{"id":2725,"date":"2015-02-07T11:59:48","date_gmt":"2015-02-07T10:59:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/?p=2725"},"modified":"2015-02-10T11:35:17","modified_gmt":"2015-02-10T10:35:17","slug":"this-week-reading-thinking-and-linking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/2015\/02\/07\/this-week-reading-thinking-and-linking\/","title":{"rendered":"This week \u2013\u00a0reading, thinking and linking"},"content":{"rendered":"

This past week I have been doing so much reading and writing for work that there has been no time to prepare anything substantial enough for a proper blog post, even if I have been stirred by the excessive protests<\/a> of Mark Walport or the\u00a0over-selling<\/a> of what is actually a nice piece of virology<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But I have squeezed in a little additional reading on the side and thought I would take a couple of minutes to pull the links together.<\/p>\n

“Check me out. The top two knuckles of my left hand look as if I\u2019d been worked over by the K.G.B.”\u00a0If you take only one thing away from this blogpost, for God\u2019s sake let it be this: in the New Yorker,<\/em> Roger Angell writes beautifully, wittily and with unsparing honesty of his life as an old man<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the Boston Review<\/em>, Stephen Shapin\u2019s superb essay<\/a> traces the association and dissociation of science and virtue.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday\u00a0the UK House of Commons\u00a0voted to approve the use of mitochondrial transfer treatments;\u00a0Mark Henderson reveals<\/a>\u00a0the pivotal role of Prof Doug Turnbull, a scientist who worked hard to overcome \u2018failure to communicate<\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n

Measles is on the loose in the US, stoking furious debates between pro- and anti-vaxxers. There really should be no debate on the matter, though the proper tenor of that discussion is something for us all to consider<\/a>. For now, this impressive animation<\/a>\u00a0in the Guardian\u00a0<\/em>gives a beautifully clear excellent demonstration of how herd immunity can only be achieved with high rates of immunisation.<\/p>\n

\"Guardian<\/a><\/p>\n

It should come as no surprise to university folk to learn that metrics are getting out of hand<\/a>. This is complex territory but John Gill in the Times Higher<\/em>\u00a0is not happy \u2013 and neither are many academics.<\/p>\n

Mention of metrics inevitably calls to mind the REF, the UK\u2019s six-yearly self-assessment and self-flagellation exercise. It\u2019s something of a b\u00eate noir<\/em> for neuroscientist and super-blogger David Colquhoun, who has an interesting proposal<\/a> for reforming UK universities so as to avoid the more insidious effects of the REF. I don\u2019t always agree with David but he always makes you think.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere on the cultural landscape, I read another good book<\/a> by novelist James Salter and delighted in Andy Marmery\u2019s fun making rockets<\/a> with water bottles and ethanol. The RI Channel<\/a> is going from strength to strength \u2014 this week they also released videos of the 1980 Christmas lectures<\/a> by crystallographers David Phillips and Max Perutz.<\/p>\n

That said and much as I love my crystallography, the video highlight of this week is the news that Simon Singh\u2019s and John Lynch\u2019s fabulous film about Fermat\u2019s Last Theorem<\/a> is now available on the BBC iPlayer. In my humble opinion it remains one of the best science documentaries ever made. Treat yourself (UK only, I’m afraid).<\/p>\n

With apologies to Ed Yong<\/a>, who has been in the linking business for much longer and does it so much better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past week I have been doing so much reading and writing for work that there has been no time to prepare anything substantial enough for a proper blog post, even if I have been stirred by the excessive protests … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,23,28,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication","category-history-of-science","category-science-media","category-science-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}