Home Cooking Raises Physics Take-up

Should we expect better from the Times Educational Supplement?

Family meals have bigger impact than “superfoods”, research suggests

Fish oils, nuts and seeds have all been claimed to boost pupils’ brainpower - but a family meal is likely to have a bigger impact than “superfoods” when it comes to studying science, new research suggests.

Children who regularly eat with their families are 30 per cent more likely to take biology and physics at A-level than other pupils, according to a Government study.

Full report at: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6069253

Junk food makes kids less brainy

Eating junk food may be correlated with low IQ, but is this the same as saying that eating junk food causes low IQ? The Sun certainly seems to think so.

Story at: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3398102/Junk-food-makes-kids-less-brainy.html

Al Franken's Extended Ditch Analogy

Obama says that the Republicans drove America into a ditch, so they shouldn't be given back the keys.

Senator Al Franken extends this analogy considerably:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR2GZ25tjQY

Targeted by Aliens

"I have no doubt that I am being targeted by aliens," Radivoje Lajic told reporters outside his house in Gornji Lajjci (Bosnia).  "They are playing games with me.  Since 2007, my house has been hit six times by meteorites, and that defies all statistics.  The chances of being hit once by a meteorite are so small that getting hit six times has to be deliberate.  So I am clearly being targeted by extraterrestrials, but I don't know what I have done to annoy them."

"Experts at Belgrade University have confirmed that all the falling rocks are meteorits from outer space.  The strikes always happen when it is raining heavily, never when there are clear skies, and for months I was unable to sleep whenever it rained, for fear of yet another strike.  So I have now had my roof reinforced with steel girders, which I paid for by selling one of the meteorites to a university in the Netherlands.  The scientists are now trying to work out what exactly it is about my house that attracts the meteorites but isn't it obvious?  It's me."

Source:  24 Sata (Croatia) 19/7/2010

Reported in Private Eye's "Funny Old World" column

Do Daughters Cause Divorce?

Another good correlation/causation possibility:

Apparently parents of daughters are more likely to get divorced than parents with sons.  A possible explanation is that fathers of boys are more likely to stick around in an unhappy marriage, in order to be a male presence for their sons.

Read the report in Slate

Alex Ferguson's Strange Analogy

Alex Ferguson on the Wayne Rooney Saga:

"Sometimes you look in a field and you see a cow and you think it’s a better cow than the one you’ve got in your own field. But it never really works out that way. It’s probably the same cow which is only as good as your own cow. We have to deal with that – some players like to think that it’s a better world somewhere else. It never really works like that."

Irrelevant Appeal to History - 2014 will determine the course of our century says Cambridge Professor

Are you fed up hearing the much misquoted saying that "those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it"?  Of course, there is much truth in the idea but it is not true that what has happened in the past will necessarily happen again.  Sometimes things happen for the first time and sometimes things happen that never happen again.

According to the Daily Telegraph, a Cambridge Professor is claiming that dramatic events in 2014 will determine the course of our century because such events have happened in the middle of the second decade in the previous five centuries, for example the first world war broke out in 1914.

"Prof Boyle argues that 2014 will be important because previous five centuries have also hinged on events that took place in the middle of their second decade.

In 1517 Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of Wittenburg church, sparking the Reformation and the rise of Protestantism.

A century later 1618 marked the start of the 30 Years War and decades of religious conflict in Western Europe, which ended with the establishment of the Hanoverians in 1715.

The enlightened Congress of Vienna took place in 1815 following the defeat of Napoleon, heralding a century of relative stability across Europe..

Prof Boyle, whose book 2014 - How to survive the next world crisis is published on Thursday, said: “The character of a century becomes very apparent in that second decade, so why should ours be any different?"

This seems a rather silly argument for a Cambridge Professor to be making.  Could the Daily Telegraph, by any chance, be oversimplifying his thesis?

Telegraph article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7832724/2014-will-determine-course-of-century-says-Cambridge-professor.html