A year or so ago, I stopped pirating TV shows and movies. The whole process just became too fraught, what with finding the torrents, watching out for the bad guys, and never quite knowing whether the resulting file would even be watchable. Plus, it was becoming easier to watch legitimately. Last night, attempting to watch London Spy from the BBC made me long to dig out my old eye patch.

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You’ve seen evolutionary maps before. Even Charles Darwin used the metaphor, envisioning an earlier species that gave rise to new ones, each new species splitting off as a branch of an ever-growing tree.

That's where this piece of ignorant schadenfreude in Wired lost me. To suggest that Darw...

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In fact, 21% of Iowa farmland is owned by people who do not even live in Iowa. What is particularly rankling about these figures is that some 40% of that corn is grown to feed piston engines. This is a travesty especially now that gasoline is so cheap. Everyone I talk to except corn farmers them...

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There's a long and throughly-researched article at Mosaic, ¹ the Wellcome Trust's website, explaining Why the calorie is broken. The standfirst expands:

Calories consumed minus calories burned: it’s the simple formula for weight loss or gain. But dieters often find that it doesn’t work.

T...

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I rant regularly when people abuse Latin binomials by adding an unnecessary article in front of them, like people who refer to "the acanthomyops latipes". As I said at the time:

While I happily refer to the Skidelskys, I would never dream of calling them the Edward Skidelsky and the Robert...

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