Cambridge Genius Untangling Darwin’s Apostrophe Murder
The Shocking True Tale Of The Mad Genius Who Invented Sea Monkeys by Evan Hughes (The Awl): Harold von Braunhaut was on the surface an amiable inventor, the man behind sea monkeys, X-ray spex, the game Balderdash, and Invisible Goldfish. He was also a Jewish man who was a member of racist right-wing group Aryan Nation. [via]
Inside Darwin’s Tumor by Carl Zimmer (The Loom): We see cancer as being a single monolithic entity, but every cancerous cell that will ever be in your body was is descended from a normal cell that mutated. And once those cancerous cells start actively mutating (e.g., once you get a cancerous growth), they keep mutating. And as the cancerous cells multiply and mutate, it gets more and more likely that one of those mutated cancers is resistant to the chemotherapy and the radiation. It’s almost the perfect case of natural selection, of how Darwin thought evolution worked.
Making Murder Respectable (The Economist): The Economist give us a joyful romp through the euphemisms of the world here, from “tired and emotional” (meaning “drunk” in English newspapers), to how “old-fashioned” in personal ads (which means “inconsiderate” if male or “uninterested in sex” if female) to “playing the bamboo flute” (oral sex in Japanese, apparently).
So Who Is Good Enough To Get Into Cambridge? by Jeevan Vasagar (The Guardian): Vasagar watches the dons of Cambridge as they sort applications, as they try to find the best candidates. It’s a radically different system to the U.S. (where extracurricular stuff seems to matter more) or Australia (where you get a number from 20 something to 100.00 based on your year 12 results, and the people with the highest numbers who apply for a course get in). Interestingly, the dons seem to be of the opinion that, if you were taught reasonably well at a state school and did well in the exams, you probably have a better chance of doing well at university than if you went to an expensive private school where you were mollycoddled. It’s sad to see the dons reject applications from students who clearly are smart enough but were taught so badly by their teachers that they would need too much remedial education to get to where they needed to be.
Untangling Rebekah Brooks by Suzanna Andrews (Vanity Fair): A history of Murdoch’s right-hand woman Rebekah Brooks, and how she got into the kind of position where she was in charge of Murdoch’s newspaper empire after starting off as a lowly secretary. Article seems to be of the opinion that it is entirely possible that Brooks actually knew nothing about the phone hacking, that she was too focused on sucking up to the boss to pay attention to what was going on under her command (in which case she’s incompetent). [via]
The Politics (And Lies) Of The Apostrophe by Michael Rosen (Michael Rosen): The way that English does apostrophes makes little sense. There’s no rhyme or reason to the fact that we write “Tim’s” and “anybody’s” but don’t write “her’s”. Rosen makes the point that punctuation usage is ultimately about power - if you have the power to set the rules. [cheers to Suse]
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