“It ain’t over till it’s over,” Yogi Berra famously used to say. If you’re an English rugby fan, there can be no truer words to reflect your recent experience. I normally don’t follow rugby very closely, for various family reasons, but have a habit of walking in to watch the last 5 minutes of major [...]

When James Bond arrives at his Istanbul hotel in From Russia With Love, he finds that the room is bugged (naturally), is moved to the bridal suite, and orders breakfast: green figs, yoghurt and coffee — very black — for nine o’clock delivery. As this has been the week of social proof, I’d like to [...]

There’s been a bit of a to-do recently following a comment by Richard Dawkins here.* Chris Dillow, who blogs here, said this:- Here’s a curious statement from Richard Dawkins (via Norm): “When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told – religious [...]

Research by Yohsiharu Yamamoto of the University of Tokyo, via the Physical Review Letters and The Economist, has shown that the movements of people suffering from clinical depression can be described by a power law. So different are they from their “normal” counterparts that the discovery looks truly diagnostic, according to The Economist. Subjects were [...]

I specifically asked for a cherry-red Gibson ES335 semi-acoustic guitar with a Vox AC-30 Amplifier for my 40th birthday. I can’t really play electric guitar, and had no real intention of taking it up. But the same genes that pushed me into marathon-running were finding expression; it was a pure materialism/mid-life crisis mashup. March 2005 [...]