Huzzah, have submitted the magnum opus to the Ministry, and am now gainfully employed in one of those fabulous postdoc things. More on the exact nature of that later. I started composing a list in my head of things NOT to say to PhD students in the final death throes of writing up, but decided … Read more
A “vagary”, according to The Source, is the collective noun for ‘impediments’. More pages that collect collective nouns are here and here. I am amused that a group of submarines is called a wolfpack, and that a group of sheldrakes is a doading (shoutout to my friend Duckie!). Henceforth a group of links to things … Read more
Presentation Zen has a great post on the rule of thirds in slide composition. FrinkTank linked the site for Danny Boyle's new film Sunshine, which I will not embarrass myself by going OMGICANNOTWAITLKJSHDFALKJFSDA except how I totally just did. Am following with interest the reponse to Nature's piece commenting on PLoS's "rocky" financial position, here. … Read more
Eagleton, C. & Spencer, M. 2006. Copying and conflation in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the astrolabe : a stemmatic analysis using phylogenetic software. Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part A [link] Chaucer’s works seem to be the focus of what one might call literary phylogenetics. This new paper uses network methods to try … Read more
Cultural evolution really is a growing field. So there. Fiona Jordan Anthropology, UCL It is extremely useful to be able to preface one’s grant application or paper introduction with a reference to the vibrant state of research in the field of cultural evolution. Of course, the truth of that sentiment has, until now, been more … Read more
My lame attempt to add content to today's post is to report that I went to a workshop on dealing with the media. We didn't actually get to the most useful part of it (mock interviews), but there was some interesting advice from our Media Relations centre here and from the presenters. Myself and the … Read more
Via John Hawks: big words make readers think you're not clever At Edge.org: Jaron Lanier on the aggregating-phenomena of the the web, where he views Wikipedia (for example) as one of many "online fetish site(s) for foolish collectivism". Yeah, exactly. The Jolie-Pitt enterprise and celebrity colonialism. Remind me again what Geri Halliwell does for the … Read more
Presentation Zen, my favourite blog on the art of presentation, links to the site for Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", the film derived from Gore's "travelling slideshow" on climate change and global warming. The trailer itself is (as with all cinema trailers) isn't sparing with the drama, but the presentations and visuals linked therein are … Read more
A terrible sign of laziness, but the two things I want to blog about require brain power and I just can't get that together this afternoon. From Language Log, Reliable Sources on (Language) Classification. A USB flash-stick that balloons up with the amount of data stored on it. From the ever-awesome John Hawks, the unintended … Read more
From the delightful ladies at InkyCircus, big pictures of bugs! They have such personality at this scale, I don't know why people are scared of critters. Except ants, of course. That degree of organisation in something with three ganglia is scary.