General

This is going to be a rant. About language, words and meanings. I know, I know; language is a living, breathing, dying thing, and I should just deal with it. But for a word that had its barmitzvah only last year (shortly after its day in court) “blog” is getting me hot under the collar. [...]

I was very remiss last summer and failed to decongest the irises. As a result this year’s show was pretty poor; only four blooms. So a couple of weeks ago I bought three new tubs and some soil and set to. Step one, take two packed tubs … And divide them up into replantable bits [...]

I don’t know why people complain about the quality of science reporting these days. As any fule kno, “combat” is a synonym of “boost”. A Science Journalist told me so. I know, lets blame the subs.

So, farewell then, Horace Freeland Judson. “It is as if one were in the classroom with a dozen or so of the world’s greatest biologists, with Mr. Judson acting as the informed student,” he wrote. “We learn as he is learning.”   That’s Jeremy Bernstein’s appraisal in the NYT obit linked above, and he’s right. [...]

I ask because there’s a fascinating blog post – Malaria, past and present — over at Aidwatch. Laura Freschi takes a book review in Harper’s because “it shows the historical roots of a struggle still raging in public health assistance today”. That struggle is the unequal battle between simple, easy silver bullets and difficult, complex systems [...]

US States that voted Republican in 2008 “are now the biggest losers in the fight against childhood obesity,” and yet they are also the states that most reject efforts to reduce obesity. To me, the interesting thing about this table is what we public health people call “tracking.”  Obesity tracks (correlates) with other measures of [...]

Living by the precepts of Getting Things Done requires sorting things into one of four piles: Delete, Do, Delegate, Defer. Which is fine, as far as it goes, although you do need to stay on top of Delegate and Defer. The problem is that Google, and in particular GMail and Reader, make it so very [...]

Here’s a lazy journalistic trope: o·pin·ion / əˈpinyən/ n. a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge. I know of no other way to approach an “Opinion” by someone called Doug Saunders at The Globe and Mail in Canada.Saunders writes breathlessly about having talked to spies at the Canadian [...]