Dept of, I knew that, sort of: Cryptic crossword solvers played a vital role in military intelligence during the second world war.

Dept of, not immune to the attraction of Neanderthal Man: The downside of sex with Neanderthals.

Dept of, like no divorced couple ever remained friends: The secret letters of Wallis Simpson are sensational - but don't ( Read more... )

Urrggh, aaaargh, eeeeeeeuuuuuuwww, etc to the gospel that Catherine Hakim is preaching in Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital. Interview with Zoe Williams here, and you get the distinct impression that Zoe wished she'd taken a codfish with here, and review of the noxious thing by Will Self, which is a bit point thahr misst (wot duz e no about ( Read more... )

Via something that was being circulated at work yesterday: The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700:
Humans have become much taller and heavier, and experience healthier and longer lives than ever before in human history. However it is only recently that historians, economists, human biologists and ( Read more... )

Transport for London havin a laff: I'm convinced that there is someone with a warped sense of humour behind the Journey Planner bit of their website, because there is always one suggested mode of getting from A to B which has me going 'WTF, do we really need to go via L, Q and back to H first, using at least 3 forms of available transportation and ( Read more... )

Several papers carried the worrying story today suggesting links between social networking sites and sexually transmitted infections (STIs): Dr Petra Boynton deconstructs journalistic claims that Facebook give you Teh Pox.

Moar deconstruction, this time of historimythic and much recirculated photo: The photograph that defined the class divide: In ( Read more... )

Barbara Pym does the ton (and is Excellent)? Oxymoronic fashion: The biker cardigan.
I met her in the libraree
She turned around and sssshed me - You get the picture? -
Yes we see -
That's when I fell for
The Leader of the Pack
(Vroom vroom vroom vroom)

***

And on other internal combustion-related issues, yet another person claiming that competence ( Read more... )

Appended to the page for one of my works this morning:

Customers Viewing This Page May Be Interested in These Sponsored Links
Evolution is a lie www.prophecyandtruth.com - What does science evidence prove? Is evolution in the bible?

I suppose these are automatically generated somehow, but I would love to know if there is some mechanism for ( Read more... )

Spotted across my reading list, a certain amount of indignation apropos of the failure of new film about Darwin to find a US distributor, because you can't really make a film about Darwin without mentioning evolution... and they fear God will smite them, or something. Or probably, more likely, nutters picket the cinemas where it's showing.

However ( Read more... )

By koinkidenk, My Attention Was Drawn in 2 different directions yesterday on the topic of Orgasms. In women, in particular. (Because male orgasms are really, really, boring, eny fule no orl about the male orgasm...)

This article, by David P. Barash and Dr. Judith Eve Lipton, on Why Do Women Orgasm. (Actually it deals with a number of other Mystreez ( Read more... )

I've been seeing this popping up hither and yon on my reading lists.

Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around? The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves.

Sing it, sing it loud and clear.

Really chops the legs from under all those myths about men being hardwired to rape, spread their seed around, prefer women of a certain hip- ( Read more... )