Notes 26.3.2025
Today’s notes
- Lower Thames Crossing approved by government “It’s a bypass… you’ve got to build bypasses”
- Braggoscope Browsing the ‘In Our Time’ archive
- Dark energy: mysterious cosmic force appears to be weakening, say scientists Don’t blame it
Lower Thames Crossing approved by government
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crewy5472gxo
Things we need to spend £9bn on:
- Schools and teachers
- The NHS and its staff
- Building council homes
- Flood defences and water management
- Cycling infrastructure
- Rail investment (particularly in the North)
- Retro-fitting home with solar panels and insulation
Things we should not spend £9bn on:
- More bloody roads because other roads are congested.
Braggoscope
In Our Time is a long running live Radio 4 programme where Melvyn Bragg discusses the history of ideas with a panel of 3 experts.
With an archive of over 1000 episodes it’s an incredible resource of information but the BBC’s online facilities to search the archive are somewhat limited.
Thankfully Matt Webb has provided such a tool by scraping the BBC’s archive and making a browseable and searcheable index using the Dewey Decimal System.
Dark energy: mysterious cosmic force appears to be weakening, say scientists
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/mar/19/dark-energy-mysterious-cosmic-force-weakening
I find it helpful to think of the Universe as the three dimensional surface (the part we see) of a four dimensional sphere.
As the 4D sphere expands then the galaxies on its surface grow more distant from each other.
It’s intuitive then that if the expansion of then sphere is slowing, then the rate at which galaxies move apart from each other would also slow down. Or maybe I’m oversimplify it, clearly I’m not an astrophysicist.