HENRY - The human evolution news relay
Entries in the ' it-was-better-in-my-day ' category
Written July 19, 2008 in it-was-better-in-my-day, quotes, science
…one of the chief values of print library research is poor indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within core journals—likely had unintended consequences that assisted the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past. Modern [...]
Written July 4, 2008 in anthropology, cultural evolution, europe, evolution, genetics, human prehistory, it-was-better-in-my-day, language, music, stupidity
….and the award for the stupidest science story I’ve seen in months goes to LiveScience.com for “Cave Men Loved to Sing“, in which we’re told that our cave-dwelling ancestors used echo-location:
With only dull light available from a torch, which couldn’t be carried into very narrow passages, the ancient hunters had to use their voices like [...]
Written March 30, 2008 in it-was-better-in-my-day, language, language preservation, linguistics
An analysis of the top 8,000 girls’ and boys’ names registered on birth certificates last year shows that parents are increasingly eschewing spellings that their parents would have recognised in favour of making up their own phonetic versions.
For hundreds of children born in 2007, Samuel became [...]
Written March 9, 2008 in americas, anthropology, bongo-bongoism, creationism-is-stupid, human prehistory, it-was-better-in-my-day, stupidity
The reviews of Roland Emmerich’s new movie, 10,000 B.C. (”A prehistoric epic that follows a young mammoth hunter’s journey through uncharted territory to secure the future of his tribe”) are starting to come through, and it sounds like a bigger crapfest than Apocalypto:
In 10,000 BC, you’ve got Egyptian pyramids being built by guys using woolly [...]
..at this rate, there won’t be any left!
Although the Human Genome Project was completed 4 years ago, the catalog of human protein-coding genes remains a matter of controversy. Current catalogs list a total of 24,500 putative protein-coding genes. It is broadly suspected that a large fraction of these entries are functionally meaningless ORFs present [...]
Written January 7, 2008 in anthropology, bacteria, it-was-better-in-my-day, people, quotes, science
The journal Nature has digitised their entire publication archive - dating all the way back to November 4th, 1869. Nature has been one of the most influential journals in science (the wikipedia has a good history), so this is a good chance to poke around their archives. Unfortunately, all the good stuff is still behind [...]
The inventive language created by doctors the world over to insult their patients - or each other - is in danger of becoming extinct.
So says a doctor who has spent four years charting more than 200 colourful examples. (…). The increasing rate of litigation means that there is a far higher chance that doctors will [...]
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