Weekly Round-up Week Ending 17/11/2014

Welcome to the better late than never weekly round-up.

I want to start off by saying how grateful we are to Dr Tim Grant on his inaugural Skeptics in the Pub talk last week. It was a highly entertaining and illustrative exploration of forensic linguistics. For those of you that want to know more here’s a set of links that you’ll enjoy. First off is a paper Tim wrote on the linguistic analysis of SMS messages in the case of the murder of Amanda Birks. Here’s a more recent article on the linguistic clues that reveal your true twitter identity. This is the Gender Guesser webpage that he demonstrated in his talk. And finally link to the Centre for Forensic Linguistics.

Not one but two tales of university sports based misogyny made the news this week as first Stirling University Men’s Hockey Team and then Cardiff University’s Football team disgraced themselves. There was further dismay when Cellular Solutions revealed their unbalanced staffing structure. And whilst we’re talking of balance here’s a statement from their managing director on the subject.

Let’s move on the little explored territory of paranormal kitchen based phenomena. Firstly the mysterious case of the suicidal robot cleaner that apparently chose to end it all with a cooker and then the terrifying tale of spontaneous towel combustion. Actually, after reading those stories I can see why they’re little explored.

According to some scientists this is the fossil remains of the “oldest ever complete example of life on Earth”. Although according to others it might not be. But hey, that’s how scientists think as any baby would know. However, if you’re a scientist and you stumble across the oldest actual living creature, what do you do? Kill it of course mwuhahaha!

Here’s an article on quantum physics and the afterlife from the Daily Mail that I swear is word for word a conversation I had as a drunken student many years ago.

Here’s a little something for you cycling fans out there. A great set of films on the science of bike design.

Some visuals for you now starting with the photographically documented story of a family’s experience of werewolf syndrome. Click here for one of those eye bending optical illusion things. And not particularly skeptical but still oh so good, high speed photos of wet dogs shaking their heads.

Despite our best efforts, Birmingham Skeptics has yet to secure funding from Big Pharma so maybe there’s a chance from Big Alt Med. Perhaps we could get royal patronage, maybe Edzard can put a word in for us.

If you enjoy random linkage you really need to get liking our Facebook page. Roy Beddowes populates it with all manner of links that might be of interest to those of a skeptical and science bent. To give you a taste of what goes on there, and not in any way a shameless space filling exercise, here is a selection of the goodness recently posted therein:

The unexpected ways that animals use their genitals.
Imagining the post-antibiotic future.
Four new ways to smuggle information across the internet.
Toy robots picking fun at our smartphone addiction.
Girls and girls’ toys.
Don’t be too Northern for Ofsted!
50,000 generations of bacteria prove that evolution never stops.
Chickenpox nostalgia.
Behold the smelloscope!
The paranormal pursuit of life after death.

We’ve got an extra talk this month, no less than Simon Singh himself taking us through the Maths Secrets of the Simpsons. We expect this to be a popular event and any money collected on the night will be given over to Medicins San Frontieres. You can also sign up for our Christmas themed talk with the wonderful Mike Hall and our December Book Group who will be reading and discussing Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape.

We’ve got events posted up for months to come and you can get details for them here. True some of the details are sketchy but that just means that these are new talks, being written and thought through just for us and you will be the first to hear them. We’ll fill in the gaps when we get the info.so keep checking back.

Although Simon’s talk is on the subject of Maths he’s happy to take questions on anything for the Q and A. perhaps you can ask him about his career as a pop song lyricist

This week’s round-up was assembled by Patrick Redmond (@paddyrex) with the usual help of the linkmaster, Roy Beddowes.