My friend Kerrie, who has just started a master’s program at Oxford, has just become the latest of the Oxford bloggers. Thankfully, it seems that her arrival was somewhat less sodden and confusing than mine was.
Oxophiles and any Oxonian readers I have retained, take note.

I have a Google Alert set up that forwards news stories including the terms “Canada” and “Climate Change.” Every day, it provides a few very misleading items, usually published on personal blogs or the canada.com network: a group of publications including the Vancouver Sun, Province, and Chilliwack Times. A piece in the latter caught my [...]

On Wikipedia, there is an ongoing debate between ‘inclusionists’ who feel that any factual information - no matter how trivial - is suitable for inclusion and ‘deletionists’ who think only articles with a certain level of importance should be kept. Regardless of who wins on Wikipedia itself (or rather, which balance between the two views [...]

Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine applies the methodology of double-blind, randomized clinical trials to a number of different forms of ‘alternative medicine.’ Written by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, the book describes the history of clinical trials and evidence based medicine: citing historical examples such as finding the cause of scurvy, [...]

Last weekend involved a brunch attended by local bloggers, not unlike the four bloggers’ gatherings I attended in Oxford. Zoom has kindly provided the internet with her notes about what occurred and was discussed. An embarrassingly large number of items consist of esoteric topics that I raised. Many thanks to Zoom and XUP for organizing [...]

Written by a journalist embedded with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion of the Marine Corps, Evan Wright’s Generation Kill describes the experience of invading Iraq alongside them in 2003. The book provides a graphic account of what transpired among the men of the Battalion and its subsidiary units, as well as on battlefields between Kuwait City [...]