Status-Q

Many people think of Richard Dawkins as a strident, aggressive figure. I think this comes mostly from passages in The God Delusion where he’s deliberately mischievous, in a way that is decidedly uncomfortable to those of a religious persuasion.

I read The God Delusion and then moved on to several of his other books, like The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene – all brilliant books, by the way, which transformed my understanding of many aspects of science – but the thing that got me started was really YouTube. Hearing and seeing him speak made me realise he was a very smart, very thoughtful guy, who wasn’t just out to poke fun at religion. He doesn’t always give that impression in his writing, especially to those who have only read small excerpts.

Here’s a little four-minute example of the man who has been christened “Darwin’s Rottweiler”:

The U.S. edition of Rose’s second novel in the Mary Finch series, The Counterfeit Guest, hits American bookshelves today.

Jeremy Reimer writes a nice Ars Technica piece on why, after more than 20 years of using Microsoft Word, he now almost never uses it.

Is the age of the word-processor drawing to a close?

Thanks to John for the tweet.

Update: Well I never… at the other end of the table here, John was writing a blog post, and we both picked the same subject and independently came up with the same idea for the title!

This is great:

(Click to find out what’s going on…)

Many thanks to Ian Yorston for the link.

This is nice:

Search Google for ‘recursion’

(and check the ‘Did you mean…’ option)

Thanks to Neil Davidson for the retweet. More info here.

Supermarkets are strange places. Sometimes they have bizarre ideas about how to make your life easier. And a couple of years ago I reported on how my local Waitrose had an area entirely free from long-life milk.

But just this last week I discovered a new product trend of which I was not previously aware:

I confess to having used the same kind of toilet roll all year round in the past. Perhaps certain types only grow at certain times of the year, though, and mine were being flown in from Portugal in the winter?

Or perhaps it’s a fashion statement, and visitors have been whispering behind my back that my loo rolls are so last-season…

I’ve just been watching this great panel discussion with Richard Dawkins, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Ann Druyan and Victor Stenger. It’s about the value of critical thinking and the challenges that religions cause for science teaching. It takes a few minutes to warm up but is well worth watching. It’s an hour long.

I hadn’t seen Neil DeGrasse Tyson before – what a great speaker!

Found on RichardDawkins.net

Just come across this – very nice demo.

Sad to hear that my cousin, John Ryan, has died aged 88. John was the creator of Captain Pugwash, Mary Mungo & Midge, and other BBC children’s favourites from the 70s.

For a bit of nostalgia for those of a certain age – here’s a clip on one of my previous posts.

And here’s the announcement on the BBC website.

An interesting article in this week’s Economist reports on experiments showing that people in a competition, for example in an exam hall, do better when surrounded by fewer competitors. In the 2005 SAT exams in the USA:

The two researchers used data on the number of test-takers in each state of the union and the number of test-taking venues in that state to calculate the average number of test-takers per venue in the state in question. They found that test scores fell as the number of people in the examination hall increased. And they discovered that this pattern was also true for the Cognitive Reflection Test, another analytical exam.

Further experiments suggested that even when factors such as the differing amounts of distraction have been removed, if you know or feel you are competing against a smaller group, you will achieve more.

The article is here – it may require an Economist subscription, though.

Well, I’m a bit late with this story, but I thought it worth repeating as a great example of the ingenuity of artists (and their lawyers)…

ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, is suing AT&T over the phone company’s selling of ringtones. Why, you may ask, would they do that, since they are already paid a share of the download fees?

Well, the download fees are too low, they claim, because they’re based on the idea that the download is for private listening. No, they say, not so! When your phone rings it is a public performance! And the fees should be adjusted accordingly…

More on the story here. Meanwhile, here’s how you can turn any music into an iPhone ringtone using iTunes.