This is the superb title of a paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. The paper is open access, and I urge you to click on the link and read the summary – it’s a delight and will only take you a minute.
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If the hamster had been more ambitious, and less careful, she could have beaten me
In an earlier post, I pointed out that, according to one metric used to assess how good a scientist is, I am twice as good as a hamster. One way of assessing not a scientist, but a single scientific paper, is how many other scientific papers reference (cite) it. This is certainly a measure of […]
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Guest post of Prof Mark Gieles: The wanderings of an astrophysicist: from the Netherlands, via Chile, Edinburgh and Cambridge to Surrey
As a final year high school student I went to open days at Dutch Universities, trying to find out what I wanted to do later. Later? I did not really know what that meant. So I passively absorbed the information given to me by enthusiastic staff and students in colourful T-shirts. I had an interest […]
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Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?
This was (according to the mighty Wikipedia) the title of a talk given by Edward Lorenz, one of the pioneers of chaos theory. Apparently, Lorenz didn’t come up with the title himself. He was too lazy/badly organised to give the organisers a title for his talk, so one of the organisers, in frustration, came up with this title. I can sympathise with the organisers here. I am currently organising a workshop, and am at the stage when my co-chair and I are trying to extract the last few titles from our speakers. It can be tricky to get some people to come up with a simple 10 to 20 word title.
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Mortgages and baseball
I am not a baseball fan. I have been to only one baseball game. This was an LA Dodgers game when I was working in LA. The Dodgers lost, and the highlight for me was the hotdog. But baseball is known to be very nerd friendly as it generates lots of stats: batting averages, pitching […]
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