Skeptobot has stolen the Mini-blog idea!

There has not been very many updates lately, as I've been far too busy with the final year of my PhD. But I have seen a number of great links I wanted to post. And I've had a few great things sent in by readers that I haven't had time to post yet - but thanks, I will do it eventually!

So I thought I would ease the drought by stealing Ben Goldacres Mini-Blog idea off his Bad Science Site. I hope he doesn't mind.

It's on the left in a rather small font.

Larry Lessig talking about Copyright is amazing.

Larry Lessig talked at Ted about copyright law. No wait, don't go. It's amazing. It's everything I tried to say but better.

It's so, so good.

It's called "How creativity is being strangled by the law"

Trust me, watch it.

Jesus and Mo is rather good

Jesus and Mo is a great little time waster featuring everyones favorite prophets Jesus and Muhammad and the larks they get up to in their platonic Morecambe and Wise lifestyle. It has existed since long before the Danish Cartoon 'events' and is occasionally printed in The Freethinker journal in the UK. The fact that this has survived an attack when those cartoons didn't is very interesting. Is it the power of anonymity or is it the angle of it's content? Either way it's now reached the impressive milestone of 200 strips.

I've been meaning to pimp it on the site for a while now, but never got round to it, but as the latest one is about homeopathy I couldn't resist:

Comic
The one before that was good too:
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It's quite variable in quality, but I can't help but like it.

Woman 'not having' Formal construction of negative integers




'Cold Cash' was a winter themed Scratch card where you were given a temperature (say -2 degrees C) and if you scratched off temperatures lower than that one, you won cash prices. It's had to be withdrawn after people couldn't understand it.

Tina Farrell, 23, complained saying:

"I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I'm not having it."
Which I think is the first time I've seen someone actively resist mathematical truths. But the fact that this card has had to be withdrawn because of 'player confusion' says something of the selection bias of Scratch card buyers.

Sorry for the lack of updates, work hit a busy patch. Should be back to normal service soon.