I left The Observer on the shelf at the supermarket yesterday because it had another load of bollocks about MMR and autism on the front cover. Around the blogosphere, people who A) know some science and/or B) can be arsed to use Google show the newspaper’s science editor how to do his job: lizardoid Eustonian […]
I caught up with wongaBlog this morning. I enjoyed this post about Jonathan Edwards’ reflections on his conversion from Christianity to atheism. It’s all downhill from here, Jonathan. Believers might be wrong, but believing often makes for happier and more successful people; and I enjoyed this marvellous rant about anti speed camera campaigners. My apologies […]
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 […]
By PooterGeek
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Also posted in Academia, Biology, Blogs, Cambridge, Language, Magazines, Media, Philosophy, Physics, Psychology, Religion
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Hot Wheels Helena is back from Glastonbury with a message for post-modernists, fundamentalists, and plain mentalists everywhere: More info here. [Thanks to Caroline for the pic.]
I’m probably in a (large) minority in thinking this, but it’s a Bad Thing that we’re raising a generation of science students who won’t get this joke.
This civil engineering computer simulation [YouTube video] of one of the September 11 impacts is all the more shocking for being created without factoring in the explosions or heat damage. It also omits the fleeing spectating Jews, holographically concealed missiles, and shaped charges planted in the tower by giant lizards. Scientists and engineers, eh? They’re […]
I like this: a to-scale depiction of the Earth and the Moon as if seen from a point in space 350 000 miles away from both of them.
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.
I used to work for a Professor whose academic homepage listed among his interests “sperm production”. If you want evidence that female animals can be as promiscuous as male animals you should have a browse through the literature on sperm competition. In the case of ducks, that promiscuity is not necessarily the females’ choice, so they […]
It seems my former employers have funded research into an amazing new drug: Scientists are developing a pill which could boost women’s libido and reduce their appetite. The hormone-releasing pill has so far only been given to female monkeys and shrews who displayed more mating behaviour and ate less. The team from the Medical Research Council’s Human […]
Tom Hamilton’s blogging has been particularly good lately, ranging from the Devil’s Chaplain to the Devil’s Kitchen. I recommend his excellent posts about Richard Dawkins—oldie and goodie—and his fine, if less taxing, fisking of the most superfluous blog in existence not written by someone called Brittany: hoisting out the middle wicket and scooping up an […]
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 […]
Legal drugs, like illegal drugs, have drug-like effects on the brain. Apparently, by performing post-mortems on them it’s possible to reveal biochemical changes in their bodies that suggest that regular smokers develop a physical addiction.
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 […]
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. […]
Friends have told me that my obsession with freewill and my belief that there is such a thing as evil are products of my Catholic upbringing. They are, in fact, products of personal experience and of a long, dull training in human biology. I know people who simply do not believe in evil. They are […]
If you have ever spent any amount of time in conversation with cokeheads in London then you will be able to testify to the authenticity of “Diary of a London Cokehead”.
Hilary Mantel is a novelist. I haven’t read any of her books. I have read her review of magician Derren Brown’s Tricks Of The Mind in yesterday’s Guardian. Near the end of her mostly negative assessment she tries to set up a weak joke: she “hopes” that “no intellectual snobbery” will prevent Richard Dawkins from […]
If you are familiar with the official French attitude* to the use of English in academic (and other cultural) settings, the appearance of a state-funded TV station, “France 24”, with an English-language feed might surprise you. It did me when I watched one of their online English-language video ads a few days ago. They also broadcast Arabic. […]
Beat this, Jesus of Nazareth. [thanks to Liam]
07:30hrs. I’m standing outside Brighton rail station with a suitcase, but I’m having nothing to do with trains today. After a quick discussion with the on-duty policeman and the man on the information desk I plant myself outside the gates. With a flip of the lid, bearing the A2 legend FREE BOOKS FREE CARDS and some shuffling […]
Regular drivers of cars live in terror of flying on commercial airlines. People deadlock their front doors at night to keep out violent burglars and then die of smoke inhalation trying to open them in a house fire. Pensioners stay indoors for fear of assault by teenagers, keep their cash in boxes for fear of […]
With their characteristically English lack of ambition, scientists from Newcastle University and KCL have applied for a three-year licence from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to make chimaeric human-cow embryos. The similarly small-minded Korean authorities have been doing their damnedest to bring low the genius of visionary Hwang Woo-suk: Seoul, South Korea (AHN) - […]
Further to this, this. METHOD: To study the effect of penis width vs. length on female sexual satisfaction, 50 sexually active female undergraduate students were asked which felt better, i. e., was penis width or length more important for their sexual satisfaction. RESULTS: None reported they did not know, or that width and length were equally satisfying. […]
I couldn’t be bothered to fisk that nonsense about the “future evolution” of humankind that was all over the media this week, merely dropping it into my “Pseudoscience” and “Tin Foil Hat Wearers” blog categories in passing instead. Luckily we have P Z Myers to do the job properly.
In response to the previous PooterGeek post I received an email from a reader in Dulwich who wishes to make it clear that, despite buying property there, the Thatchers never actually took up residence in her neighbourhood. I’m sorry for suggesting otherwise. I’ve also toned down the language I used about Susan Greenfield back here because […]
If you are a middle-aged man then two things are going to happen to your hair soon: it’s going to fall out and it’s going to turn grey. My dad managed to escape both of these until he reached 60 years of age, but everyone accused him (unfairly) of using Grecian 2000, so he didn’t […]
It’s the sound of ball bearings grinding against fragments of broken glass on a wet pavement. It’s being wired straight into my jaw in full-frequency Dolby surround. Yes it hurts, but if I didn’t have a face full of lidocaine I’d be squealing like a pig in a combine harvester. There’s a man with his […]
Wikipedia will eventually triumph over all other existing encyclopedias. Does any edition of Britannica or Encarta have a “List of films ordered by the use of the word ‘fuck’”? Yesterday’s featured article was about philosopher and socialist Hilary Putnam, who is the Putnam in the “Quine-Putnam indispensability thesis” and definitely my kind of thinker. (By that […]