by Tom | Nov 30, 2009 | Science
Trailblazing is a great new resource from the Royal Society, starting with the pioneering experiments in the late seventeenth century that started to make clear how the body actually worked and showing that the institution has remained influential to the present...
by Tom | Nov 30, 2009 | Government, Science
“Britain faces return to Victorian levels of poverty”: is a slightly pessimistic look at the good work that has been done on levels of child and pensioner poverty. However, the lesson that universal benefits redistribute more to the poorest than targeted...
by Tom | Nov 30, 2009 | Reading
Females more sociable? Well we knew this anyway, but interesting that it is duplicated on the more sociable networking sites (indeed, there are often more females) rather than the more geeky ones.
by Tom | Nov 30, 2009 | Personal, Reading
Lots of excellent commentary on the controversial clause 14 (which creates a strict liability offence for paying for sex with a trafficked prostitute, regardless of the punter’s knowledge) on the Lords of the blog site. Exaggeration of...
by Tom | Nov 30, 2009 | Business, Reading, Science
Lots of exciting things going on in the food world: I read about Incredible Edible in the Indy at first, but it clearly is making waves. And secondly, we are now really close to getting in vitro meat production to the eatable level (of course not at scale, yet)....
by Tom | Nov 28, 2009 | Reading, Science
Two things we should teach everyone:Â the nocebo effect is a very strong version of priming. How is it that people can get symptoms from a sugar pill? Because their brain is doing some clever / weird stuff. How is it that telling people they are wearing knock-off...
by Tom | Nov 27, 2009 | Reading
Some great Daily Mashes England to uninvent cricket. Climate emails change climate change. “This is the smoking iceberg that fires a polar bear of truth between the eyes of hysteria and communism”. Police creating army of super villains. Drinkers abandon...
by Tom | Nov 27, 2009 | IT
I have a manually triggered AutoHotKey script that gradually lowers the volume of my laptop when (e.g.) ads are on in Spotify. Sadly, to get it working in Windows 7, it has to run as administrator, and thus requires a UAC prompt, which rather defeats the purpose....
by Tom | Nov 26, 2009 | Personal, Science
Turkey electrocution, according to Benjamin Franklin, is a way of creating the perfect Thanksgiving turkey. Not one for the faint of heart, and probably not for Ali Blah Blah. Happy Thanksgiving to all our American and ex-pat chums.
by Tom | Nov 26, 2009 | Business, Personal
What kind of freelancer are you? I’m not sure I fit into any category, so maybe I’m not a freelancer?
