BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition 2012

If you’re at a loose end this coming weekend, go along to the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition at the RDS this week. You’ll enjoy it. Yes, really. I’ve been to the show a couple of times over the years. There were projects on weather, studies on crops, sexuality and society, web applications, teeny [...]

Pronoun usage and college admission

Interesting piece in the Scientific American on a study of pronoun usage in society: Across four years, we analyzed the admissions essays of 25,000 students and then tracked their grade point averages (GPAs). Higher GPAs were associated with admission essays that used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and lasted [...]

What’s Navan for Indiana Jones?

During the turn of the 20th century British Israelites carried out some excavations of the Hill of Tara in Ireland looking for the Ark of the Covenant – the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland campaigned successfully to have them stopped before they destroyed the hill. Snipped from Wiki. Search for March 9 entry on [...]

There is no New Media and we’re all correspondents

Photo owned by waferboard (cc) No, seriously. There isn’t. The news is as it ever has been and ever was. The tools we use to send and receive news have changed. That’s it. Do you think that when the move from bulletins to newspaper than a thousand gurus calling the news something else? No, industrialisation [...]

Surprising Etymologies

Avocado: From the Aztec word ‘ahuakatl’ for testicle. Pander: A pimp. Nice: Originally meaning “foolish, stupid, senseless” in the late 13th Century.

Themed up and Rockstarring

Just applied a new theme – Rockstar from Woo Themes – it’s free and has a nice theme config page. Definitely considering popping for their club now. And the buhbye blog thing – blogs are oh-so-confining, if I could I’d rename this place – a repository of swirled ideas. Enough navel-meta bull, back to sketching [...]

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