This is an archive from the old blog, originally written in 2008. Regular readers may have noticed that I get rather annoyed by the casual use of the word “chemical” to mean “synthetic chemical”, and the use of the naturalistic fallacy (natural good, chemical bad) that is associated with this […]
This is another archival repost from the old blog — this one from january 2008. This post is part six in a series. The series so far can be found here. Cogito, ergo sum. René Descartes, 1637. I’ve given five posts and several thousand words over to introductions to principles […]
This is another archival repost from the old blog, this time from jan 2008 Tina Beattie was on Start The Week this morning, talking about the New AtheismTM. I only caught little bits of it, but I’ve managed to find the time to flick through the podcast. You can guess […]
I’ve been reading John Gribbin’s In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat. He casually mentions the atomic (or, rather, ‘atomistic’) theories of the ancients — in particular Democritus. Gribbin accuses historians of science and popular writers of attributing too much to Democritus, whose ideas about the world do not resemble modern physics. […]
This is another archival repost, from jan 2008 Many people in Britain have been campaigning for a repeal of the blasphemy laws, which have had a bit of bad PR since they were used in an attempt to censor Jerry Springer: The Opera a few years ago, and since we […]
This is another archival repost from the old blog — this one from January 2008. The post is part five in a series. The series so far can be found here. In the first installment of Sunday Syndrome I used the example of Prader-Willi Syndrome. This week we’ll bring in […]
This is another archival repost, originally written for the old blog in Dec 2007. Read about member of parliament George Galloway in any British newspaper, no matter what its editorial policy or political situation, and you will read about corrupt, self-serving Stalinist dullard on an ego-trip. But I hardly have […]
This is another archival repost from the old blog — this time from Nov 2007. The post is part four in a series. The series so far can be found here. So far in the Sunday syndrome column, we’ve been talking in terms of the all-or-nothing loss (or gain) of […]
This is another archival repost originally written for the old blog in november 2007. “Yes I agree, but this is different. Don’t lump us in with those charlatans!” Criticise quack miracle cures, irrational superstition, loony pseudoscience, and religion, and you will get in return an example of the comment above. […]
This is an archive from the old blog, originally written in 2007. The “Thursday Paper” column on the blog is for reporting on a recently published peer-reviewed research. Apologies if this one isn’t so polished, but I have a train to catch. It would appear to be medical genetics week […]
This post is an archive from the old blog, originally written in 2007. I’ve been discussing in the “Sunday syndrome” column various disorders caused by genetic aberrations, but I haven’t really explained how such aberrations occur. There are several different types of aberration that occur, and several different mechanisms that […]
This is another archival repost from the old blog, this time from november 2007. The post is part three in a series. The series so far can be found here. Some causes of disease are heritable genetic aberrations. Others are diet, pathogens, trauma, and similar environmental factors. One might get […]
This is another archival repost, first published on the old blog in Nov 2007. Accusations of racism have been flying these past few weeks, but in the heat of the moment, the discussions have been more noise than signal. This week’s Friday Creationism looks at an old accusation of racism: […]
This is another archival repost from the old blog, originally written in oct 2007. Evolution, from the point of view of the geneticist, is the change in allele frequencies that occurs in populations over time. New alleles are created by random mutation, and others slowly disappear through natural selection or […]
This is another archival repost, this time from oct 2007. The post is part two in a series. The series so far can be found here. Knowing how and why things go wrong tells us a lot about how and why things work when they go right. Indeed, this is […]
This is another archival repost, originally from oct 2007. Are you an addict? I bet you are (I saw you gambling addicts coming!). It might be coffee, chocolate, or tobacco, rather than alcohol, heroin, or self-harm, and you might not be wasting away because of it, but you’re probably addicted […]
This is an archive of a piece originally published on the old blog in 2007. A particular interest of mine is cell signalling. This is the field of molecular biology that looks at how biochemical events in the cell go on to cause responses elsewhere in the same cell, and […]
This is another archival repost from the old blog, originally from oct 2007. It’s not healthy to bottle up your worries and stress. That’s why all the best comedy throughout the ages has dealt with the tough issues that worry us. It’s why doctors make jokes about diseases and pathologists […]
This is another repost originally written for the old blog in 2007. Over the next few years or decades, traditional antibiotics will largely be replaced by bacteriophages. Like everything in biology and medicine, this is ultimately down to evolution. Pathogenic bacteria are alive: they reproduce, with slight imperfections, and are […]
This is another archival repost originally written for the old blog in oct 2007. In an episode of Friends, Ross and Phoebe have a somewhat implausible argument about Evolution. The argument ends with Ross conceding a point about probability and the inability to prove anything outside of mathematics (of course, […]
This is another archival repost of something originally written for the old blog in Oct 2007. I apologise for the half-hearted post. I had hoped to write a lot more, but was foiled by migraine, and ran into the deadline: today is “Blog Action Day“! New words are created every […]
From the cult of the amateur to the triumph of miscellanea, a revolution in how we interact with information is in its early stages. I don’t use the term “revolution” lightly. You could be forgiven for thinking it hyperbolic, because traditional publishers have been slow on the uptake. If you […]
This is another archival repost originally written for the old site in 2007. My initial intention was to write a quick Brain Fart post with random thoughts on a dozen or so topics that aren’t ready for a full post, but I got a bit carried away with a couple […]
This is another archival repost, originally written in september 2007. There is a new fashion emerging from the internet, newspapers and now even books. It is fashionable to consider Richard Dawkins to be your enemy, and to believe that everything he says is personally aimed at you. I don’t wish […]
This is another archival repost from the old blog, originally from july 2007. I started writing this over a month ago, but may have got a little distracted. I’m not entirely sure what point it was supposed to be making anymore, but I do remember that, because it was supposed […]