Yvette Cooper—who used to live next door to me at Balliol—was responsible for a government campaign to reduce the number of teenage pregnancies. According to the statistics collected, its effect seemed to be to make things ever-so-slightly worse and then ever-so-slightly better. These days there’s a whiff of desperation about the issue. Today I discover […]
Read MoreI saw this poster yesterday on the noticeboard at work. The Cambridge Philosophical Society lectures are public. To quote the society, they are “open to all who are interested”. Sadly, even the touts had run out of tickets for this one: Professor Peter Littlewood Department of Physics ‘Quantum phase coherence: from coupled pendula to Bose-Einstein […]
Read MoreBrian notes that Nigella Lawson is dissing British tertiary education. She’s right to do so. And I’d say that even I wasn’t picturing her doing the dissing in sub-fusc. [Blimey, I think that might have been some non-gratuitous Nigella. Am I getting old?
Read MoreFirst of all I hung out with Claire as she researched her new book, talking to various bright Cambridge dons about Europe and Britain and religion and immigration and anti-Semitism and the state of the World today. Her questions were so good and the resulting conversations were so long and wide-ranging that there is far […]
Read MoreThis is a fun, skeptical report on the various genome projects. I didn’t catch it when it first appeared in Ha’aretz: ” The circumstances which led to a visit by the head of the U.S. National Human Genome Institute astonished scientists in Israel. Collins has received many invitations to participate in scientific conferences in Israel, […]
Read MoreLast week I was invited to the swankiest academic dinner offered to me since I graduated from my first place of higher education. And, for the first time since then, it seemed to be free-of-charge. Naturally, I filled out the faxback form straight away and, er, faxed it back. Having achieved fuck-all since I left, […]
Read MoreI have a pretty strict “no ‘Blogging during business hours” rule, but this is ‘Blogging about the business. A colleague has just sent me this story about an “intelligent design” paper being published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. [You might need to register for free to read it.] I haven’t got the time to comment […]
Read MoreI have been yammering here and elsewhere about several things I would like to do with PooterGeek when I get some free time. I haven’t done any of them. This post will declare my intentions in public, and (I hope) remind me / embarrass me into action. I’d like to interview some interesting academics. I […]
Read MoreThanks to Jo for this.
Read MoreNorm beat me to ‘Blogging new ‘Blogger Eric the Unread’s brilliant attack on linguistic determinism this morning. I have looked over Eric’s first post and his third post and they both made me laugh, but I don’t want to read anything about The Village until I’ve seen the film, so, as far as I’m concerned, […]
Read MoreFirstly, for the benefit of Jon and other non-English readers, here‘s a definition of “oik” oik n. member of the lower classes of the UK—especially anyone not English—e.g. one who tends to pronounce an (i) sound as (oi) UK Secondly, Norm is both a professor of political thought and a very clear thinker—a dying breed. Today he demonstrates […]
Read MoreHe’s back. He’s beige. He’s of marriageable age. He’s PooterGeek, European ‘Blogger of Culture 1990.
Read MoreMichael Crichton is a doctor, a best-selling author, and unfairly good-looking. He also gets to make a fortune both writing science fiction horror novels and at the same time debunking science “fact” horror stories. Backword Dave calls the Drake Equation “crack cocaine”. It is. Crichton breathed its vapours deeply before he made this famous public […]
Read MoreIn the business some people call one strand “Watson” and the other “Crick”. A moment's silence, please, for the loss of a helix.
Read MoreYesterday I stumbled upon a 'Blog that was news to me, but I think I'll be watching from now on. According to its URL, “Language Log” is broadcasting from the University of Pennsylvania and seems to be staffed by linguistics profs from other top US universities. Stories that caught my eye include one on the […]
Read MoreGoogle exemplifies many of the best things about the Web. It even catalogues and copies the best things about the Web—and the worst things too. Its founders are self-mocking academics with a brilliantly simple idea, who hire hordes of PhD graduates to keep refining that idea in a never-ending race against nutters of every kind: […]
Read MoreIn the absence of anything amusing from me, read someone else. I've added Mick Hartley's 'Blog to the PooterGeek 'Blogroll, having inspected it at the recommendation of Backword Dave. You might want to wander over and enjoy the righteous kicking Mick gives Bianca Jagger today—no, not that Mick. I salute a man ready to lay […]
Read MoreIn the age of Google it is so important to name your children wisely. I am grateful that my parents christened me as they did. Imagine you are Michael Henson, Professor of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, respected for your work on bioreactors. A fellow academic goes looking for you and stumbles […]
Read MoreAnti-war academic hair-splitters desperately using the separated fibres to lash together a defence for Amnesty International, mess with Eve Garrard at your peril. (I'm just amazed she has the patience to pick apart such flimsy constructions. She may be a respected scholar, but she'd probably also do a good job helping the elderly and confused […]
Read MoreYesterday evening I listened to Warwick University‘s Iraq “expert”, Toby Dodge, tell BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight that the Iraqi Governing Council’s choice for Prime Minister was “the worst one possible”. His argument seemed plausible and well-informed. Then I had a google into Dr Dodge’s past. Here he is arguing that only offering to […]
Read MoreI no longer receive invitations to participate in Reader’s Digest prize draws, but this week I was asked, for the second year running, if I would like to appear in Who’s Who In Science And Engineering. I have no illusions about my professional standing, so my instinct was again to treat the letter as a […]
Read MoreFor the past four days I have been at the the Cambridge Centre for Mathematical Sciences, a lovely new collection of ultra-modern pagoda-style buildings housing the best maths department(s) in the country. I was attending a workshop on protein structure (and writing it up for a journal). The workshop, incidentally, was the best scientific meeting […]
Read MoreTony Blair spams me; Stephen Hawking stalks me. I don’t work for the University, but in my two years in Cambridge I have been to the Department for Applied Mathematics and Physics exactly once and was directed to his office by mistake. (He had an Onion story about him on the door.) Yesterday I was […]
Read MoreOver at Kamm’s ‘Blog on Friday, the proprietor launched a thoroughly deserved attack on Rupert Read. [The rest of this entry was a rant about Rupert and one of his papers. Although I still disagree violently with his letter to the Telegraph and am very skeptical about the content of that paper, Rupert has offered—very […]
Read MoreHere’s a collection of links that have been deserted in my virtual in-tray for a while, uncommented upon and unshared: Hugh linked me to this bizarre event at a US university—not an April Fool, there are pearls of wit amongst the pellets of gravel at the Four Word Film Review site—I liked the reviews of […]
Read MoreThanks to Bill and Judy for brightening up what would otherwise have been a miserable train journey back from London. You asked me what good I thought would come from UK universities being able to charge fees. This short article [Adobe Acrobat PDF file], The Coming Invasion of Britain by Andrew Oswald, an economist at […]
Read MoreThis guy has one of the funkiest sets of academic homepages I have ever seen. Check out his collection of optical illusions—many of them animated. (Clicking on a thumbnail on the right takes you to the corresponding illusion.) Would you believe I arrived at his site by clicking on an uncaptioned image of a large-breasted […]
Read MoreI should introduce this one by pointing out that, a couple of years ago, having read an excellent article of Prof. Jardine’s about a piece of science history that interested me, I contacted her to ask if she would be interested in working with me on something related. She might not have received my email, […]
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