Jun 22 2009
Two of us were standing at the bus stop outside the Central Library. A small group of people walked past in animated conversation. We only caught the briefest part before they were out of earshot again:
…so you can have an entirely private conversation without being overheard…
We laughed.
Mar 02 2009
The Daily Quail gets better and better as the Mail continues to plough its way through ever sillier depths. The Quail here does a brilliant round-up of all the red wine cures/causes cancer that the Mail runs on a regular basis.
It’s saddening to think that only one of these “newspapers” is a satire and parody.
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Feb 15 2009
We took out membership of the local library this afternoon, and spent half an hour browsing. I got out The Extended Phenotype, a sequel of sorts to The Selfish Gene. In the preface he states that the first chapter goes over a lot of ground from the previous book, and tries to clear up misapprehensions and answer complaints from critics of The Selfish Gene. But I’ve never seen such a back-handed compliment as this:
I am grateful to my critics for forcing me to think again about how to express difficult matters more clearly.
See the kerfuffle behind Mary Midgley’s review for an example of the critics who just didn’t get it, no matter how simply it was worded.
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Feb 06 2009
It’s fairly well known that human beings are apt to fool themselves that coincidences have deeper meaning. I recently found a great little game to demonstrate this.
This is actually just a silly questions meme, but it has a nice mixture of producing answers that are (a) unrelated to any actual answers you would give and (b) demonstrating what kind of music you listen to. And like I said, it’s great for showing how easily we spot patterns in meaningless coincidence.
The rules are:
This is what I got. How many of these do you think are relevant answers to the questions? I would say nearly a dozen.
I particularly enjoyed “what is the one thing you regret? — foreign affair” and “what hurts right now? — Scotland’s shame”.
Jan 16 2009
The blind man at the back takes firm hold of the tail and says:
But why do we need to call it an elephant? No-one knows what that is. Everyone knows what a rope is, so we should just call it a rope.
And that is how the elephant came to be labelled a rope in all the guide books.
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Dec 05 2008
So that was the first big weekend of the summer…
Starts Thursday as usual with a canteen quiz and again no-one wins the big cash prize. Later I do my sound bloke routine by approaching Gina’s new boyfriend to say that he shouldn’t feel that there’s any animosity between us and then I even go and make peace with her. I shouldn’t have bothered. Then on Friday night we went through to the Arches…
There was only one car going, so some of us had to get the train. We got through quite late. Then we went to a pub to take the gear. There was no problems getting in — we saw some others waiting down the front of the queue so we skipped in. It was a good night, everyone was nutted and I ended up dancing with some blonde girl. I thought she had been quite pretty until last night when Matthew informed me that she had, in fact, been a pig. When the club finished we wandered the streets for a while until we got to this 24-hour cafe but I didn’t like the look of it so we left and got a taxi back to Morag’s flat. I couldn’t sleep, so I sat about drinking someone else’s strawberry tonic wine and tried to keep everyone else up.
Then at ten o’clock in the morning we went downstairs to buy some drink. We had intended to watch the football in the afternoon but we’d passed out by then and slept right through it, awaking to find that England had won two-nil. Then we went to get the train home and had a few in the Station bar. We had some stuff left from the previous night’s supplies so when we got home we decided to go down to John’s indie disco. Same story as Friday — lots of hugging, lots of dancing etc. etc. I couldn’t sleep again so went up the park to look at the tomb, taking a detour through the playpark. To get in we had to climb over a ten foot steel fence, which resulted in severe bruising of our hands, legs and groins, but we had a good laugh on the stuff, especially the tube-slide, which probably doubles up as a urinal for drunk teens. Then we walked through the woods to have a look at the tomb. It was a big disappointment, but the mist on the lake was cool.
Sunday afternoon we go up to John’s with a lot of beer in time to watch the Simpsons. It was a really good episode about love always ending in tragedy except, of course, for Marge and Homer. It was quite moving at the end and to tell you the truth my eyes were a bit damp. Then we watched these young girls in swimsuits have a water fight in the street. “Taping this, aye?” We went up to the pub about ten. It was busy for a Sunday night, lots of people we know, including my first ever girlfriend who I still find very attractive, quite frankly, but I didn’t really speak to her. She’s probably still a bitch, anyway. Her friend Gillian was there, I had a chat with her, she was still quite pleasant. At the same time I watched Malcolm make some terrible attempt to try and chat up a girl we know called Jo. He made some remark about her skirt that was barely there the previous night or something. I couldn’t sleep again that night, thanks to some seriously disturbing nightmares… Matthew says I should cut down on the cheese.
“Went out for the weekend, it lasted for ever, high with our friends it’s officially summer.”
I got some sleep eventually on Monday afternoon. It was a beautiful day, and later that evening Malcolm introduced me to the power of Merrydown — £1.79 a litre, 8.2% — mmmm… Judith and Laura came round later and we sat in my back garden and drank. Then Matthew came round and we went up the town.
It’s officially summer.
Oct 24 2008
After reading the caption on this silly Daily Mail article I decided to do a quick Google experiment. Searching for “storm in a X-cup” with quotes and replacing X with various sizes, to see which is the commonest storm type. (I also used an instead of a where relevant.)
| Cup | Number of storms |
|---|---|
| A | 423 |
| B | 10 |
| C | 1320 |
| D | 79700 |
| DD | 391 |
| E | 127 |
| F | 5 |
| G | 209 |
| GG | 8 |
| H | 2 |
| tea | 29300 |
Oct 08 2008
From a Bad Science thread on Echinacea:
I tried SJW [St John’s Wort] a few years ago and it did seem to help but I have no idea if it was a real effect or not. I did a controlled trial, comparing it with shopping and found that it performed no better…
But was cheaper, and thus more cost-effective?
Have you ever been to Primark?
;-)
Aug 31 2008
I mean that in the sense that Feynman talked about cargo cult science:
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he’s the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
A cargo cult religion, then, would be an act of apparent religiousness that doesn’t mean anything — it has no meaningful content at all. Not stories, parables, histories, ethics or in fact anything else.
Now, having said all that, I present a video of Kanon Tipton, the grandson of Reverend David Tipton.
I am really struggling to make a serious point, but the silliness of the video is fighting back. It’s a tiny child going through all the motions of fire-and-brimstone preaching with none of the real words. Maybe I should just leave it there.
Aug 22 2008
One of my recently discovered blogs is Separated by a Common Language, a sort of extended series of notes about the differences in UK and US English. The author is a linguist at some university down south.
I was recently looking through the archives and found an early post about “roiling and broiling”. The commenters were discussing types of boil, and I particularly liked this comment:
I would also note that my family has two useful terms for two stages before that:
- ‘thinking about boiling’ — when you can see lots of tiny bubbles stuck to the sides and bottom, but it’s not actually boiling yet
- ‘talking about boiling’ — visually very similar to last stage, but you can hear a rustly/ticking noise that implies it’s about to start boiling anytime, really, once it gets around to it.
I really like these.
