07.27.07
Come the revolution
…first up against the wall will be those that say any variation of “ok, it’s not as good as it used to be, but The Simpsons is still better than anything else on TV“. It’s bloody well not, the bad episodes outnumber the good these days and it should end. So there.
07.26.07
A necessary clarification
US cat ‘predicts patient deaths’.
Last paragraph:
A doctor who treats patients at the home said she believed there was probably a biochemical explanation, rather than the cat being psychic.
Phew!
07.24.07
New game!
Sneak your woo comments into the Daily Mail. I like it a lot.
(none of those in the Mail article are mine, sad to say)
07.18.07
Of vaccines and journalists and feet
When I were a lad, a journalist came to our school and interviewed about ten of us about adolescent hygiene - I can’t recall what paper it was for, but it was one of the major ones, possibly the Telegraph.
The interviewer asked us a series of questions, as interviewers are wont to do, and I vividly remember that they were ‘road-testing’ a question that they weren’t going to use in the final version – “Do you wipe your bum from front to back, or vice versa?” Cue ten teenagers with furrowed brows making vague hand gestures as they tried to work out their system (as it were).
Another question was “do your feet smell?” or possibly “do people say your feet smell?” My answer was, roughly, “well, it’s one of those things with feet, isn’t it? People say they stink even if they don’t, everyone just ribs each other about it.” When the report was published, Ben, 15, from Leicester was reported as saying:
“Everyone at school says my feet smell. Sometimes their comments drive me to tears.“
All of which is a very roundabout way of saying that some journalists are bastards, and that I know the pain of Professor Simon Baron-Cohen. Ben Goldacre’s article in today’s Graun is excellent, but the version for the BMJ that’s up at his site is even better, and includes details of a cracking bit of journo shenanigans, whereby an email saying this:
“can i share this with ayla and with the committee planning services for AS [autism services] in cambridgeshire if they treat it as strictly confidential?”
became the professor being “so concerned by the one in 58 figure that last year he proposed informing public health officials in the county”. Baron-Cohen clarifies:
“That’s not saying I’m concerned, or that we should notify anybody; these are just the people who run the local clinic, who I share a corridor with, who said they were interested to hear how it was going so far. They are not public health officials, and it’s not alarmist, it’s not voicing concern, it’s simply saying: ‘am I allowed to share a paper with a colleague in the next door office?’ It seems very important to me that we discuss clinical research with clinical colleagues, and I only stressed confidentiality because the paper was not yet final.”
And for the record my feet don’t stink either, you fuckers.
Best recap ever
“I’m seeing Pirates 3 tonight. Am i right in thinking that they’re now on the way to rescue captain jack after he got swallowed by an octopus?”
Brothers, eh?
07.04.07
We can say with 95% confidence that Beyonce will feature heavily
I already know the title of my third year dissertation:
‘Why Do The Tossers Who Play Music On Their Tinny Little Speakers For The Whole Fucking Bus Journey Invariably Have Appalling Taste In Music: Or, You Will Never Hear Nirvana On The 7.56 To Town’
07.01.07
Ye gods
Scientific illiteracy is the theme in the Observer today, with an article here that features James Watson lamenting the presence of women at modern day Clare College in the name of missed opportunites, and a panel of celebrities answering basic scientific questions here. John O’Farrell performed so badly in this that I thought it was worth gathering his answers together.
Q: Why does salt dissolve in water?
No idea.
Q: Roughly how old is the earth?
I’ll have a guess. About 100 million years?
Q: What happens when you turn on a light?
I’m running out of steam here. I really don’t know.
Q: Is a clone the same as a twin?
No. How could it be the same? That’s not how cloning works, is it?
Q: Why is the sky blue?
My daughter explained this to me the other day. She is in Year Seven. It’s to do with blue being the dominant colour in the colour spectrum.
Q: What is the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
Let me think. Is it to do with heat conductors? Metal is an effective heat conductor and wood is not. I remember that from metalwork classes.
Sweet fancy Moses. 100 million years, metal and wood, and he runs out of steam after a wrong answer and a don’t know. Good skills.
