Neville Alexander: Political philosopher (1936–2012)

Neville Fogarty

When we transmit data over a noisy channel (e.g., satellite) to a receiver, we run the risk of our data becoming corrupted. Fixing the channel is not typically an option, so instead we must make our data noise-proof. A naive method of doing this is simply sending the same data multiple times. However, the benefit of the redundancy created may be offset by the cost of sending a lengthy message m...

Mr. Neville Chamberlain's Opportunity

Sir.?The aims of your paper in regard to the public health, as set out in your New Year's issue, are excellent. And as everyone seems to be waking up at last to the fact that the housing question overshadows every other question in domestic politics, perhaps something will be accomplished. Questions of housing and health must not, however, be allowed to become the playthings of politics. Every ...

Thomas Young, Natural Philosopher

Dr. Willmer's second edition of this little book fulfills his stated purpose ... to correlate some of the numerous fragments of scattered data which have so far been obtained and to orientate them in such a way as to illustrate the more fundamental contributions which the method has made to physiological knowledge, and to show the manner in which a change of outlook has already been brought abo...

Joseph Priestley, natural philosopher.

In this two hundredth anniversary year of his death, we are met to celebrate the life and career of Joseph Priestley—and most of us celebrate the wrong man, for the wrong reasons. We celebrate the pneumatic chemist who, in a flurry of random experiments made over a period of five years, isolated and partially identified nine new gases, including oxygen—and the man who spent roughly five times a...

Newton as Philosopher