Mssv

A comment of mine on MetaFilter expressing my views on genetically modified crops.

Here’s a comment I posted in a Metafilter on bad books today:
Schools should never assign books for class reading. It’s a sweeping statement, but the agony treated upon students must be stopped. I remember reading ‘A Passage To India’ at school; it was the dullest thing I’d ever laid eyes upon. Maybe it’s a good […]

The steam-powered drum machine - an astonishing extract from a journal written in 1894 about a steam-powered drum machine and a 19th century rave (yes, it’s a joke). Via the Culture List and spawned, in part, from the demented mind of Brendan Nelson.

Some utter fool has written an article in the Times (part one, part two) on the failure of psychology. My views are reflected quite accurately in this Metafilter thread which I contributed to.
Psychology is alive and well, and if you want to attack the strawman of psychoanalysis and outdated views of early 20th century psychology, […]

Cheeks to the rescue - ever been in a desperately embarrassing situation where you wished you could just crawl into a hole? Imagine being a 13 year old and fluffing the words to the American national anthem on live TV, and in front of 20,000 people. Fortunately, NBA team coach Mo Cheeks came to the […]

The big news today is that Apple has launched its new music service. $.99 for a single track and $10 for an album. However, the folks at MetaFilter are positivery derisory of the entire scheme, even though it has almost no DRM issues (burn to CD effectively as many times as you want). What do […]

Natural Artifacts - a well-written post at MetaFilter by someone who has written a program that generates images without human output. Is it art? The creator says no.

4,000,000! - the population of New Zealand reached 4 million today. New Zealand has a very nice statistics website which sets an impressive example for other countries (via MetaFilter).

They just can’t help it - an article about the differences between the male and female brain by my old university psychology supervisor, Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen. Interesting and controversial stuff; I saw a lecture that he gave about this topic a few months ago (not via Metafilter - I read it in the Guardian myself […]

Today I posted a thread in Metatalk (a part of Metafilter) complaining about useless images in threads. There I was, expecting at least some semblance of a reasonable response when what I actually found was a bunch of obscure replies full of non-answers and in-jokes. Their meaning is so opaque to Metafilter newcomers to be […]