space
February 26, 2021
For about a decade, I have, off and on, been writing blog posts about space, space probes and space travel as part of the Making Science Public blog. Since 2012, I have been following the Mars rover Curiosity on Twitter, or rather its digital alter ego the Sarcastic Rover. I have a cast iron model …
The ghost in the machine: Of automation, algorithms and AI
May 15, 2016
Despite working at the fringes of a field called Science and Technology Studies, I am a bit of a technophobe. I was introduced to computers in the early 1980s and I am still not totally in tune with some of the things they do. To misquote Arthur C. Clarke, most technology, and in particular advanced …
Pluto and pareidolia
July 16, 2015
As everybody knows by now, New Horizons has been flying past Pluto and has beamed down astonishing images. One of these shows a peach or bronze coloured planetary object with a lighter pattern on the side that I first saw as a ‘heart’. Many others did so too, including NASA (it will now name this …
Kissing a comet
November 12, 2014
I began writing this post this morning and I have just read that Philae has reached its landing spot Agilkia (sort of)! Touchdown happened at 1605 GMT. Congratulations!! Rocks, robots and us When I switched on the ESA live feed about the comet landing this morning, I heard one of the lead scientists say that landing …
Seeing like the Mars Curiosity Rover
August 8, 2012
In my last blog I talked about metaphor as ‘the mind’s eyes’, as metaphors make us see something as something else, which enables us to think about something in novel ways, extend our knowledge and in the process shape both science and society. In this sense metaphor can be said to be a mental technology …