As I surfaced the other day, there was a discussion on Today about the marketing of e-cigarattes between Deborah Arnott, chief executive of ASH, and Lorien Jollye of the New Nicotine Alliance (now there‘s an organisation that wears its heart on its sleeve!). It’s available from about the 1:22 mark here. Having re-listened, it appears to me […]
Category: Gratuitous music video
Saatchi Bill – Update
Damn. Damn, damn, damn. It turns out that the version of the Medical Innovation Bill about which I wrote this morning isn’t the most recent: the most recent version is available here. Naïvely, I’d assumed that the government would make sure the latest version was the easiest to find. Silly me. Here’s the updated version […]
Testing, testing…
So, yeah. It’s been a bit quiet here, hasn’t it? There’s been a range of reasons. Mainly, it’s had to do with David and I both having to do (whisper it) real w*rk, and that’s got in the way. And then WordPress went a bit odd, which made it impossible to post anything. (Part of the […]
Italian Pop Music’s Role in Bioethical Debate
Sadly, the list entitled “Great Moments in Italian Pop” is short; but the entry that must surely be at the top is probably very near the top of the list entitled “Great Moments in All Pop”. It’s a 1972 song by Adriano Celentano. Prisencolinensinainciusol. It’s pure gibberish – a parody of what anglophone pop sounds […]
Crime and the Less-Polluted City Solution
People who listen to Today may have heard an article in the prime 8:10 slot on the 9th about the correlation between a drop in the use of leaded petrol, and a drop in violent crime rates. (Mother Jones actually beat the BBC, having published a piece on the same research last week: I meant to post something […]
Is Julian Savulescu Channelling Bryan Ferry?
Specifically, I have in mind Roxy Music’s “Love is the Drug“. (Annoyingly, I can’t get the video to embed.*) And I don’t just mean Julian – I mean him, and Anders Sandberg, with Brian Earp somewhere in there too. The thought crosses my mind because I’ve been reading this essay in New Scientist, which apparently […]
Musing about Kant (2)
It’s very easy, having encountered Kant for the first time, to think that his account of morality is much too cold and impersonal to be plausible – the sort of thing you might expect from a computer rather than a human. And though this criticism is rather simplistic – I think that Kant does have […]