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The Marfan Syndrome Patient's Sourcebook. Before and After Radical Prostate Surgery. Little Green Apples Publishing. Prostate Cancer and the Man You Love. The Prostate Cancer Revolution. Pediatric Genetics and Inborn Errors of Metabolism. Surviving Leukemia and Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Testicular Cancer, Varicocele, and Testicular Torsion. How to write a great review. The review must be at least 50 characters long.

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Item s unavailable for purchase. Please review your cart. You can remove the unavailable item s now or we'll automatically remove it at Checkout. A questionnaire study of college students replicated this effect but also found that the performance-boosting benefits of the natural frequency presentation occurred primarily for participants who scored high in numeracy. This finding suggests that even comprehension and manipulation of natural frequencies requires a certain threshold of numeracy abilities, and that the beneficial effects of natural frequency presentation may not be as general as previously believed.

Fans of Gigerenzer's Reckoning with Risk take note. This is exactly what I need for book 7. And thanks, Keith, who told Andrew! Andrew Gelman , statistics. Tuesday, October 20, envy. Also courtesy MR, Cory Doctorow on a publishing experiment. Including, among other things, a limited hardback edition with a cover illustration by Randall Munroe. Form an orderly queue. Courtesy MR, article by Daniel B. Klein on The Ph. Circle in Academic Economics. Ilya has just received an award in environmental journalism for his reporting on the carbon trading market, story here. Friday, October 16, unaccustomed as i am.

John Chris is poised, self-possessed, articulate; I, on the other hand, seem to have entered the 2-minute 'you know I mean' babble competition. Just how many times is it possible to say 'you know' in a single sentence? Hard to say, but I think Caroline Kennedy's record has been beaten handily. So this is, of course, horribly embarrassing - I need to take lessons, clearly, from the pro - but John Chris is worth hearing. Thursday, October 15, the character solution. Trafigura tried to have the Guardian silenced by injunction.

But the plan began to unravel rather rapidly on Monday when it transpired that an MP, Paul Farrelly, had tabled a question about the injunction and the awkward document in parliament. That was bad enough, what with the nuisance of odd years of precedent affirming the right of the press to report whatever MPs say or do.

There was a tiresomely teasing story on the Guardian front page. And then there was Twitter. Tuesday, October 13, Camfed. Thank you for all your support! Monday, October 12, Sweet Thames, flow invisibly. Design Observer on the Tube map sans Thames. Ken Garland's book, Mr Beck's Underground Map , is one of my favourites, by the way - a must-have for design fanatics. Saturday, October 10, bleg. Wednesday, September 30, lists.

I think EC has slightly missed the problem. I got an email a while back from The Millions asking me to nominate my top 5 books for the new millennium, with the following constraints: The idea was, The Millions would then tabulate all votes and come up with a top If some of the most interesting writing I've read has been in a blog, or a pdf, or a webcomic, or just in emails, I can't mention it - it has to be writing that been legitimised by a book deal. Also, if I've read someone brilliant in a language other than English - someone who hasn't happened to sell English-language rights - I can't mention that either.

So I can't use this to give interesting writers a better chance of attracting notice and getting an English-language book deal, I just have to endorse the status quo. Well, let's say I play the game and I just pick 5 novels published in English since ; I might still think this was a chance to draw attention to undeservedly neglected writers. Fact is, it can't work that way. The only writers who stand any chance of making it into the top 20 are going to be writers a significant number of other contributors have also noticed - which means they are wildly unlikely to come from the undeservedly neglected.

They will come from the pool of writers who got promoted, who won acclaim, in other words from the much smaller pool of writers many of us have happened to hear of. On these terms, the only book I can think of that stands a chance of making the cut is Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang - which, as it happens, didn't get onto the list.

Possibly because it never did get my vote, because I thought this was silly. Something that would not have been silly would have been to let people nominate whatever they wanted, and then publish two things: The top 20 list on the original criteria 2. A list of ALL nominations, with the names of the people who put them forward. We might expect, after all, that writers would read more widely than the general public; we might expect the most interesting contributions to be, precisely, all the nominations that only a handful put forward.

The amount of weight we gave to such nominations would, unsurprisingly, be governed by what we thought of the individuals who made them. Friday, October 2 at 8: Saturday, October 3 at 1: Whatever is traded will remain on the walls of the cafe for others to encounter and enjoy for the duration of the show. The show will open with a rare appearance by John Chris Jones, author of the pioneering Design Methods and Designing Designing, who has come to Berlin for the occasion.

Hope to see you there! Wednesday, September 23, John Chris Jones. John Chris has generously agreed to come to Berlin for the opening; he describes his ideas as follows: When i read a book in public i like to make it a shared reading with the audience It would be better to post with more accurate information, but I'm somewhat exhausted. Still, if anyone would like to participate in the reading of an animal reading path, drop me a line and I will pass it on.

Go on, be a devil. Owen Hatherley will be talking about his new book, Militant Modernism , on Thursday the 24th, 6. The event is free but call or email events bookmarks. I'm in New York, worse luck. Saturday, September 19, words fail. Nothing remarkably incisive to say about all of this beyond the capsule rendition of how it works.

It is an engine of professionalization, though. American job candidates, almost all of them, spend an entire year focused almost exclusively on this sort of thing — well, save for any teaching they might be doing, and frantic nighttime dissertation finishing. You enter into your first year on the market a kid who likes to read and write; you exit a fully fledged professional academic. But it is something to note, and perhaps something worth thinking and writing about a bit more, what effect the rhythm of the market has on intellectual life in the academy.

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But it becomes profoundly present, definitive, in bursts. There the struggle to get into a PhD program, and then relative calm for a few years. Then a frantic burst of market-awareness, then a bit of calm at least on that front as you start your job. Friday, September 18, send in the robots. How we come to understand the world Kamran Nazeer.

Thursday, September 17, risk is what keeps us alive. Monday, September 14, correction. A reader writes in response to my thoughts on the admissions criteria set out on the website for the Oriental Institute at Oxford which, as you'll see, would appear to have suffered from a severe shortage of relevant information: One quick fact-check-ish thing: The written work submitted with an Oxford application generally isn't written specially for that application - usually it's one or two coursework essays, written as part of AS or A-level requirements. Coursework is required at GCSE, as well: I think coursework is externally moderated, though a lot of it might be marked in-school initially.

I'm sure there is a set marking scheme applied nation-wide which of course has its own problems. It would probably take more than just coherence, correct spelling and a grasp of grammar to get an A in e. I've taken part in the interview process for Oriental Studies at Oxford - I mean, I did so twice, once as a candidate and then some years later as a quite junior panel member. The state-school question was pretty pronounced in my mind: It's not a brilliant rate.

At least one of the state school students took a long time to produce essays of the kind being asked for-- but then so did a couple of the international school students. Of course all this means is that this sampling of state school students at Oxford were the kind of people who found themselves identified as clever and fought to keep that status, despite bullying and distraction and all the rest. Not much space for the clever kids whose brightness led them into boredom and doing the minimum. On the other hand-- learning a new foreign language ab initio really requires you be the kind of person who can make their own study timetable and stick with it.

If you get distracted, you start forgetting. One thing that's worth comparison is the difference in intakes between SOAS and other places that do Oriental Studies, or at least the version of events I've heard - it's said that SOAS has the lowest grade requirements for entry, and takes a lot of students in, but their rate of attrition is very high.

As students find themselves unwilling or unable to do the work, they drop out or are encouraged to leave. So people who just didn't enjoy what was demanded them at school can discover that they really enjoy the intellectual demands of university, and do well. On the other hand it's worth noting that this sort of thing looks very bad on league tables.

There might be financial problems involved, too-- I know that FE colleges often get allotted government money based on the number of students left in the course at the end of a term or a year, not on the number who started. Sunday, September 13, this sounds great! Characters wander around aimlessly, do things for no reason, vanish, reappear, get arrested for unnamed crimes, and make wild, life-altering decisions for no reason.

Half a paragraph is devoted to describing the smell and texture of a piece of food, but the climactic central event of the film is glossed over in a sentence. The death of the hero is not even mentioned. One sentence describes a scene he's in, the next describes people showing up at his funeral.

Josh Olson , however, was unimpressed. I was having a look at the admissions criteria for undergraduate degrees at the Oriental Institute in Oxford. My vague assumption was that they would be looking for students with strong evidence of linguistic aptitude - in other words, it would be the elimination of the language requirement at GCSE, with consequent fewer numbers taking a language A-level in state schools, which would be the biggest obstacle for candidates from the state sector.

This seems not to be the case. According to the relevant page on the OI website, even an A-level in an Oriental language offers no significant advantage: All undergraduate degrees in Oriental Studies involve the teaching of difficult languages from scratch, since only in exceptional cases will students have studied the languages before coming to Oxford. Our experience has been that an A level in an Oriental language does not give significant advantage to a student, since the Oxford courses involve such a broad range of cultural elements in addition to language study. The progress of language learning from the start of the B.

In other words, you might think, this could be a good choice for a student from the state sector, because the Oriental Institute has had to assume responsibility for teaching all students to a high standard from scratch. Students are offered a linguistic aptitude test which you can try out here solutions here ; the test seems to be designed to test whether you can get the hang of an inflected language in which word order is no guide to sense, a challenge for which five years of French, say, would offer no great advantage.

Oddly enough, though, the things that really count seem much harder for someone from a school for students of widely varying abilities to demonstrate. We judge whether you should be offered a place to study an Oriental subject at Oxford according to the evidence presented to us in your admissions documents: Some subjects may also set an informal test during the interview. We would expect successful candidates to demonstrate the following: Oriental Studies courses require a a capacity for hard and well-organised work; b the motivation to tackle languages which in most cases will be radically different from languages learnt previously and c skills of analysis, argument and description for essay writing on an unfamiliar culture.

When I say it's hard for someone from a school with a population of widely varying abilities to demonstrate these qualities, I'm looking back to the schools I went to along the way; in this sort of school, if you hand in a piece of written work that is coherent, correctly spelled and grammatical, you will get an A. Teachers are not going to give challenging assignments, because they don't want weaker members of the class to be demoralised. They are not going to hound the A student for inadequate skills of analysis, argument and description.

And they're unlikely to set large numbers of written assignments in any case - the kind of thing that would require a good student to develop excellent work habits - both because, again, they don't want weaker students to be demoralised, and because it's hard work labouring through large numbers of papers that are incoherent, poorly spelled and ungrammatical. A student in this kind of environment who has high academic potential is not necessarily going to have much in the way of a track record of achievement; he or she is likelier to do what I did, hand in schoolwork as required, be very bored, spend a lot of time reading.

Such a student would be doing well to achieve the necessary A grades at A-level; I don't know that he or she would be likely to offer anything very impressive as supplementary material for an application. I do realize, of course, that a university must have some criteria for selection. It may be that it's simply more straightforward to devise a programme for intensive language teaching from scratch than it is to teach, I don't know, excellent work habits, an international outlook and powers of analysis and argument.

Thursday, September 10, yes!!!!! Anatol Stefanowitsch is back! Paul and Jesi are planning to open the space to anyone who is interested in offering a course, seminar or other event; the idea was to talk about some possibilities. This coincided, as it happens, with Obama's speech on education and also with a piece in the Guardian on the severe decline in British universities of degrees in modern languages, following the removal of the language requirement at GCSE. I write in that context. One of my ideas is to offer a two-hour well, maybe three class called Mute Inglorious Nabokovs.

Nabokov was taught English and French from an early age; this early exposure to languages other than his mother tongue seems to have been important in his formation as a writer. In Speak, Memory he talks about the entertainment offered by working through a little grammar book, in which the student started on simple sentences, could look forward to ever more exciting grammatical features, and at the end was able to read a simple story.

He remembers sitting inside while a servant swept the gravel walk outside; he wonders whether she might not have been happier sweeping the walk than driving a tractor in later years under the Soviets. This passage always makes me think: But perhaps she was a mute inglorious Nabokov. Perhaps the servant, too, had gifts which would have benefited from reading an introduction to English culminating in an adventure for little Ned. One thing that's certain, anyway, is that most schoolchildren do not get this kind of chance at an early age. More generally, it seems to me, there is never a point at which people are encouraged to try a range of languages, and in particular to see what it is like to read a short passage in each by a great writer.

It seemed to me that one could try something like this: So, for instance, one might start with 1. A good starting point for the many people whose first second language was Spanish or French. One introduces the principles of Italian orthography, so that the reader, looking at a text, knows how it shd be pronounced; one then goes through a short passage from Calvino's Invisible Cities, providing relevant grammar and vocabulary.

One would then go on to 2. Alphabet not dissimilar to ours; the student still starts with a big advantage. The object is to work through the first 7 lines of the Iliad. One points out that the Greek alphabet can be divided into true friends, false friends and aliens. One starts the student off with exercises spelling English words in Greek letters, moves on to introduce Greek pronunciation and some Greek words, and then goes through the first 7 lines of the Iliad.

One does not need all these letters for Iliad Sceptics may think starting with Homeric Greek is really jumping in at the deep end, but it is only 7 lines. One would then go on to, as it might be 3. Totally different script, with many letters representing sounds not found in English. Also, a Semitic language! But this, too, is less difficult than it looks; one starts on the script, using a version of the method described above, introduces the new sounds, and then works through a short passage - I was thinking, maybe, a few lines from Ibn Rushd on tragedy.

Once the materials have been properly worked out they can be posted online and also, I suppose, published in book form though it wd need an accompanying CD. Just the sort of book one wants on a long flight. The sort of book one could give to a child who has been dragged to the beach on vacation because younger siblings are not too old for the beach. If you'd like to be sent pages from the beta release as they're developed, do drop me a line! You have here a simple question that anyone can access. Doesn't matter that you've never run a linear regression in your life.

If you've ever shopped for groceries, if you've ever stood in line with a candy bar, a soda bottle, and a matinee starting across town in ten minutes, you have an opinion here. Courtesy MR, Dan Meyer's post on queuing speeds in grocery stores. Wednesday, September 9, Camfed. Just got this newsletter from Camfed. Can a book change lives? We believe this one can. Drawing on years of rich and varied reporting experience in Asia and Africa, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's new book Half the Sky chronicles the stories of women who have escaped from slavery, narrowly evaded death in childbirth, and hoisted themselves out of the depths of poverty.

Growing up in Zimbabwe, Angeline was so determined to attend primary school that she persuaded her teachers to let her wash their dishes in exchange for school supplies.

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A brilliant student, she graduated at the top of her sixth-grade class-but her parents didn't have the resources to send her to secondary school. When Angeline's path crossed with Ann Cotton's, the founder of Camfed , she had the opportunity to return to school. Today, Angeline is the Executive Director of Camfed's Zimbabwe program and an inspiration to her community and country. Read an excerpt of Angeline's story here. Half the Sky concludes with a call to action to end injustices against girls and women worldwide through a massive grassroots campaign for education and empowerment.

Half the Sky is an inspiring and compelling collection of stories, but it is more than that. It is a passionate reminder that giving women the resources to fight their oppression and bolstering their potential to succeed will not only benefit their families and communities-it will sow the seeds for a healthier, more peaceful, and more just and prosperous world. Available from Powell's, here. Tuesday, September 8, isn't science amazing.

Health and safety regulations have limited schools' ability to do this. We need to maintain an excitement in science and show it's not about learning dull facts. You know it makes sense. Britain struggles with the perennial problem of getting students to see that science is not boring, here. But things are getting better!

Thank goodness for that! I'm reminded, for some reason, of my favourite scene in Tarantula, Clint Eastwood's first film. Man looks with dismay at sinister-looking test tube: It looks like an isotope. Monday, September 7, Did you know? Dinosaur Comics , joey comeau. Sunday, September 6, hm. Things are still a bit tricky. I write posts and put them in the drafts folder. I told someone the other day that I would try to write a review and not put it in the drafts folder, but I have failed; there were larger implications.

Still, I'm definitely catching up on Dinosaur Comics of yesteryear. If I'm not careful I will end up just embedding the entire Dinosaur Comics oeuvre, which is not really a solution for Drafts Folder Syndrome, but anyway, Pi Approximation Day , wish I'd thought of that. Wednesday, September 2, secondhand sales revisited. Nathan Bransford , an agent at Curtis Brown, urges his readers to buy new books because authors don't get money on secondhand sales.

I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank all the readers who bought secondhand copies of The Last Samurai and sent a token of their esteem to the author via PayPal. But I'd also like to thank the hundreds of readers who took the time to send a donation of a dollar or so, when it would be easy to think the amount was so small it would make no difference. It does make a difference. Our experience has been that an A level in an Oriental language does not give significant advantage to a student, since the Oxford courses involve such a broad range of cultural elements in addition to language study.

The progress of language learning from the start of the B. In other words, you might think, this could be a good choice for a student from the state sector, because the Oriental Institute has had to assume responsibility for teaching all students to a high standard from scratch. Students are offered a linguistic aptitude test which you can try out here solutions here ; the test seems to be designed to test whether you can get the hang of an inflected language in which word order is no guide to sense, a challenge for which five years of French, say, would offer no great advantage.

Teachers are not going to give challenging assignments, because they don't want weaker members of the class to be demoralised. They are not going to hound the A student for inadequate skills of analysis, argument and description. And they're unlikely to set large numbers of written assignments in any case - the kind of thing that would require a good student to develop excellent work habits - both because, again, they don't want weaker students to be demoralised, and because it's hard work labouring through large numbers of papers that are incoherent, poorly spelled and ungrammatical.

A student in this kind of environment who has high academic potential is not necessarily going to have much in the way of a track record of achievement; he or she is likelier to do what I did, hand in schoolwork as required, be very bored, spend a lot of time reading. Such a student would be doing well to achieve the necessary A grades at A-level; I don't know that he or she would be likely to offer anything very impressive as supplementary material for an application. I do realize, of course, that a university must have some criteria for selection. It may be that it's simply more straightforward to devise a programme for intensive language teaching from scratch than it is to teach, I don't know, excellent work habits, an international outlook and powers of analysis and argument.

Perhaps the servant, too, had gifts which would have benefited from reading an introduction to English culminating in an adventure for little Ned. One thing that's certain, anyway, is that most schoolchildren do not get this kind of chance at an early age. More generally, it seems to me, there is never a point at which people are encouraged to try a range of languages, and in particular to see what it is like to read a short passage in each by a great writer. It seemed to me that one could try something like this: So, for instance, one might start with 1.

A good starting point for the many people whose first second language was Spanish or French. One introduces the principles of Italian orthography, so that the reader, looking at a text, knows how it shd be pronounced; one then goes through a short passage from Calvino's Invisible Cities, providing relevant grammar and vocabulary. One would then go on to 2. Alphabet not dissimilar to ours; the student still starts with a big advantage. The object is to work through the first 7 lines of the Iliad. One points out that the Greek alphabet can be divided into true friends, false friends and aliens.

One starts the student off with exercises spelling English words in Greek letters, moves on to introduce Greek pronunciation and some Greek words, and then goes through the first 7 lines of the Iliad. One does not need all these letters for Iliad Sceptics may think starting with Homeric Greek is really jumping in at the deep end, but it is only 7 lines.

One would then go on to, as it might be 3. Totally different script, with many letters representing sounds not found in English. Also, a Semitic language! But this, too, is less difficult than it looks; one starts on the script, using a version of the method described above, introduces the new sounds, and then works through a short passage - I was thinking, maybe, a few lines from Ibn Rushd on tragedy.

On reflection 2 hours seems wildly optimistic and even 3 somewhat optimistic. Seems as though explaining how a Semitic language works would not be the work of a couple of minutes. Luckily, though, I can now use Jesi as a guinea pig and try to achieve a more realistic sense of how it is all to be done. Once the materials have been properly worked out they can be posted online and also, I suppose, published in book form though it wd need an accompanying CD. Just the sort of book one wants on a long flight. The sort of book one could give to a child who has been dragged to the beach on vacation because younger siblings are not too old for the beach.

If you'd like to be sent pages from the beta release as they're developed, do drop me a line! You have here a simple question that anyone can access.

Doesn't matter that you've never run a linear regression in your life. If you've ever shopped for groceries, if you've ever stood in line with a candy bar, a soda bottle, and a matinee starting across town in ten minutes, you have an opinion here. Courtesy MR, Dan Meyer's post on queuing speeds in grocery stores. Wednesday, September 9, Camfed.

Just got this newsletter from Camfed. Can a book change lives? We believe this one can. Drawing on years of rich and varied reporting experience in Asia and Africa, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's new book Half the Sky chronicles the stories of women who have escaped from slavery, narrowly evaded death in childbirth, and hoisted themselves out of the depths of poverty. Growing up in Zimbabwe, Angeline was so determined to attend primary school that she persuaded her teachers to let her wash their dishes in exchange for school supplies.

Read an excerpt of Angeline's story here. Half the Sky concludes with a call to action to end injustices against girls and women worldwide through a massive grassroots campaign for education and empowerment. Half the Sky is an inspiring and compelling collection of stories, but it is more than that. It is a passionate reminder that giving women the resources to fight their oppression and bolstering their potential to succeed will not only benefit their families and communities-it will sow the seeds for a healthier, more peaceful, and more just and prosperous world.

Available from Powell's, here. Tuesday, September 8, isn't science amazing. Health and safety regulations have limited schools' ability to do this. We need to maintain an excitement in science and show it's not about learning dull facts. You know it makes sense.

Britain struggles with the perennial problem of getting students to see that science is not boring, here. But things are getting better! Thank goodness for that! I'm reminded, for some reason, of my favourite scene in Tarantula, Clint Eastwood's first film. Man looks with dismay at sinister-looking test tube: It looks like an isotope. Monday, September 7, Did you know? Dinosaur Comics , joey comeau. Sunday, September 6, hm. Things are still a bit tricky. I write posts and put them in the drafts folder. I told someone the other day that I would try to write a review and not put it in the drafts folder, but I have failed; there were larger implications.

But I'd also like to thank the hundreds of readers who took the time to send a donation of a dollar or so, when it would be easy to think the amount was so small it would make no difference. It does make a difference. In this case, the difference between buying BonaVista's MicroCharts and prudently deferring in the interest of more or less manageable credit card debt. I seem to have fallen into a humorous tone which does not really express my feelings.

I'm always touched when a reader takes the trouble to do this. You didn't have to do it. You're absolutely entitled to buy a secondhand book; it's not obligatory to send something to the author, it's just an unbelievably nice thing to do. So thank you all very much. Things are a bit tricky at the moment. Andrew Hussie's guest post on Dinosaur Comics captures the mood. Monday, August 31, survival tip. The authors analysed data from puma attacks on humans in North America over more than years. The response was severity of injury, ranging from no injury to death. The predictors were age, group composition and behaviour.

The modern data crunch used to reveal the elusive truth was multinomial regression. Chris Lloyd on Core Economics, the rest here. Saturday, August 29, the story behind the election. Probably the most noble thing a publisher can possibly do is provide cheap paperback editions of important texts. All the first editions and Folio press embossed hardbacks in the world are, culturally if not financially, worth less than a single bundle of s Penguin Classics, and the line of low-budget purveyors of enlightenment is a worthy and laudable one.

Owen Hatherley on Verso's Radical Thinkers: Series 4 in 3: Tuesday, August 25, that clinking clanking sound again. Greg Butler has drawn my attention to an article in the NYT on Kickstarter, a new method for raising funds for the arts, here. Why didn't they ask Gelman?

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Well, no, Mr Weisberg, you really can't. One can't help feeling that Mr Weisberg, Mr Brill and the New Yorker would all benefit from the services of a statistician. Not that they actually need someone like AG for this kind of thing, but it would be infra dig, presumably, to call on someone who had merely mastered the material in an introductory course for undergraduates.

Sunday, August 23, disparition. He tried to show what it was like to read a book and what the thinking mind looked like in the act of writing. He wrote compellingly about effort, about difficulty, about struggle, about failure, about incoherency, about instability, tension, waste, self-consciousness, incompleteness, process. Mithridates on the critic Richard Poirier, who has just died.

Mithridates , richard poirier. The signaling problems faced by criminals are unusual in the following regard. On one hand they wish to signal a certain untrustworthiness, namely that they are criminals in the first place. This is useful for both meeting other criminals and also for intimidating potential victims. On the other hand, the criminals wish to signal that they are potentially cooperative, for the purpose of working with other criminals. Sending these dual signals isn't easy and Gambetta well understands the complexity of the task at hand.

Thursday, August 20, proportioned like an egge. In the river of Panuco there is a fish like a calfe, the Spanyards call it a Mallatin, hee hath a stone in his head, which the Indians use for the disease of the Collicke, in the night he commeth on land, and eateth grasse. I have eaten of it, and it eateth not much unlike to bacon.

From thence we were sent to Mexico, which is 90 leagues from Panuco. There groweth a fruit which the Spanyards call Avocottes, it is proportioned like an egge, and as blacke as a cole, having a stone in it, and it is an excellent good fruit. At this time, and in this ship, were also sent to be presented to the king of Spaine, two chestes full of earth with ginger growing in them, which were also sent from China, to be sent to the king of Spaine. The ginger runneth in the ground like to liccoras, the blades grow out of it in length and proportion like unto the blades of wild garlicke, which they cut every fifteene dayes, they use to water them twise a day, as we doe our herbes here in England, they put the blades in their pottages, and use them in their other meates, whose excellent savour and tast is very delightfull, and procureth a good appetite.

Tuesday, August 18, virtuosi and musicians. Tuesday, August 11, mind the gap. American conservatives have, I gather, been attacking the NHS. Guardian There's something they somehow miss. If you live in America and happen not to have health insurance, it's complicated to organise treatment. By 'complicated' I mean that you might well be able to clear the bureaucratic hurdles if you had spent the last 6 months training for a marathon, were in peak physical and mental condition - but if you are, um, you know, sick , you are unlikely to have mental and physical stamina required.

In I had a breakdown. I lay on a bed in my mother's house, unable to move. What was needed was, I suppose, some sort of medication. I had no health insurance in the US. To organise the required medication it was necessary to make phone calls. Phone calls I might well have been able to make had I not been in the middle of a breakdown. I did not have the necessary social skills to take this on from a state of insanity, but there was something I could cope with.

I could book a ticket online to Britain; I could get on the plane. Once in Britain, all I had to do was walk into a clinic. The treatment offered by the NHS was flawed. I was living in short-term accommodation. I had no permanent address. I was offered cognitive therapy at the Whitechapel, in addition to the medication prescribed; by the time I turned up for my first appointment for cognitive therapy, I had moved. As it turned out, I had moved out of the district covered by the Whitechapel; I was no longer eligible for its cognitive therapy programme; it was necessary to start again from scratch.

It would have been simple enough for the clinic to give me a map with the boundaries of its district; if they had done so, I would have taken care to find a new room within its boundaries. They didn't; the results were not good. If I'd stayed in the US, on the other hand, I would not be alive today. When the edge of town gas stations come into focus, the background furniture of literary realism suddenly looms into the foreground, and there is a moment of Harmanian object-epipany, in which ready-to-hand, peripheral vision-familiarity transforms into uncanny opacity: The houses became fewer.

The truck passed gas stations, tawdry cafes, ice cream stands and motels. The dreary parade of motels Nothing is so alien, so bleak and unfriendly, as the strip of gas stations - cut-rate gas stations - and motels at the edge of your own city. You fail to recognise it. And, at the same time, you have to grasp it to your bosom. Not just for one night, but for as long as you intend to live where you live. But we don't intend to live here any more. It's a scene in which Edward Hopper seems to devolve into Beckett, as the natural ist landscape gives way to an emptied out monotony, a minimal, quasi-abstract space that is depeopled but still industrialized and commercialised.

George Monbiot on the irresistible rise of Tesco. In this case in Machynlleth, a small market town in mid-Wales. George Monbiot , Tesco. Sunday, August 9, robogod. I vividly remember playing in Mayflower Park, the windswept public space that divides the city's dead and 'alive' docks, on my birthday. I was, being a child of the 80s, fairly obsessed with robots, specifically Transformers. My parents, were they contributors to my comments box, would tell you, unprompted, the story about me coming home from nursery school claiming we'd been told about 'this robot called God' well how else to explain it?

Owen Hatherley in a longer piece on the architecture of Southampton , here. Wednesday, August 5, fourth seeks three. I may have to retract my dismissal of bridge as a game with relevance to the world of finance. Warren Buffett apparently thinks otherwise. On one occasion [Buffett] is reported to have said: Now I am trying to figure out how to get by on less sleep in order to fit in a few more hands.

Tuesday, August 4, less unprintable than previously supposed. Languagehat has buried a terrific offer in the Comments section. As I mentioned in a previous post, the US publishers of Uglier than a Monkey's Armpit did manage to include the names of both authors of on the cover of a book with two authors a feat we might once, in our innocence, have taken for granted , but absentmindedly forgot to include the introduction by Steve "Languagehat" Dodson - a feature unique to the US edition, which for fans of LH's indispensable blog must be one of the chief attractions of the book.

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The introduction will appear when the book is reprinted; a slight problem with this is, of course, that it offers a strong incentive to fans to wait for the reprint, thereby, presumably, postponing the appearance of this highly desirable edition. Dodson, anyway, has now generously offered to send a copy of the missing introduction as a Word document to anyone who buys the book he can be reached, obviously, via the blog. Not only is this a great offer, it is a chance for readers to pick up a collector's item!

The first US edition, minus the introduction, augmented with a genuine Word document from Steve Dodson! The name of that book in full, with full complement of authors: Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit: Some examples of entries can be found in an earlier post on LH, here. Sunday, August 2, life, the universe and everything.

A friend of mine once put it succinctly: Explaining that, for those who immediately liked physics in high school, this was what they liked about it. Hence this terrific blog. I believe it is the atomic hypothesis or the atomic fact , or whatever you wish to call it that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. Those who love physics for the fun of hunting for the variable will be aggrieved, very aggrieved.

Saturday, August 1, babies. Infinite Thought is off-message. Do I need to have a kid to understand Antichrist properly?