“Dawkins is right. He just is. Getting raped in an alleyway while having a knife held to your throat is worse than being taken advantage of while inebriated at the end of a date.” So says my colleague Brendan O’Neill, in response to Richard Dawkins’s characteristically unhelpful comments about rape. I know it is ridiculous…
Month: July 2014
The curse of Ebola
Ebola has arrived in Spain, and many in Britain are now suggesting that we screen new arrivals at our airports for the disease. But deadly as the virus is, it is also easily destroyed, Tom Chivers reports In a hospital somewhere in a rural part of sub-Saharan Africa, a patient presents with an unknown disease….
Why Donald Trump was right about the handshake
There are few things in life more galling than the realisation that Donald Trump may have been correct. But the implausibly haired buffoon-tycoon, it seems, got at least one thing right: handshakes aren’t very good for you. Stopped clocks and all that. Research by scientists at Aberystwyth University suggests that the handshake spreads germs. Rather…
Medicalising the healthy: is ‘pre-diabetes’ a useful term?
Diabetes is the great modern scourge. More than three million people suffer the disease in this country. The NHS says that about 10 per cent of its budget, roughly £10 billion a year – £27 million a day – is spent treating it and its complications – including but not limited to blindness, kidney stones,…
Even one death is too many? No it isn’t. It’s important to treat people like numbers
The laziest political argument that exists – with the possible exception of “don’t you trust the British people?” – is “you’re treating people like numbers”. I wrote a piece last week about Atos, the French IT firm that has overseen the shambolic new system for disability support. A stat was doing the rounds that 10,600…
Botany: the roots of civilisation
Plants underpin all life, yet botany fails to capture our imagination. Tom Chivers hopes a BBC radio series will change that view A billion years ago, a primitive single-celled organism ended up inside another, slightly less primitive organism, and something strange happened: it didn’t die. Now, a billion years later, the descendants of that hybrid…
Brazil v Germany, Nate Silver v Piers Morgan: do sport pundits ever get it right?
The Reverend Thomas Bayes, RA Fisher, Johann Gauss: your boys took one hell of a beating. That’s right, apparently it wasn’t only the Brazilian national team that suffered ignominious defeat on Tuesday night, as Germany tore them apart in a brutal, tragicomic home-turf humiliation. It was also the abstract concept of statistical probability. Nate Silver,…
The ‘10,600 people died within six weeks of being declared fit to work by Atos’ stat is simply wrong
It’s pretty much accepted that the French IT firm Atos, which was tasked by the Department of Work and Pensions with assessing the ability of disability benefits claimants to work under the new Employment and Support Allowance scheme, has not done a good job. Atos, it appears, agree with that: they said of their contract…
No, climate change isn’t going to make gingers extinct
Weird things you never thought you’d have to write: man-made global warming is not going to make red-headed people disappear. The Independent newspaper says that it is, you see. (And since I’ve started writing this I’ve just noticed that we do too. Ah well.) Here’s the hypothesis: Dr Alistair Moffat, managing director of Galashiels-based ScotlandsDNA,…
The bacteria has been decimated: how much should we care what words used to mean?
Much amusement this morning on the Today programme, as John Humphrys shamefacedly confessed to having said “a bacteria” on the previous day’s episode. Since Humphrys has made such a song and dance about “proper English” in the past – I saw him at an Intelligence Squared event, alongside the even more hidebound Simon Heffer, getting…
Tom Chivers 