It was, perhaps, the most inauspicious start to a TedTalk I’ve ever known. A shiny guy, wandering back and forth, telling the audience that soon they would be experiencing the top notes of a fragrance, Beyond Paradise, which had been split up by the perfumer who created it for Esteé Lauder into...

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OK, now I'm as much of a Darwin groupie as the next hominid, but I really don't think we need to dredge up a long forgotten concept album¹ as a tribute to The Man's 200th birthday next year. I mean, I wish Mark Pallen luck, and all that, and I'm even happy to link to Suzy Quattro's² Hey Charl...

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Velociraptors, killer gorillas, chip-headed cyborgs, gunslinging robots, cannibal Neanderthals, Demi Moore -- these are the sort of things Hollywood knows how to make frightening.

I’ve never read any Michael Crichton. I doubt I ever will. But I liked Oliver Morton’s appreciation. At least I...

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I wasn't sure whether to blog Quantum of Solace, which I saw on Wednesday night, but late-breaking news of a James Blog-a-Thon tipped the scales, needy-blogger that I am.

QoS is a mess of a movie, with an even more meaningless than usual title, but WTF. I'm no Bondie (or whatever they call the...

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I realize that the overlap between “people who read this blog” and “people who are members of the Society for Conservation Biology and live in Europe” is probably exactly one. Just in case it isn’t, my web 2.0 savviness suggests that I make use of grassroots activism and the latest intertube techn...

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