‘Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so,” said Ford Prefect in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For the past century, mainstream physics has agreed with him. To most of us, it seems obvious that the world is moving steadily forward through time, from a known past, through an active present, into a…
Month: August 2013
Save our children from the Grammar Tribe
From Friday’s Daily Telegraph: Teaching standard English is important – but who decides what’s right and wrong? Their out of there minds. Two pizza’s for the price of one. Its all downhill from here. You’re turn. If you have a certain type of mind, those four sentences will have set your teeth on edge, and…
A response to Nick Cohen, regarding Islam, Richard Dawkins, and my liberal cowardice
Much as I love Nick Cohen, who is wise and splendid and who I’m pretty sure owes me a drink, I’m going to have to take issue with him. He has described me, in his latest column in The Spectator, as “a journalist stuck in the office without an idea in your head”, after I…
The Chief Medical Officer sparks outrage by mildly stating the obvious: the drug laws aren’t working
Poor Dame Sally Davies. She gives a wide-ranging and harmless-sounding interview on Radio 3, expecting presumably that it will be listened to by a few dozen 62-year-olds in comfortable sweaters and be forgotten by the morning. Instead, it’s plastered all over the news: I’VE TAKEN CANNABIS SAYS CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER, yells The Daily Mail. What’s…
The mandatory tweets of the self-righteous vacillating centrist stats bore: a user’s guide
Sure, you can tweet like a Leftie. Or you can tweet like a Rightie. But what about those of us who smugly hold ourselves above such petty tribal considerations? What if you look down your smarmy nose at frothing Right-wingers and deluded Left-wingers with equal disdain? Where is the guide for the oh-so-superior evidence-based rationalist…
We don’t have enough information to say that sites like Ask.fm are driving teenagers to suicide
It’s a silly, empty, formula thing to say, I know, but I can’t begin to imagine how the families of children who kill themselves feel. I know a few people who’ve lost relatives to suicide, and just thinking about it opens a yawning, dizzying chasm of horror in the pit of my stomach. So I…
No we haven’t ‘literally killed’ the English language. Or metaphorically killed it. Stand down, semantics nerds
Oh no! What are we to do? People are using “literally” to mean “not literally”! The world is metaphorically coming to an end! I don’t want to single out Buzzfeed, but it was their article that caught my eye, so here it is: “The Wrong Definition Of ‘Literally’ Is Literally Going In The Dictionary“. Everyone…
Yes, atheists are probably more intelligent, on average, than religious people. That doesn’t mean you are, though
People aren’t very good at thinking in terms of probabilities and statistical tendencies. It’s part of how our minds work; we categorise things in lumps. It’s why people get desperately offended when studies come out which suggest that, say, women on the whole are less interested in engineering than men are, and why you see…
Please be quiet, Richard Dawkins, I’m begging, as a fan
I really don’t want to write this piece. I have long worshipped Richard Dawkins and sort of wish I’d never started following him on Twitter because it’s ruining all my happy memories of The Blind Watchmaker. But, I mean, come on. He’s just tweeted the following: All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than…
‘Society is going to hell in a handcart and the English language is decaying’, pt 2,445 in a continuing series
Have we really become more selfish, and can we tell it from studying our word use? According to news reports of a study by Patricia Greenfield (no relation, I assume), we have, and we can. Apparently, using the publicly available and utterly brilliant Google Ngrams tool, Prof Greenfield examined more than 1.5 million books and…
You only have 4,000 weeks of existence. Use them wisely
We only live for about 4,000 weeks. If you’re anything like me you’ll find that statistic startling, even though it’s obvious (average 80-year lifespan in Britain, 52 weeks a year = 4,160) when you stop to think about it. It’s particularly troublesome on a Monday morning, when you’re idly wishing the week away, and thus…
A guest post by Ukip’s Godfrey Bloom, fearless scourge of Bongo-Bongoland
The Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom has been under scrutiny this morning after he described recipient countries of British foreign aid as “Bongo-Bongoland”, and then repeated the comment on Radio 4’s Today programme. He has kindly agreed to express his feelings more fully here. Listen! Some of my best friends are racist, I can’t be black!…
