#IAmAResearchParasite
Towards the end of January, there were three editorials in the New England Journal of Medicine with somewhat overlapping authors and somewhat conflicting messages. The first editorial was D.B. Taichman...
View ArticleNegative stereotypes, utterly destroyed?
After last night's doozy of a Republican debate, Meghan McCain tweeted the following this morning: Every negative stereotype I have tried to combat for the last 8 years about republicans has been...
View ArticleAnnals of euphemism
We seem to be entering new lexico-political territory, which is increasingly challenging the publications guidelines of the mainstream media: Andrew Rosenthal, "Donald Trump defends his hands", NYT...
View ArticleThe hand of god
Article in ScienceAlert today (3/4/16): "Scientists are freaking out over a new paper that says our hands were designed by God" #Creatorgate The article in ScienceAlert begins: Twitter exploded today...
View ArticleFecal compounds
Donna Cassata, "Lindsey Graham: 'My Party Has Gone Batshit Crazy'", USN 2/26/2016: Sen. Lindsey Graham is disgusted with the GOP's embrace of Donald Trump: "My party has gone batshit crazy." In...
View ArticleWhich is harder: Western classical languages or Chinese?
Joseph Manning kindly called my attention to this post by Kathleen Coleman on the blog of the Society for Classical Studies (SCS): "Nondum Arabes Seresque rogant: Classics Looks East" (2/2/16). The...
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Petaloso
"How an eight-year-old boy invented a new word", BBC Trending 2/24/2016 A few weeks back, primary school teacher Margherita Aurora, in the small town of Copparo in central Italy, was intrigued when one...
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Political one-liners
Yesterday I linked to a couple of Lindsey Graham's jokes at celebratory dinner ("Fecal compounds", 3/5/2016). But the journalists and politicians who spoke at last night's annual Gridiron Club dinner...
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A perfectly spherical politician
… radiating stupidity isotropically. Today's SMBC presents a variation on the traditional "perfectly spherical cow" joke:
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Pedantic about biscuit conditionals
Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "'If you're done being pedantic, we should get dinner.' 'You did it again!' 'No, I didn't.'" These are known in the trade as "relevance conditionals" (or, more...
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Pinyin for Singlish
A correspondent from Singapore saw the following photograph in his Facebook feed: This is a Singapore language test which calls for the student to write in Hanyu Pinyin the name of the animal depicted...
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