Latest posts

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

Studious

Posted on 9 January 2021 by Henry Gee

As you’ll both know by now, playing live music means a lot to me. I’ve been playing live since student days — before — and at times music has been the only thing that’s kept me going. Many of my closest, fastest and longest-lasting friends I’ve met through music. Whenever I’m not in some kind of combo, Mrs Gee complains that I am wandering round like a los Continue reading →

Posted in blues, D C Wilson Band, flabbey road, friendship, home recording, Music, pandemic, voodoo sheiks | Comments Off on Studious

Rethinking Qualifications? It’s About Time

Posted on 8 January 2021 by Athene Donald

For the second year running our school assessment system is up in the air, for totally understandable reasons. A Levels were explicitly cancelled but the Government seemed incapable of giving a clear answer about this month’s BTec’s, the vocational equivalent. Leaving decisions about whether the imminent exams should go ahead to individual schools was a clear failure of leadership, putting both th Continue reading →

Posted in A levels, BTec, Charles Clarke, David Goodhart, David Sainsbury, education, skills | Comments Off on Rethinking Qualifications? It’s About Time

Microeuoi

Posted on 7 January 2021 by Henry Gee

Somewhere in Neal Stephenson‘s sprawling Baroque Cycle, two men are urinating against a wall — and remark on the simple joy of such an action. Both had undergone lithotomy, an operation to remove painful calculi, in their case, bladder stones. One of the men was a fictionalised version of the diarist Samuel Pepys, who had had a bladder stone the size of a tennis ball removed in 1658. I Continue reading →

Posted in Baroque Cycle, bladder stones, COVID-19, diabetes, golden arches, i have spoken, it is the way, jelly babies, life always feels better after a big poo, lithotomy, Neal Stephenson, pandemic, poo-phoria, Samuel Pepys, SARS-CoV2, Science Is Vital, the mandalorian, urination, vagus nerve | Comments Off on Microeuoi