America: resuscitating the English language since 1620 
On being a smug skeptic 
Cervical screening and the quest for informed consent 
QEDcon book swap! 
Autism and Public Understanding 
“An American teaching English?” she cried. “Surely that’s evidence of a brain drain?” And we were off, with Lynne Murphy’s gentle, self-deprecating humor informing her talk on ‘How America saved the English language’. Talking to a packed out room (I think the biggest I’ve ever seen at Horsham), she had a tough crowd of English
(More)…
This evening I was caught out pouring scorn on skeptics. Expecting to be tarred and feathered before long, I thought I’d pre-empt retributive scorn. What I said “Look! Now there’s an easy way to be a skeptical c*** online… http://www.yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ just link someone to their fallacy & be smug!” What I meant (constrained by Twitter’s 140ch and
(More)…
Cancer screening – a mini rant that turned into a big one. I must declare an interest and a bias here. My father’s had prostate cancer (not found through screening, admittedly) and I had surgery to remove pre-cancerous cells on my cervix last year. My very first screening for cervical cancer found dangerous cells that,
(More)…
QEDcon is fast approaching (14 days left!) and due to a Facebook friend’s question to attendees about recommending some books, I thought about a QEDcon attendee book swap! In these cash-strapped times, I thought it might be nice to use QEDcon as a chance to give and receive (or long-term lend) the gift of awesome
(More)…
In March, May and June I will be doing a talk on Autism. The first two talks will be in Guildford and in May in Hackney. June is still to be confirmed. If you’d like to help then please do share the link on Twitter or Facebook and complete the survey! There are only 10
(More)…
So today on Twitter I saw some people retweeting a picture of Zooey Deschanel (500 Days of Summer; New Girl; Yes Man) into my timeline I clicked, absent-mindedly, not expecting much apart from a really skinny version of Zooey – nothing much different from your average photoshopping. I was wrong. Here is that abomination.
(More)…
(Reposted from The Custard TV) Nadine Dorries last night complained about Mock the Week being part of a ‘sexist’ BBC agenda. But, with the example of Mock The Week, could she be right? Chortle, reporting on this today, have done the maths. It doesn’t look good. “Chortle has analysed the line-ups over all ten series
(More)…
Yesterday I received an email from the BME inviting me to a conference on the subject of ‘Spirit Possession and Mental Health’. Intrigued, I had a good look at the conference details: Particularly of note, I thought was ‘Examining the ‘critical themes and debates on spirit possession [...] using a range of illustrative case study,
(More)…
(Originally posted on 25th Nov 2011, here) Dear Observer, Regarding: The worst year of my life: cancer has my family in its grip - http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2011/nov/20/a-family-gripped-by-cancer As the daughter of a man with cancer I’m always interested to read about new therapies and scientific breakthroughs into cancer treatment. However, I felt I must write to you about
(More)…
In October, @xVirtutex (Myles) and I decided to go down to Guildford’s GLive venue to speak to Sally Morgan fans. On the 1st October Simon Singh @SLSingh had tweeted that Sally had seen him coming and blocked him before he’d had the chance to even follow her (spooky, eh?) so I decided to follow @SallyMorganTV for laffs. Little did I know she’d be coming to
(More)…
