This post’s triggered by the fact that I’ve just spent several hours reading through draft essays that students have asked me to check for them. I definitely don’t go through & correct every last thing, but I do identify areas that need work, & I’ll give examples of how to improve things. For example, I’ll […]
Continue readingMonth: September 2010
evidence supporting an hypothesis of crank magnetism
Orac often talks about ‘crank magnetism’ – the tendency for people who believe strange stuff in one area, to be attracted to other areas of oddness as well. (As far as I can tell, the terms was originally formulated on the denialism blog.) Anyway, having an hypothesis (the above crank magnetism) one must test it – […]
Continue readingthe specialities of mad scientists
Oh noes! I am doomed!! It seems (fictional) biologists are almost as likely to be mad scientists as those of the nucular persuasion (click on the graphic for a better-quality image, courtesy of Mad Science): I should hang out with the chemists more often…
Continue readingthe great tree of life
This one’s for both teachers & students (& of course, anyone else interested in evolution and evolutionary trees): the Evolutionary Genealogy website 🙂 It’s a site that "seeks to promote the teaching and acceptance of the biological theory of evolution by emphasizing one of its great lessons: that life on Earth is one big extended […]
Continue readinga cultural divide
What follows is a re-post of something I originally wrote for my ‘other’ blog over on Talking Teaching. One of the things that I find profoundly irritating is hearing tertiary teaching staff decrying the efforts of their colleagues in the secondary education system. [Edit: here I must add that it’s not something I hear regularly […]
Continue readingprized science
This one’s for anyone with an interest in chemistry – the Prized Science video series, which aims to look at the significance of chemistry in our lives. My colleague Merilyn Manley-Harris alerted me to this site, & the information she sent through to me follows below. So far there’s just the first video of the series […]
Continue readingscience & cooking – quite similar in some ways
Or at least, they are, the way I do things 🙂 (Had a busy weekend that included spending much of yesterday out here at work running a Scholarship preparation day for local bio students – hence the lack of posts & my desire to do something light & fluffy today!)
Continue readingmore on ‘sweet poison’: aspartame – truth vs fiction
I’m a regular visitor to Science-Based Medicine. Today there’s a post about aspartame by Steven Novella, which caught my eye given my own interest in this topic. The first paragraph follows below, but I encourage readers to go across to SBM for the full article 🙂 If you believe everything you read on the internet, […]
Continue readingretail therapy better than s*x?
From the UK’s Telegraph (& via the NZ Herald) comes the attention-grabbing headline: ‘Finding a bargain feels as good as sex‘. Well, I’m a fan of a good bargain (mmmm, coats…) so of course I read on. And was, as usual with such headlines, disappointed.
Continue readingconspicuous facultative mimicry in octopuses
Or should that be octopodes? Anyway, this is so much more interesting than so-called psychic octopuses: an octopus whose mimicry can make it more conspicuous, not less. The ‘mimic’ octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus – now, there’s a name that Terry Pratchett would appreciate) is arguably the best colour-changer on the block, & it combines its colour-trickery with […]
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