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  • Tough love for PhDs

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    Tough Love for PhDs – Brad talks about the mismatch between tenure-track positions and PhDs granted as US universities (I don’t know what the situation is in the UK). Good job I have four years to figure out what I want to do.

  • The steam-powered drum machine

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    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.

  • Biononsense

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    After reading this article about human genetic engineering, I have to comment on something that’s been bugging me for a while now. The article is inoffensive enough, but it uses the term ‘biogenetics’. I’m sorry, but there is no such field as biogenetics; it’s either genetics or nothing, and there’s no use in trying to…

  • Alive and well

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    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 Psychology is alive and well, and if you want to attack the strawman of psychoanalysis and outdated views of early 20th century…

  • Photos

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    In lieu of any weblog updates, and since I had a craving for some serious procrastination, I’ve uploaded two new collections of photos to my photo gallery. The first and larger collection is from May Week last year, and the second collection is from the Chinese New Year Ball in Cambridge at the start of…

  • Queue

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    You know the feeling well. You’ve been queuing up in a worryingly long line for a film or a talk for a while now, and while you’ve resigned yourself to getting a seat at the back behind a pillar, you’re still holding out hope that you’ll actually get inside. Just as you begin to near…

  • End of an era

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    Futurama officially, officially cancelled – I can’t say it wasn’t unexpected, but it’s yet another reason why Fox are the spawn of the devil.

  • Oops

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    Something is wrong with Wired’s China statistics. They say that China sells 15.6 trillion books per year. In a country of 1.3 billion, that’s about 14,000 books per person. Spread over the world population, that’s almost 3,000 books per person. Somehow I doubt that China really does sell 15.6 trillion books per year.

  • Quotations

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    The Futurama Season 2 DVDs that I ordered from Amazon Germany arrived a few days ago and besides from all the packaging being in German, everything else is in English, so it’s all good. Every episode on the DVDs has a commentary track with several people, usually including Matt Groening and David Cohen, the executive…

  • GamesFilter

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    A while ago I mentioned that I was thinking about setting up a collaborative weblog akin to MetaFilter, called (appropriately enough), GamesFilter. Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on it on and off during the periods in which my brain refuses to accept any more information about neuroscience. GamesFilter has been running for…