Yearly Archives: 2009

Wiley Interscience

… may sodomise themselves with spiky reindeer antlers. I am paying their exorbitant charges for article reprints: $34.44 with VAT; and each one comes with the following boilerplate: IMPORTANT: You now have 24-hour access to this content. Access to this … Continue reading

Posted in Blather, Journalism, Science without worms | 10 Comments

New and noted from PLOS

I came across this when looking for a report about empathy in mice: The mouse empathy story turns out to be of rather more lasting interest. I had been going to use it as an example of sloppy journalism: the … Continue reading

Posted in Blather, Literature, Science without worms | Comments Off on New and noted from PLOS

Darwinism as religion

One reason I am not writing much here is that on top of everything else I have been sent fourteen (at last count) books on Darwin to review. Well, fifteen, counting the hardback Origin of Species which turned up this … Continue reading

Posted in Blather | 10 Comments

National Character

Not to stereotype or anything but I have just had my first piece of German blog spam and it’s wonderfully fake-professorial: two paragraphs analysing the performances of different sorts of fund in Frankfurt last year. This is illustrated with lots … Continue reading

Posted in Blather | 1 Comment

Nature notes

It was almost my birthday today, so we ate lunch at the Three Horseshoes in Madingley, which just gets better and better. What I liked best this time was a lemon sorbet which tasted of all the different smells that … Continue reading

Posted in Blather, Pictures | 2 Comments

Book Search

If this list is Google’s idea of the history books we might want to read on our mobile phones, Amazon can breathe easy. Five books are listed. One purports to be the memoirs of Napoleon; two are by those well … Continue reading

Posted in Blather, Literature, Net stories, nördig | 4 Comments

Random resumption

I know I have written nothing here for the last month. I don’t think that’s good. It started off as a consequence of Guardian blogging, where I felt that I had to turn everything that occurred to me into a … Continue reading

Posted in Blather, Journalism, Sweden, Travel notes | 8 Comments

From the literary magazines

My new year treat has been to ignore all comments about atheism on the Guardian site. 320 at last count. Instead, I went for a long walk and caught up with the LRB and TLS. The personals in the LRB Continue reading

Posted in Journalism | 4 Comments