Language Log discusses The Barry White effect:All that said, we need to observe that the effect of voice pitch was a statistical tendency, a much weaker effect than I'll bet most readers of the news stories are imagining. (Those stories exaggerated and sensationalized the results of this study; in other news, the sky is still often said to be blue ( Read more... )

In Christopher Brookmyre’s superlative One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night, he invents the concept of BDQ: Bullet Deadliness Quotient. Essentially it is the rule that you can’t go changing the rules halfway. If you want dangerous realism in your action movies, it’s got to stay that way, and not turn into “your John Woo movies: zillions of ( Read more... )

The field of epidemiology studies the health of populations with any eye to detection and prevention of illness.

Disease is fascinating in any light, and as our world shrinks due to global travel we’re likely to see a lot more of it in new guises. Single cases of disease in exotic places are a potent threat to major population centres, because ( Read more... )

I’m getting really fed up and pissed off at these utterly heartless bastards who would sacrifice someone’s health for the sake of their own paranoid fantasies.

By the Daily Mail’s own admission in the article, HPV is responsible for 700 deaths from cervical cancer every year. But they “revealed”, in their best stoke-the-controversy fashion, that ( Read more... )

This is as much as anyone needs to know on the subject:

I mean, my only problem with creationism is it being discussed as theory instead of as pointless solipsistic wanking.

From Slashdot. I lol’d (literally).

It appears that the Archbishop of Glasgow didn’t much like me taking him to task over his poor grasp of the facts, so decided to quote-mine me and another critic of his from the same letters page.
( Archbishop demonstrates poor reading ability )

Following on from my angry post about stem cells, where I mentioned in particular the specious list of “65 adult stem cell-based treatments”, that very list was invoked in yesterday’s Herald by the Archbishop of Glasgow, Mario Conti.

So I got out my quill pen and finest sealing wax, and sent my servant off on the fastest horse to the presses in ( Read more... )

I’ve just finished making my way through a pair of popular science biology books: Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and Steve Jones’ Y: The Descent of Men, both of which were pretty good.
( Read on for thoughts on both books )