In today’s Observer there is a story that will gladden the hearts of conservationists across the UK. The new way to tackle invasive species is to eat them. According to the paper, grey squirrel (the invasive American species) is the latest meat to hit the shelves. The normal methods of eradication is not going to work (well, I guess we could put poisoned peanuts in ridiculous places where no sane animal would go), so why not eat them?
The Beast agrees of course, although he wonders why we bother to burn it first. He also doesn’t understand the difference between nasty American gr*-a-*ey squirrels and good European red squirrels, which might be a problem if we asked him to help. In fairness, he has only tasted the European species.
This is an effort I can get behind, and I think it should be tried for other species too. But it might take a bit longer before someone comes up with a good recipe for cane toad.

Bora has a post up about impact factors that links to a discussion in Epidemiology. It’s the usual stuff: how awful they are because they have all sorts of problems. We all know this, but of course it doesn’t stop us all checking the IFs of the journals we want to submit to, and assiduously following our h-index (if anyone would care to cite this paper or this one I’d appreciate it. Thanks).

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Tag clouds are a neat way of summarising the common topics on blogs (the cloud on HolfordWatch is amusing, and this one for the Democratic race is neat). This week they’ve hit the science blogging world. The author of Clastic Detritus applied tag clouds to their papers. This is too neat an idea for me not to join in, so…

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I never got any further with this. I’ll post it anyway, and please leave a comment if you notice this post!

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

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.