Via Slashdot, here’s an abstract of a study of graffiti found on the walls of the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, performed by a member of its IT staff. You can also browse the full dataset, including photographs of the inscriptions made available under a Creative Commons licence.
The take-home messages (as obtained with […]
The resignation of Hazel Blears reminded me again that this nation’s government now has a “Department for Communities”. Letting that phrase pass my lips without implied quotation marks would be like vomiting into my mouth without washing it out.
Thanks to Kevin Harris’s “neighbourhoods” blog, I can sample a little of that department’s output, a review document […]
Thank you very much to the PooterGeeker who sent me a Minolta SLR camera, lenses and other exciting goodies. You are star. I feel guilty writing so little lately when my readers are so nice to me.
The person who sent me that amazing gift is someone I have never met in my life, which brings me […]
Harry’s Place is down because of a threat of libel action. The Ministry of Truth has the details. This will turn out to be a good thing, because the University and College Union, an organisation whose representatives seem unfamiliar with the way the Internet works, will soon learn the meaning of “The Streisand Effect”.
Via The Motley Fool, comes this essential abstract from the scholarly journal Digestive Surgery:
Red Hot Chilli Consumption Is Harmful in Patients Operated for Anal Fissure - A Randomized, Double-Blind, Controlled Study
Pravin J. Gupta
Fine Morning Hospital and Research Center, Laxminagar, Nagpur, India
Another “shocking state of our universities today” story has appeared on the BBC news Website. A report from the Quality Assurance Agency says the degree classification system is broken. I smiled when I read this bit:
The reports from the QAA raise some worries about the effectiveness of the external examiner system, in which examiners from other […]
This morning I received an email from a community college in Canada asking permission to publish a link on its Website to the Website of Index on Censorship.
The “pictures” included a front-page one of the torturer dressed in a pink nurse’s outfit that stopped just above the tops of her black stockings
For those of you not up to date with the PooterGeek soap opera, having been made redundant from my first permanent job in science (when the Medical Research Council closed down […]
I’m so tired with work I’m starting to have hallucinations. I’d swear Richard Dawkins starts rapping 1 minute and 6 seconds into this YouTube video. (Christopher Hitchens throws shapes from 1:49 or thereabouts.) Go here for the torrent.
[via]
NASA ASTRONAUTS ARRIVE ON CENTAURI IV AND ENCOUNTER POPULATION OF HUMANOIDS SO PRIMITIVE THAT THEY STILL HAVE FACEBOOK ACCOUNTS.
PANEL OF HISTORIANS VOTES ON MOST HATED FIGURES OF 21ST CENTURY. SADDAM HUSSEIN, CLONED HITLER, HEATHER MILLS-MCCARTNEY TOP POLL.
HUMPHREY LYTTELTON FORCED TO STAND DOWN AS PRESENTER OF I’M SORRY I HAVEN’T A CLUE AFTER EXPOSURE TO SUNLIGHT LEAVES HIM […]
Remember William Hurt Grows A Beard? Now Dennis Quaid has grown one too.
Mick Hartley links to a Times report of a “serious” novelist suing the proprietors of a neighbouring factory because the fumes it produced so affected her concentration that she was reduced to writing genre fiction. It’s not just a funny hook for a news story; it’s a delicious illustration of how class and status in […]
One of the reasons I’ve been quiet these past few days is that I’ve been working on a new Website for the journal Index on Censorship which went live over the weekend. The purpose of this post is to send some of my Google karma to their new URL: “indexoncensorship.org”. If you believe in free […]
Not having a telly, I didn’t catch the latest from Richard Dawkins, but when I visited his Website to look for clips, I saw this photo of him:
All I could think of was Michael Mann directing Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in an atheist actioner:
[A convertible Ferrari screams through downtown in slow motion, reflections of streetlights flowing across […]
Beachy Head[click image to enlarge it]
I was eating breakfast in an hotel in Cambridge the Saturday morning after I shot that college ball. A tall, intense-looking man with a beard sat down at a table nearby. He pulled a hardback book out of his briefcase and began underlining paragraphs heavily with a soft pencil. I […]
Dismissing David Cameron and his gang as “toffs” is feeble, but I’ve noticed a few commentators refining that line lately. The Spectator blog points at Trevor Kavanagh, Political Editor of The Sun—there’s a job—claiming that the workrate of the Cameroonies compares unfavourably with that of either the Blairites or Brownites (as recounted by Alastair Campbell), […]
Damian:
[T]he impression I get is that Norm is more forgiving of Eagleton’s errors of reasoning than he should be
Norm:
Damian leaves an impression about my viewpoints that I feel I have a right to comment on.
Damian:
I’d happily place a bet with Norm on which of the two of them will be considered worth reading in two hundred years’ time.
But […]
I write short posts. Much goes unsaid. I often write ironically. Some subjects are better approached that way; or it’s just more fun for me to tackle them sideways. What I do say, I say in plain English in the hope that my words at least are clear to everyone who reads them.
Reading Norm today I […]
Norman Geras is disappointed by Terry Eagleton. You have to wonder how closely Norm’s been reading Eagleton’s output over the past few years decades.
Last Friday I found myself stuck in a room in a Cambridge college waiting to do a photo job so I took Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations down from a shelf and, as an intellectual dwarf perched on Hindsight the Giant, sneered at it. Certain things he said appear absurd in the light of certain experimental […]
Foolishly allowing himself to be provoked by the skeptical taunts of Professor Cho the experimentalist, Professor Hawking chooses the annual NASA barbecue as the occasion to collect on one of his bets.
Thank you to everyone who spoke at, helped with, and attended the Euston Manifesto Conference yesterday. Every seat was taken and then some. It was a superb meeting with some of the most interesting and thoughtful lectures I’ve heard in years—and that includes the stuff I thought was wrong. One of the best things about […]
I’ve not mentioned the Euston Manifesto Conference here yet because it’s been another pile of unpaid work for yours truly and I’m buggered if I’m going to add to it by writing lengthy blogposts about it. There’s a week to go before it takes place (on Wednesday 30May07) and most of the tickets have already […]
During the dying months of my doing bioinformatics for a living, I attended a scientific conference in Scotland. I helped to run a few of the seminars there, but had nothing to do with their planning.
At one, I marched to the front during a student’s presentation and told a member of the audience to stop whittering […]
Today, via Photo Matt, I discovered a phrase that I wish I had known about years ago:
“The adage, “Why should I care what color the bikeshed is?”, means: just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they […]
You can download a series of Glasgow University lectures about Kant on MP3.
When I used to work for the Medical Research Council, I did my best not to bore people with it on this site. I took up the name “PooterGeek”—ironically, the suggestion of a summer student—so that when people searched for my name on the Web they would find biomedical publications to download rather than movie parodies.
Despite […]
Following the Madeleine Bunting farce, Demos is keen to emphasise the academic credentials of her replacement. Accordingly Demos’s press release announcing the appointment of Catherine Fieschi makes more references to her PhD than if it had been written by the cover designer of a self-help book. It also quotes her reaction to getting the job. […]
