Ultimate procrastination

Thanks to John Naughton I have just stumbled upon a site which appears to list every public or semi-public talk being given in or around Cambridge University. It is a glorious searchable toyshop of interesting ideas and almost the best thing about it is that each talk is accompanied by a sidebar listing others that seem almost entirely random. So I went from

* “What the Media are doing to our politics”:http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/8957 (where I will be this evening) to
* “What is meaning, does it reside in the brain, and, if yes, where?”:http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/8042 via
* “Saving equality from the dustbin of history: a refutation of the ‘meritocracy thesis’ from The Bell Curve”:http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/8199 (The lecturer is Flynn of That Effect) and
* “Animals in medical experiments in the Middle Ages”:http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/8253 which led to
* “What goes wrong when speakers stutter?”:http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/7830 and, tomorrow —
* “Why People Go to War”:http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/9262 by Robert Hinde, who is a very thoughtful biologist.

And a whole lot of other stuff I have already forgotten. See? It’s like Google, but with real learning at the end of it.