The journal Current Biology, in celebrating its 25th birthday (congratulations!), published a special issue that includes two articles touching on the Ig Nobel Prizes. Geoffrey North, the journal’s editor, wrote an editorial called “The Biology of Fun and the Fun of Biology“: Both [the artist] Magritte and [the artistic chef] el Bulli illustrate one aspect of ‘fun’ that is relevant to Current Biology […]
Year: 2015
Short essays – are they long?
When it comes to student essays, is a very short essay short because it’s short, or is it short because it’s shorter than a long one? Dr Simon Bell, Ph.D., M.A., Pg.Dip., Pg.Cert., B.A (Hons), who is Course Director and Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at the School of Art and Design, Coventry University, UK, […]
Medicine is sprinkled with metaphorical crumbs
My colleague Lisa Kipersztok (a final-year medical student at Tufts University) and I (Gwinyai Masukume, at the University of the Witwatersrand) have collected and arranged a new feast of medical food metaphors. We follow in the footsteps of hungry giants. In the late 1970s Terry and Hanchard in their seminal paper, titled “Gastrology: the use of culinary terms in […]
Cleese opines to great effect on Dunning and on Kruger
John Cleese, the tallest and angriest of the Monty Pythons, tells here, in this video, of his controlled, venomous glee at learning about the Dunning-Kruger Effect: The Open Culture blog comments about Cleese’s commenting. David Dunning and Justin Kruger — the Dunning and the Kruger of the Dunning-Kruger effect — were awarded the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for psychology, for […]