Could be a design statement, but I'm going with making-up error: the patterned part of a new pair of socks comes on the soles, I discover when I put them on, and would be pretty much invisible even were I to be wearing the lightest and strappiest of sandals.

***

No - no - (Frankie Howerd voice) - don't mock: Three colours rule this autumn: mustard ( Read more... )

One way in which this week was good.

I have been mentally pacing the room and wringing my hands and wailing and howling over the paper for the conference in Tuscany for far too long.

Okay, I had some unexpected interruptions in the process - whereas I thought I had several clear weeks, I ended up with PROOFZ and various other stuff, but even so, it ( Read more... )

Interesting piece on current issues in scholarly journal publishing, especially problems with the peer review process as currently practised, but, ahem, do you want to reconsider this sentence?

[P]eer review, although the Rosetta Stone of the tenure and promotion process, is deeply flawed*

Let's just say, were I to be sent a piece that invoked the ( Read more... )

Hi, my name is
( Read more... )

Currently all over my reading list, the thing about Amanda Palmer and the pretend-conjoined-twins-with-backstory-of-abuse-and-exploitation, who were being presented as real people whom she has taken up as proteges, but are really her and someone else.

Which is being defended as some kind of edgy art project pushing the boundaries etc, and really ( Read more... )

Partner read this out to me from Simon Hoggart's column in The Guardian over lunch (it's attributed by Hoggart to Sir Terry Wogan), in which it is commented that, 'Women like that one immoderately':
Breakfast time, and a woman says to her husband: "We must have sex, NOW!"

"What's the urgency?" he asks.

"The egg-timer's broken."
I'm over here, ( Read more... )

How is this news? Charles Darwin's "tree of life", which shows how species are related through evolutionary history, is wrong and needs to be replaced, according to leading scientists.
The great naturalist first sketched how species might evolve along branches of an imaginary tree in 1837, an idea that quickly came to symbolise the theory of ( Read more... )

I have been distinctly meh about David Hare - I was less than impressed when I saw the original production of Plenty at the National Theatre, way back, and he seems to have made rather a feature of woman-going-to-pieces=searing-metaphor-for-state-of-the-nation, a trope which irks me.

However, there is some excellent good stuff in this Guardian ( Read more... )

Thinking about change, and changing people's ideas, and the take-up of new technologies, and how this tends to be much slower.

Comment to a post the other day about forceps and how shocking that the Chambelen family kept them a trade secret for so long; however, even when the secret was out a lot of doctors were fairly hostile to the idea and they ( Read more... )

I know it's in the poorest of ton to quote compliments that people have made one, but this, from callunav was very thought-provoking and I don't think I can go into the thoughts that riffed off it without citing:
You demonstrate - habitually, maybe even casually - that it's entirely possible and useful to explore at least a part of a complicated issue, and ( Read more... )