About Alun Salt

Alun Salt works part-time for the Annals of Botany weblog and on a portal for UNESCO's Astronomy and World Heritage Initiative. He's currently grumpy because a broken arm is making it very difficult to type.

Posts by Alun Salt:

The Meaning of Liff at 30

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There’s a radio show online cel­eb­rat­ing 30 years of The Mean­ing of Liff a dic­tion­ary of words that don’t exist, but should. The words are all place names that have been press-ganged into doing some proper work in the Eng­lish language. As a respons­ible per­son I’m not link­ing to this web­site that lists many of the defin­i­tions in the book: http://folk.uio.no/alied/TMoL.html

Examples:
THROCKING (par­ti­cipial vb.)
The action of con­tinu­ally push­ing down the lever on a pop-up toaster in the hope that you will thereby get it to under­stand that you want it to toast something.

NAD (n.)
Meas­ure defined as the dis­tance between a driver’s out­stretched fin­ger­tips and the ticket machine in an auto­matic car-park. 1 nad = 18.4 cm.

RIPON (vb.)
(Of lit­er­ary crit­ics.) To include all the best jokes from the book in the review to make it look as if the critic thought of them.

#Liff     #Books     #Douglas­Adams     #Gplus  

The Mean­ing of Liff at 30
John Lloyd cel­eb­rates 30 years of The Mean­ing of Liff with Matt Lucas and Helen Fielding.

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For once an anti-GM campaigner might cheer a Monsanto win

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I’ve blogged about my con­fu­sion over the Bow­man vs. Monsanto case at AoB Blog. There’s a whole argu­ment over GMOs are bad or not, or if that’s even the right ques­tion. But if they are, does that mean the anti-GM pos­i­tion is always anti-Monsanto?

On this occa­sion I argue a Monsanto win would do more to reduce the uptake of GMOs than a loss. It’s per­fectly pos­sible I’ve made a mis­take. The cam­paign­ers are pre­sum­ably much more know­ledgable about the situ­ation than I am, so feel free to leave a com­ment at AoB Blog.

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My enemy’s enemy…?
Recently a lot of com­ments on the Bow­man vs. Monsanto court case have been in my social media streams. If you’ve not heard about this, it’s about a court case between a farmer and the Monsanto corp.…..


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In the UK we’ll soon hear that ‘cod’ fish fingers are up to 100% sea…

Alun Life 2 Comments

In the UK we’ll soon hear that ‘cod’ fish fin­gers are up to 100% seahorse.

Reshared post from +Sean Treacy

These are not the fish you’re look­ing for. 

One-third of sea­food mis­labeled, study finds
Fraud com­mon in sea­food labeling. Sushi houses the worst offend­ers, study finds.

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Thoughts on Persuasion

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A talk so good I went out and bought the book. Given I was in a foul mood at this point in the event, that was a big suc­cess for the speaker.

I’m not sure how much I can use this; I’m not inter­ested in mak­ing sales. It is inter­est­ing to know about thought to see how you can be unin­ten­tion­ally per­suaded by oth­ers actions.


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Going into space? If you can’t wear a blue shirt then make sure you have a red…

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Going into space? If you can’t wear a blue shirt then make sure you have a red one.

Sig­ni­fic­ance magazine has ana­lysed the cas­u­al­ties in Star Trek:TOS. Every­one knows that wear­ing a red shirt on the USS Enter­prise is like wear­ing a giant shoot me sign. But what every­one knows might be wrong.

Mat­thew Bars­alou has ana­lysed the cas­u­al­it­ies and found blue is the safest col­our. He’s also found more red shirts died than any other col­our — but on the Enter­prise there are more red shirts any­way. The situ­ation is made more com­plic­ated by secur­ity, engin­eer­ing and oper­a­tions all wear­ing red shirts even though they do very dif­fer­ent jobs.

If you’re a space cadet this is essen­tial reading.

Reshared post from +K. Llewel­lin

#startrek   #stat­ist­ics  

Keep your red­shirt on: a Bayesian explor­a­tion — Web Exclus­ive Art­icle — Sig­ni­fic­ance Magazine
Keep your red­shirt on: a Bayesian explor­a­tion. Author: Mat­thew Bars­alou. The idea of red-shirted char­ac­ters being fre­quently killed in Star Trek: The Ori­ginal Series has become a pop cul­ture cliché. B…

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A new dark sky reserve

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There’s another dark sky reserve in the UK. The prac­tical effect is that the coun­cil will be tak­ing light pol­lu­tion ser­i­ously in order to keep the status. If you’d like to see what a dark sky looks like AstroCamp is there in May: http://astrocamp.org.uk/

I’m pleased about this news as I’m hop­ing that it’ll mean the local council’s open to redu­cing light pol­lu­tion else­where in Powys. I live in a more sparsely pop­u­lated region to the north of the Brecon.

Brecon Beacons win dark sky status
Brecon Beacons National Park has become Wales’ first and only the fifth des­tin­a­tion in the world to be gran­ted the status of an inter­na­tional dark sky reserve.

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Deal or no Deal?

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There’s a crime­wave in south­ern Eng­land. Deal Town Coun­cil have been been reck­lessly using the coat of Arms gran­ted to Deal Bor­ough Coun­cil in 1968. As her­aldry afi­cion­ados will know, Deal Town Coun­cil cov­ers a slightly dif­fer­ent area than Deal Bor­ough Coun­cil. There­fore there’s been a stretch of almost 40 years of law-breaking since the bor­ough coun­cil was dis­ban­ded in 1974.

Deal Town FC have also been told their kit is illegal due to their badge. Pre­sum­ably because people might con­fuse them with the entirely non-existent Deal Bor­ough FC.

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Town and foot­ball crest ‘unlaw­ful’
A town and its foot­ball club are told that it is unlaw­ful to con­tinue using their crest.

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Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day is due out in April

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I missed this till now. There’ll be a fourth instal­ment of the Sci­ence of Dis­cworld. If you haven’t read any of the Sci­ence of Dis­cworld books, they’re dif­fer­ent to the usual Sci­ence of… books in that Dis­cworld doesn’t run on sci­ence so there’s not much point explain­ing how it could work sci­en­tific­ally. Instead it fol­lows an exper­i­ment by the wiz­ards of Unseen Uni­ver­sity to cre­ate a world that runs on rules instead of nar­rativium. Round­world has no magic so how does a world come together and how does life col­on­ise it?

Sci­ence of Dis­cworld II: The Globe was about the devel­op­ment of Mind with the aid of two play­wrights and Sci­ence of Dis­cworld III: Darwin’s Watch looked at how the idea of evol­u­tion was inven­ted again and again until Charles Dar­win made it stick.

For Sci­ence of Dis­cworld IV the Omni­ans have dis­covered about the Round­world pro­ject. A world that is actu­ally round but has no gods is a bit of a prob­lem for the Omni­ans who believe that the disc is a globe, but are very keen on a God.

The cur­rent pub­lic­a­tion date is April 11.http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/editions/the-science-of-discworld-iv-judgement-day/9780091949792

There was also a talk on the sci­ence of Dis­cworld in Dub­lin last year.

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