I believe: How it works
British pharmacists are allowed as a matter of conscience by their regulatory body to pretend they believe that contraception is an “abortifacient”. A pharmacist who claims to believe that emergency...
View ArticleWere you there in the aspen grove?
I’ve always liked the name aspen. There’s something pleasing about it. And the trees are pleasing too. They’re related to the birch, and it was nice to see some real broad leaf trees when I was in...
View ArticleThe Sea Cucumber
“Nobody really needs eyeballs and limbs and all that, right? When you get down to it, all you really need to be alive is an opening for stuff to go in and an opening for stuff to come out.” True...
View ArticleHomegrown Mushrooms
Did you know you can buy kits to grow your own mushrooms? I didn’t. This account of home-growing shiitake mushrooms is fascinating, and made me hungry. Mushrooms! TRiG.
View ArticleNOM: Willing, deliberate liars
The National Organization for Marriage has been spreading a host of falsehoods about research into same-sex parenting. Every so I often I lob a tweet about this to Thomas Peters, NOM’s Communications...
View ArticleIt Must Be Beautiful: Great equations of modern science
My current reading is rather fascinating. It’s actually a reread. I picked it up, along with Deborah Cameron’s The Myth of Mars and Venus, in a bookshop in Naas. I was in Naas for a job interview (I’ve...
View ArticleResearch into the effects of “ex-gay” ministries
This is, actually, an under-researched area, but here’s a start: The top three results for why people tried to change their sexual orientation included “To be a better Christian,” “I believed it was...
View ArticleAugusto Odone
I’d never heard of Augusto Odone, the Italian economist who taught himself enough medicine to come up with a breakthrough treatment for his son Lorenzo’s illness. ALD is a rare and terrible illness,...
View ArticleTim Minchin: The Fence
A song by Tim Minchin, dedicated to Timothy Garton Ash and Ben Goldacre. The Fence. TRiG.
View ArticleTamiflu, Bad Pharma, and the UK Public Accounts Committee
The conclusion that millions of people have been exposed to a treatment, at enormous cost to the public purse, despite the fact that independent researchers have been unable to verify it as being...
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