Marcus Chown
@marcuschown
Writer. Books include A Crack in Everything, Breakthrough, The Ascent of Gravity, Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand, Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You & Solar System for iPad. See www.marcuschown.com
This showing of The Odyssey was a bit quiet. Mind you, it was pretty boring and I left before the end. I should have realised, as Oppenheimer was as dull as ditch water.
If Count Binface became PM, the UK would be led by someone infinitely less stupid than Donald Trump.
It's the same with TV crime drama too. Misogyny and violence against women is embedded in so much "entertainment".
The significant health costs of AI data centres - something the tech firms, politicians and media are not telling us… arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06288
Not a famous person reading one of my books. But I was still very happy to see someone reading ”Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You” in bed on the front of The Sunday Times Magazine!
20 July. Anniversary today of the first Moon landing. I cannot believe I was lucky enough to be a child when the first human being stepped on another world. I remember my dad getting me out of bed to watch those fuzzy black-and-white TV pictures. Recalling it still sends a shiver down my spine!
Bloody hell! Just saw Josh Kerr break the mile world record! Everyone in the London Stadium, including me, went absolutely nuts!
Saw this man with a Shipping Forecast tee-shirt at the Royal Academy summer exhibition. He said someone had bought it for him, he didn’t know from where, but that it neatly summarised how he felt about himself.
Great to see a generous stack of these books in the Royal Academy book shop. It was @grindrod.bsky.social who, when he was at @faberbooks.bsky.social, first told me about Twitter and encouraged me to do social media!
Weirdly, after releasing the pigeon, went to the Royal Academy summer exhibition, and there were three pigeon paintings! Took it as a good sign.
“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wicked of men will do the most wicked of things for the greatest good of everyone." - John Maynard Keynes
Georges Lemaître & Aleksandr Friedman independently discovered the evolving, “big bang”, solutions to Einstein’s equations. George Gamow later realised the big bang would have been a hot big bang and his collaborators, Ralph Alpher & Robert Herman, realised there would be leftover heat radiation.
"One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, ‘My little computer said such a funny thing this morning.’" - Alan Turing
Derelict telescope: choked by trees outside Cambridge is the “scintillation array” - 4096 vertical poles once connected with wires like so many washing lines - with which in 1967 Jocelyn Bell discovered “pulsars”. How has this piece of global scientific heritage been allowed to decay like this?
“A tale of fake news, lies, deceit, disinformation, astroturfing and a hugely successful campaign to vilify the British tram. And the evidence points to Shell as being the financial muscle behind the campaign, with a little bit of help from the security services.” - Mick Hamer
Lovely fairywren #BirdOfTheDay #Moments #bird #birds #light #birdphotography #nature #wildlife #wildlifephotography
Went on a wine tour of Henry Moore statues at Kew Garden. Kind of a posh pub crawl! It was really fab seeing these monumental sculptures framing the trees and blue sky - especially after three glasses! www.kew.org/kew-gardens/...
Sad day: the (free) David Hockney exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery North in London’s Hyde Park the day after the artist died
"The important thing about a man is not the colour of his skin or the texture of his hair, but the texture and quality of his soul.” - Martin Luther-King, Jr