September 2006

New book…

| | Science

Brian May (of Queen fame) has a new book coming out in October. It’s Co-authored with Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott. The book is called “Bang – The Complete History of the Universe“. Some of you may know that May was a PhD astronomy student in the early days of Queen. He completed his thesis and a paper on the dust that causes zodiac light in the Solar System was published in Nature. His supervisor (IIRC, it may have been the viva voce board) asked for changes to the thesis. Twice. Queen was just hitting the big time at the time and the result is history.

Interestingly May is now updating the thesis for resubmission under the supervision of his supervisor when he did work on one of the telescopes in Tenerife. Apparently he wrote the riff for Tie Your Mother Down whilst sitting outside the telescope one night. One of my favourite songs.

My copy of the book is on order. Update: you can preview the book here.

More good news

| | Uncategorized

Despite what spin the Church of England might have put on the churchgoing figures that where released last week the fact is that people are abandoning churches, and religion according to other surveys, at a high rate. Happy days. Some stats:


6.3% of the population go to church on an average Sunday, compared to 7.5% in 1998
29% of churchgoers are 65 or over, compared with 16% of the population
9% of churches have no-one under 11 in their congregations

Roll on the day when when religion is studied as ancient history.

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