Over on My London Your London I have up a review of The Vegemite Tales, a rollicking comedy that portrays the Australian expat life in London. It is an excellent evening with more depth than you’d expect from the number of laughs.
A quite balanced piece in the Economist about the differences between the brains of men and women.
There are a number of problems with these studies. One, according to Dr Hines, is science’s bias towards reporting positive results, so that research which shows no differences is likely to get lost. Another is that because differences between the sexes are so often popularised and played up in the popular media, people tend to pay them disproportionate attention.
For example, although it is commonly held that there are reliable differences between the verbal abilities of males and females, Dr Hines suggests this is not exactly correct. She says that the results of hundreds of tests of vocabulary and reading comprehension show there is almost no gap between the sexes. Though teenage girls are better at spelling than teenage boys, the only aspect of verbal ability that is known to show a sex difference in adults is verbal fluency (the ability to produce words rapidly). For example, when asked to list as many words as possible that start with a particular letter, women usually come up with more than men. Furthermore, even when there are differences in ability between the sexes, research suggests that the scale of these differences is often smaller than people generally believe.
I still think it underplays the cultural factors however. Last week after a friend had a baby I went out to buy a congratulatory card. I couldn’t find one, NOT ONE, specifically “congratulations on your new baby” card that wasn’t either definitely pink or blue. So in the end I choose a nice gender-neutral picture of a puppy, a card meant for any general purpose.
The president of the Royal Society has called for an Apollo moon landings-style push to develop green energy.
“The Apollo project, like the Manhattan project, is an example where a goal was given a high priority and showed things can be done much more rapidly than would have happened in the normal course of events. The scale of funds needed is small in proportion to the scale of the problem and the trillions of dollars now being spent on energy,” he said.
Ben Macintyre in The Times has a constructive suggestion – bring back hitchhiking. (Given our risk-averse culture hard to see it happening in the traditional form, but perhaps if you did it in a semi-organised way – set up “stations” on the outskirts of big cities and record names it might work.
In the same paper there’s a sensible exploration of how to cool down a typical English hot-house – ceiling fans, shutters etc (with lists of stockists at least for the Southeast).
More simply, and most encouraging of all, a high street store (Curry’s) is starting to stock solar panels. If you’ve got the right sort of roof anywhere within reach of West Thurrock, Fulham or Croydon, why not explore the option?
Then, as now, a marginal, area of London, where many writers lived or lodged.
In Holywell Street, in the late summer of 1588, the great comic actor Dick Tarleton was dying, cared for by “one Em Ball”, a local woman “of verye bad reputacion”.
Robert Greene was living that year with a woman of the surname Ball, the sister of a thief who had died at Tyburn. She would bear his son, called Fortunatus, who died in 1593 and was buried at St Leonard’s Shoreditch, when his mother was living on the same street. The two Ball women might have been related, or they might have been the same woman. (p. 40)
Other women in the pamphlets of Thomas Nashe include old Megge Curtis of Shoreditch for whom the pages of a pamphlet served “to stop mustard pots with”; and Mother Livers of Newington, a fortune-teller”.
(From A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe, Charles Nicholl, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984)
Anyone come across “Em” elsewhere?
OK, I might be feeling soppy this morning, relaxing after a hardworking couple of weeks, but I can’t resist pointing to this “shaggy dog” story. I’ve known quite a few genuine working dogs and owned one of my own of a working breed, and they can really be amazing animals – I believe the experts say that dogs don’t have a “theory of the mind”, but you’d have to doubt that conclusion after some contact with working dogs.
The Indian government is to ban children under 14 working in restaurants and as domestic servants. No doubt the law is one thing and practice another, but still it is a step in the right direction, particularly for girls, who would make up a large proportion of this group.
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