Deep thoughts and silliness

I’m reading a book about pedagogy in higher education, and I’m presently trying to go through a chapter on course planning. It’s important and should be interesting, but I’m annoyed with having to handle sentences like this:

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From The Onion:

Woman Overjoyed By Giant Uterine Parasite

Need I add anything?

I ended up at Nature Networks thanks to a post on my previous blog about a paper in TREE which claimed that the proportion of female authors was increased by double-blond peer review¹. In a nutshell, I argued that there wasn’t enough data to show this. Well, things have progressed a bit since then, and now we have more data.

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I really should write something serious today, but it’ll have to come later. Instead, I want to indulge you in some politics.
I was woken by the World Service¹ this morning, with this gem, a politician talking about

“companies in industries such as gems and timber that exploit the labour of the downtrodden Burmese people but enrich only the generals”

Companies enriching the elite by exploiting the labour of the downtrodden people? That’s straight out of Marxist (Karl, not Groucho) rhetoric. So it should be easy to guess who said this…

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This

Earlier on this blog I derived some amusement from developments on the Biologic Institute’s webpage. Well, since then things have happened.

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This idea of Martin Rundkvist is just too good not to pass on:

Let’s Shoot Bits of Peter Higgs into the LHC!
Now, if any of you physicists know of a good reason why this is a bad idea, kindly keep quiet and let the rest of us remain with our fantasies.

The web is fully of odd tests designed to reveal your true self. They all seem to be run by dating websites, which makes the one I just tried slightly disturbing. It’s the Dante’s Inferno Test (HT: John Wilkins). And the results are…

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I got a leaflet in my mail today about applied stats courses in Reading. One of them is Basic Statistics for Social Researchers, which makes me wonder whether they have web-based courses for anti-social researchers.

Well, today’s the day we’ve all been waiting for. Yep, Expelled has finally arrived.
Let’s recap on what they’ve done so far¹

• Lied to their interviewees about the nature of the film.
• Expelled one of their interviewees from a preview of the film – but let his more famous guest (a certain Prof. Dawkins) into the viewing.
• Apparently copied another animation, without asking for permission from the creators.
• Included music without getting permission from the licence holder (a certain Mrs. Y. Ono).

• Obtained permission for some other music, but only by lying about the film.

Have I missed anything?

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