Shorts

* John Naughton, “sharpening the contradictions”:http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2007/07/03/4195 of capitalism. Part of a really cruel set of Cambridge revelry. This one makes me look hungrily for the nearest lamppost.
* A “very kind notice”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004664.html of an actress on Language Log: %(sane) Listen closely to Ward pronouncing just the “fir him or ‘gin him” quotation. It’s a delightfully odd and entertaining mixture of Lalla’s own British dialect and what she imagines Southern American English to sound like.%
* The “smell of urine”:http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070625/pf/070625-14_pf.html from dominant male mice provokes neurogenesis in females. Does this work in humans? Do the smells of the urine low-status males cause brain damage? Because in that case, walking up the stairs in the “Lion Yard car park”:http://www.thelionyard.com/ must take 20 points off your IQ.
* Do I dare “install a split image focussing screen”:http://cameramentor.com/dslr_split_image_focus_screen in my camera?
* A quick peek around the _Washington Post’s_ Faith site suggests that the _Guardian’s_ readers are pretty well-educated and moderate by comparison. This is rather depressing.
* For all my sneering at Wikipedia — and I intend to continue — I have to say that it had a much more detailed article on the human hippocampus than Britannica has managed.