Latest posts

Scrabbungulate

Posted on 30 January 2021 by Henry Gee

I’m not sure whether either of you know that I am rather fond of Scrabble. I can be found haunting the Internet Scrabble Club under the name of zedwave, (playing Scrabble online with people you know only as nicknames is, I suppose, an intellectual and therefore risk-free version of cottaging) or idly passing the time with some Scrabble app or another on my phone. A love of this game was inca Continue reading →

Posted in addax, anoa, antelope, bok, cottaging, dibatag, dzho, dzo, eland, gaur, gnu, impala, kob, kudu, nilgai, nyala, okapi, oryx, ox, pudu, quagga, saiga, saola, scrabble, Silliness, topi, ungulate, Writing & Reading, yak, zebu, zo | Comments Off on Scrabbungulate

A Throwback to Years Gone By from the Government

Posted on 28 January 2021 by Athene Donald

Back in 2019 the Committee of Advertising Practice and the Advertising Standards Authority published new guidelines about the problems of gender stereotyping in advertising. The guidelines are clear: ‘These rules state that ads ‘must not include gender stereotypes that are likely to cause harm, or serious or widespread offence’. A wide variety of ads since then have fallen foul of the rules and ha Continue reading →

Posted in covid19, Dominic Cummings, Equality, Fawcett Society | Comments Off on A Throwback to Years Gone By from the Government

Distrokering

Posted on 26 January 2021 by Henry Gee

You’ll both be aware by now that I’ve been usefully spending time learning how to record music at home, time I’d usually have devoted to live music. I’ve an album-length collection under my belt, and have even started playing music on other people’s records. One of these is now commercially available, and that got me thinking about making my own music more widely avai Continue reading →

Posted in Birdland, Heavy Weather, Lockd Down and Blue, Music, These Are Difficult Times, Weather Report | Comments Off on Distrokering

DfE Deluge

Posted on 23 January 2021 by Athene Donald

As has been noted by many this week, there has been a deluge of output from the Department for Education (DfE), covering many matters that have been in the offing for months if not years. That the response to the Pearce Review on the Teaching Excellence Framework has been published with August 2019 on the cover is amusing, but it also says a lot about the way these issues are being tackled: non-ur Continue reading →

Posted in Augar Review, BEIS, education, Equality, Further Education, Level 4/5 | Comments Off on DfE Deluge

Brian G. Gardiner (1934-2021)

Posted on 22 January 2021 by Henry Gee

Just a quick post to announce the death of Professor Brian G. Gardiner (1934-2021), communicated to me just now by his son Nick.

Brian was a specialist in the evolution of fishes. He was the last surviving member of the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ that shook up the staid world of biological taxonomy in the 1980s, with their espousal of Hennig’s then-revolutionary phylogenetic system Continue reading →

Posted in brian gardiner, cladistics, colin patterson, dick jefferies, donn rosen, hennig, natural history museum, peter forey, phylogenetic systematics | Comments Off on Brian G. Gardiner (1934-2021)

It’s January, so it must be time for…

Posted on 22 January 2021 by Richard Wintle

Well, that was a bit of a year, wasn’t it?

With the more or less complete absence of photograph-able events that would usually appear in my annual round-up, I’ve had to get a bit creative. With the Honda Indy Toronto canceled, the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair migrating to an online format, and highly restricted attendance at what horse shows were running… well, the backyard, th Continue reading →

Posted in Hobbies, Photography | Comments Off on It’s January, so it must be time for…

Passeportout

Posted on 22 January 2021 by Henry Gee

Notwithstanding inasmuch as which nobody can go really go anywhere much, even if they wanted to, which I don’t, I found – quel horreur! –  that my passport was about to expire, imminently, if not sooner, and that failure to renew it would probably mean my sudden expiration in a puff of logic.

Straightway I hied forth fifth to this handy government passport renewal website (my, th Continue reading →

Posted in Alfred Molina, Apparitions, Carlos the Jackal, legal tender, Omid Djalili, passports, Science - Has It Gone Too Far?, the Brown Queue, travel | Comments Off on Passeportout

Are Journal Editors Biased?

Posted on 17 January 2021 by Athene Donald

Last week a paper by Squazzoni et al appeared, which had analysed submissions to 145 scholarly journals to look for gender bias in acceptances and across the whole editorial process. They claimed not to find it. When I saw the headline I was puzzled. A careful analysis of their own publications by the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2019 had found significant evidence of bias across their editorial Continue reading →

Posted in publications, referees, Research, Royal Society of Chemistry, Science Culture, Squazzoni, Women in science | Comments Off on Are Journal Editors Biased?

Clichecollisional

Posted on 14 January 2021 by Henry Gee

Headline for this story, from the Daily Telegraph‘s landing page:

BORIS JOHNSON PLEDGES TO RAMP UP VACCINATION ROLL OUT

The italics are mine. Perhaps I am just unusually literal-minded, or oversensitive to cliche, but this seems to mix metaphors such that they act in opposition to each other. If  ‘roll out’ means anything at all in this context, it is the ‘rolling-out’ Continue reading →

Posted in cliche, duckspeak, ramp up, roll out, semantic bleaching, vaccination, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on Clichecollisional

Bhooq

Posted on 12 January 2021 by Henry Gee

As I am sure you both know, I have been hard at work on a book. Refractory ‘t’s have yet to be crossed and the final recalcitrant ‘i’s dotted, but time waits for no-one, and as the remorseless schedules of publication get up on their winged chariot, unsparing of the  horses, which of course are metaphorical horses, as no actual horses were harmed during the making of this b Continue reading →

Posted in a very short history of life on earth, Christmas 2021, winged horses (metaphorical), Writing & Reading | Comments Off on Bhooq