My dad spotted this one and I didn’t. Mind you, I haven’t been into town in daylight for two weeks.
Read More17Sep04 — 5
Science
16Sep04 — 9
Underestimating My Audience
I’ve been far too easy on you lot. Yesterday, in his eponymous and epurating ‘Blog, Oliver Kamm wrote of Johann Hari’s (silly) attack on Opus Dei*: “[His] term Catholofascism is not accurate. There was in the 1920s a group known as clerico fascisti in Rome and Northern Italy, which aimed at a synthesis between Catholicism […]
Read More14Sep04 — 3
Putting A Bit About
Today’s featured Wikipedia article is about Jesus’s foreskin, or rather his foreskins because quite a few people claim to have had it/them. When I worked in a hospital lab I discovered that discarded foreskins were an excellent source of a particular class of cell called a fibroblast. This is one of only a couple of […]
Read More11Sep04 — 6
To The Point
Hak Mao pleads a lack of eloquence, but she says all that needs to be said today. I’m with her all the way—though obviously I’ll need to learn a bit of Cantonese and find some undiscriminating women first.
Read More10Sep04 — 4
Behind Bars
It’s amazing that critics of the application genetic fingerprinting have made so little rhetorical use of the year of the technique’s original discovery.
Read More09Sep04 — 19
“Read By People In Museums”
I 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 More09Sep04 — 9
Things I Want To Do With PooterGeek
I 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 More07Sep04 — 0
Meet The Flame
No, British moths are not in decline; the ones Dr Conrad’s looking for are all flapping around my bloody flat. And he can come round and collect them at a mutually convenient time.
Read More23Aug04 — 0
“Music is a noninvasive nursing intervention”
Thanks to Jo for this.
Read More23Aug04 — 0
Empirical Support
Norm 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 More20Aug04 — 1
I Saw A Mouse
Where? There, on the stair.
Read More14Aug04 — 1
Babies And Bathwater
Bit of a ruckus breaking out in the comments of my jokey “Staff Shortage” post about the cloning of human embryos. I think the two Davids are both right. Yes, I should be cautious about speculation and yes, as a scientist I ought to try to share my understanding of the technology with others so […]
Read More12Aug04 — 15
Staff Shortage
Bizarrely, someone at the conference I was working at last week walked up to me and invited me to apply for a job here, despite my having told him to be quiet during a seminar that I later discovered he was co-chairing. He’s Australian; they have a different attitude to that kind of thing—and he […]
Read More06Aug04 — 0
The Glasgow Conference Is Over
He’s back. He’s beige. He’s of marriageable age. He’s PooterGeek, European ‘Blogger of Culture 1990.
Read More06Aug04 — 0
Even I’m Having A Cow About This One
This is worrying and it’s also a rare example of a mainstream news report about genetics taking the time to try to explain the difference between a gene and an allele.
Read More01Aug04 — 4
Michael Crichton Is Annoying (And Mostly Right)
Michael 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 More30Jul04 — 1
Single-Stranded DNA
In the business some people call one strand “Watson” and the other “Crick”. A moment's silence, please, for the loss of a helix.
Read More27Jul04 — 0
Chimp-athy
I think they mean that chimpanzees also find yawning infectious, but it's interesting all the same.
Read More23Jul04 — 0
More Science And Technology
I'm on a roll this week. I've been banging my head against a piece of code the past couple of days—until four o'clock Thurs, when my officemate and I went down for tea. One coffee and a Cornetto™ later, back at my desk, I nailed the bug. And I've just got back from a curry […]
Read More22Jul04 — 1
How Science Gets Done
I had an idea at work yesterday. This is worthy of comment because few of my ideas survive beyond five minutes of my examining them in daylight; next to none survive my explaining them to colleagues. Philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science often, but not always, subscribe to one of a limited range of theories […]
Read More20Jul04 — 0
The Ultimate In Retro
Some of my earliest memories are of watching Apollo missions on television. I used to collect PG Tips picture cards of the space race. At infants school, every day that I could, I wore a blue cardigan with an embroidered lapel badge saying “Junior Astronaut”. Even grotty little jpeg pictures like this still make me […]
Read More14Jul04 — 1
Road Traffic Accidents And Sex
I was once witness to a spectacular but non-fatal and non-crippling crash. The sequence of events was shockingly clear in my mind. A careless driver was turning right into the road where I lived. He drove straight across the path of an oncoming motorcyclist who was certainly not speeding. I know he wasn't speeding because […]
Read More03Jun04 — 0
Gasp
A few weeks back I attended a seminar by one of the creators of the World's first “knockout mouse”. Such a creature is exactly like others of its species except that a scientist has removed one or more genes from it, for the usual scientific reason: to see what happens. Back in the 80s, creating […]
Read More28May04 — 0
What A Way To Go
Cows at sea, beware the Atkins diet.
Read More25May04 — 0
Not A Day For Hanging Out Laundry
[WARNING: big download] This is another long overdue one that I didn’t see at the time of the original news story. Boggle at a photo of Mount Etna erupting taken from the European Space Station. There are more at NASA’s photo pages. Scroll down this page, click “Has a Caption”, type “Etna” into the “Caption […]
Read More22May04 — 0
Men Think With Their Temporal Lobes
If you’ve got Flash, the BBC can sex your brain. Apparently my brain is male. (Be brisk or you could get caught out by the time limits.) Alternatively, you can have your head scanned while you look at porn. If your mind is elsewhere, you are a woman.
Read More21May04 — 0
Leaders Of The Pack
The dog genome is in. I should be ‘Blogging the potential benefits for genetic research of our being able to compare a whole collection of small, genetically isolated populations, but you want to read about the weirdness. It turns out that some pure breeds are ancient, close relatives of the wolf. This particular subgroup includes […]
Read More13May04 — 0
Jesuits Go Boldly
For a long time, the Vatican has had a theological position on extraterrestrial life. There is even a Graham Greene-meets-Arthur C. Clarke novel about the implications of our encountering intelligent aliens. Today, Slashdot links to an interview with the Vatican astronomer. After outlining some of the possible scenarios for such a meeting, he goes on […]
Read More08May04 — 0
Now You Don’t
Claire is right. This is weird.
Read More23Apr04 — 4
You Scratch My Back
This morning I received a bottle of champagne (coincidentally my favourite alcoholic drink) from a family of complete strangers, as thanks for my doing them a favour, one I enjoyed doing and for which I had refused payment. Biology geeks might see the connection between this “exchange” and the death of John Maynard Smith on […]
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