. Stats nerds and propellor-heads aside, humans are crap at probability. It’s not that we can’t do sums. Weaving the lanes of a crowded M1 at 70mph, cutting a zig-zag across a busy junction on foot or leaping for a … Read More »
As summarised in Roddis v Sheffield Hallam Part 8 – and more briefly in Part 9 – it had been found in March 2018 that, for the purposes of a claim under the Part-time Workers (Prevention of less favourable treatment) … Read More »
My battle with Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) over its treatment of me as one of more than eight hundred part time lecturers – almost forty percent of its academic workforce – on a zero hours contract is now over nine … Read More »
Thanks again to Dave Hansell for this. Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton named the effect after his friend, the Nobel Prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann. Crichton describes it thus: You open a newspaper to an article on a subject you … Read More »
(You never know. The poster might actually try a night with the garaged bovine and find himself among the four people a year in the UK (twenty in the USA) gored or trampled to death by cow. But that’s a … Read More »
Bloggers like me are prone to self doubt. Not, I hasten to add, in respect of what we say of the state we’re in, summarised in my open letter on China. There’s too much evidence for there to be any … Read More »
David Leonhardt, New York Times, September 27, 2021 The messianic certainty I detect on all sides of the Covid conversation is dismaying. People with no obvious qualification to do so are not only sounding off in FB echo chambers as … Read More »
In Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali, George Orwell targeted a knee-jerk mode of thinking; a binary either/or refusal to see (or acknowledge) nuance and complexity. Why, asked Orwell, did the liberal progressives of his day who recognised … Read More »
In her blog post today, Caitlin Johnstone implicitly draws on the great man’s insight with these words: You don’t own your comrades. A lot of people will get angrier about a political ally disagreeing with them on one percent of … Read More »
NB for those who got here via my e-alert to this post, my remarks on the brilliant C4 drama, Help, come after these idiotic outpourings on Britain’s nuclear weapons. * Late yesterday a FB post plugging BBC History Extra began … Read More »
