If I could ban any phrase, it would be that overused, viscerally irritating, and far-from-innocent term, the Guilty Pleasure. No one should feel guilty about what they eat, or the pleasure they get from eating; the only thing to feel guilty about (and even then I don’t recommend it) is the failure to be grateful for that pleasure.
Go, Nigella: 'it ( Read more... )

That if you once start exhuming persons of note so that their (alleged) descendants can get a DNA test done, there will be no end to it, I think we can be pretty sure, no?
Anyway, I recently came across this, where somebody who is, it appears, already actually acknowledged to be the descendant of Warren G Harding's adulterous rumpy-pumpy* in the ( Read more... )

During the discussion at the launch thing on Monday (for an academic Institute of Gender and Sexuality) someone made a comment (it was in the context, as I recall, of issues around women, peace, motherhood, etc) that perhaps the growing binary difference was becoming not so much e.g. sexual orientation, but having or not having children.

I was ( Read more... )

Cheering: seeing the plaque on the wall at KCL commemorating its role in the discovery of DNA - and it includes Rosalind Franklin's name!

***

Vaguely annoying: article in today's Guardian bewailing the decline or corruption of the use of 'Ms' (though the 'only used by divorced women' goes back a long way, yea, unto the late 70s as I recall). ( Read more... )

'Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration':
Statistical analogies suffer from the same weakness as actual statistics: they may not lie, but they sure can mislead. When quality not quantity is the issue, 1% can make all the difference ( Read more... )