Monthly Archives: December 2003

Happy New Year

Posted on December 31, 2003 by acb

When I was a young man, I used to think my problems were due to interesting and personalised character flaws, which other people would envy if they thought they could have them. Nowadays I realise that they are largely the … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Blather | 5 Comments

Interesting research tools

Posted on December 31, 2003 by acb

There’s a list here, via Metafilter. I had been going to mark the 1000th posting here with a descant on futility and failure, as is traditional on New Year’s Eve. This is more useful as well as more entertaining. Continue reading →

Posted in Journalism | Comments Off

A brush with greatness

Posted on December 29, 2003 by acb

I was in the middle of an anecdote about two Nobel Prize winner when the telephone rang. It was a third, Sydney Brenner. I answered, as I always answer the phone “Brown”. This is apparently a syllable that people find … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Blather | 1 Comment

Do frogs’ eyes follow you?

Posted on December 29, 2003 by acb

Apparently not: Oliver Sacks has a rather disappointing roundup of consciousness books in the NYRB which claims that Whatever the mechanism, the fusing of discrete visual frames or snapshots is a prerequisite for continuity, for a flowing, mobile consciousness. Such … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Science without worms | 1 Comment

Gather round the wireless

Posted on December 28, 2003 by acb

At 9.30 this evening, for a programme of astonishing perspicacity and excitement on Radio Four. It is also available on the Internet thingy for foreign listeners. Special thanks to Simon Sarmiento who pointed out that the blurb copy contains a … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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Puritans and population

Posted on December 26, 2003 by acb

Here’s an odd fact: among Western women, breastfeeding does not much suppress fertility, whereas among hunter-gatherers it does. In the US,on average, women start menstruating about eight weeks after giving birth whether or not they breast feed their babies, whereas … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Science without worms | 3 Comments

A hard crossword

Posted on December 24, 2003 by acb

The weekend Financial Times has had a peculiarly evil general knowledge crossword for the last two or three years: it used to be in the weekend magazine, and migrated to the main section in the autumn. We attempt it every … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Journalism | 4 Comments

Finnish manhood

Posted on December 23, 2003 by acb

I have just finished Mikael Niemi’s book Popular Music and I’m breathing in exhausted wheezes, I’ve been laughing so hard. It is the story of a young man’s growing up in the utmost extremity of Swedish lapland, in the town … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Literature | 2 Comments

They don’t make convent girls like this any more

Posted on December 23, 2003 by acb

The greatest pleasures of the Daily Telegraph are A.N. Wilson’s column on Mondays, and the obituaries. The novelist’s imagination never approaches some of the stories in the obits; This one, about a rich and spoiled convent girl, who lost her … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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Cosmopolitan

Posted on December 18, 2003 by acb

The christmas present I would like to give my mother is a ride in a Tiger Moth from Duxford aerodrome. Her brother Tony was a Spitfire pilot, and she herself was taken up in a biplane in Calcutta in 1934, … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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