Well, this is exasperating/depressing: this article demonstrates that biographies about women who meet Wikipedia’s criteria for inclusion are more frequently considered non-notable and nominated for deletion compared to men’s biographies: On March 7, 2014, a biography for Donna Strickland, the physicist who invented a technology used by all the ( Read more... )

Rare fin whale stranding in Norfolk puzzles scientists: “It should not be in those waters,” he told the BBC. “We see fin whales occasionally on the southern coast or more the west coast of the UK, so Ireland, right up to Scotland. But you never get them in the North Sea, so what it was doing there, we have no idea at the moment.”

Not the first ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished The People in the Trees - my proviso re noxiousness of main character remains, but I thought there were interesting things going on there, e.g. despoliation of nature/innocence, and that he gets a Nobel prize for work that has resulted in destruction of a way of life and island ecology, but then gets fingered for paedophilia. ( ( Read more... )

Happy, happy-making thing: received the other day, The Essential Rebecca West: Uncollected Prose, which appears to be intended as a taster volume for the delights of Dame R for those daunted by, say, the sheer mass of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. It consists of selected fugitive articles and reviews from her copious journalism, some previously ( Read more... )

West's annoyance flared up after he took the role of the Australian scientist Professor Howard Florey in Breaking the Mould, a forthcoming BBC4 drama about the discovery of penicillin ( Read more... )

When people say (the period is around 1930s/40s) things like:
Orthology flies the same flag, and is in fact based on Yuan Shan's contention that Chinese and Negro thought cannot be interpreted in current Aryan grammatical categories ( Read more... )

Heard of italicised, read (or seen work performed) bold
( Cut for length )