The problems of textual provenance begin at the first sentence, which describes a 12,000-year-old painting in the Grotte des Combarelles in the Dordogne showing “a man and a woman having sex – with his penis covered”. Perhaps indeed “archaeologists and historians have debated (whether the couple) were actually practicing safe sex”, but the debate has […]
Month: April 2008
The Colours of Indian Bureaucracy
Are officers in the Indian government’s ministry of steel permitted to use ink colours other than blue or black? Arun Shourie documents the process whereby this question was considered, tackled, bumped, spun and, to some extent, resolved. Shourie manages to compress the telling to a spare seven pages in his book Governance and the Sclerosis […]
Parker?s Bird Books
A scientific novelty can be found in The 2007-2012 World Outlook for Frozen and Liquid Whole Eggs (it was news to me, an ornithologist, that whole eggs can be liquid), not to be mistaken for the detailed survey The 2007-2012 Outlook for Frozen or Liquid Mixed Eggs in India. Undoubtedly of equal importance is The […]
Bathing beauties undergo mitosis
This video shows a swimming pool demonstration, symbolically, anyway, of the basic biological process of mitosis. It doesn’t quite show how the children double in number before separation, but what it does show is graphic in the old, commendable sense of that word. The synchronized swimmers are based, primarily for other reasons, at the University […]
The fictional man who is not the Pillsbury Doughboy
“It isn’t the Pillsbury Doughboy, but it’s almost as weird,” writes investigator Genevieve Reynolds, probing though the instant detritus of modern commercial culture. The “it” she refers to is ” Verizon’s Style Book For Deploying ‘Can You Hear Me Now’ Guy.”
Eloise Kendy joins LFHCfS
Eloise Kendy has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. Anne Eustice, who nominated her, says: My sister-in-law, Eloise, who has Luxuriant Flowing Hair AND is a scientist. This accolade which will add that something special to her standing in the scientific community. It’s a membership she’ll be proud to share with family and […]
Discarded underwear + paper production = literacy
“The development of literacy was certainly helped by the introduction of paper, which was made from rags,” says Dr Marco Mostert, a historian at the Centre for Medieval Studies, Utrecht University and one of the organisers of this year’s International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds. “These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost […]
The promiscuous streets of Edinburgh
In a street name like Sesame Street, let us (just for clarity) refer to the more distinctive part (Sesame) as the forename, and the classificatory word part (Street) as the classname…. In Edinburgh, the city to which I moved a few days ago, things are very different. Nobody leaves off the classname here. It would […]
Fergus Ray Murray joins LFHCfS
Fergus Ray Murray has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. He says: I’m a PhD candidate at the University of the West of Scotland, where my official topic is currently ‘Biologically-Inspired Reaction-Diffusion Networks’. It’s in the School of Computing, but it could probably have been in just about any science-related school. I’ve had […]
Wassersuggiana (part 2 of 2)
Having unexpectedly become a eunuch, Richard Wassersug, a professor in the department of anatomy and neurobiology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, did not despair. Being curious, he turned his apparent tragedy into a happy new obsession. Along with his ongoing exploration of amphibian biology (described last week), Wassersug now conducts research about eunuchs. […]