Tim Harford’s Undercover Economist has long been a favourite of mine in the Financial Times. So when I discovered BBC Radio 4’s More or less, which he hosts, I hastened to subscribe to the podcast, and I have not been disappointed. I’m only now catching up, though, and am delighted to share with...

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Happy Befana from a freezing Rome. Got myself in a bit of a tizz with all this Blog Carnivalia stuff. I thought I was hosting Mendel’s Garden over at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, but it seems I agreed to do it here instead. Not sure why, especially after my recent idleness. P’raps I’ll...

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An occasional series:

Men are red, women are green, Brown researcher finds

It isn’t often that a TedTalk provokes actual belly laughter. Snickers yes, sometimes an appreciative titter. But outright guffaws? I can’t remember too many, and certainly not sustained through an entire presentation. Ursus Wehrli managed it, in a talk filmed in February 2006 but only recently u...

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Some things never change. I remember going through almost exactly this line of reasoning not once but twice, for different girls, about 40 years ago. In neither case did things work out the way I wanted. In one, things worked out very much the way she wanted, which was and is great. In the other...

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