Frank's Pandora
Quirks
Minister van Vakantie
De voorspelde reistijd van Tomtom klopte eindelijk. Ik kon door de lokale koopgoot lopen zonder als een bal in een flipperkast heen en weer te worden gekaatst. Geen oorlog met winkelwagentjes die dwars in het gangpad stonden. Wat was Nederland lekker rustig de afgelopen weken. Er was weer ruimte in ons overvolle land. Wilders probeert [...]
Subtitles
My Russian colleague Karina Nazaretyan asked me if I concurred with her theory that the Dutch speak English so well because we subtitle movies instead of dubbing them in our native language. I think her theory makes a lot of sense. People learn a foreign language by speaking it actively, but I do believe that listening [...]
Meteorological peril strikes Boston
I’m not just talking about the thousands of scientists and the hundreds of journalists flocking to the usually charming city of Boston. As the AAAS opens in Boston, MA, tomorrow, the city is covered in slush. The few inches of snow that fell last night were mixed with the litres of water coming down from [...]
Singapore slung
As we descended through a thick pack of clouds, the airplane shook violently due to the thunderstorm below. The night was pitch dark but sometimes the black clouds became visible as thunderbolts moved from cloud to cloud. This morning at 6 am local time I arrived in Singapore for three days of R&R before I [...]
100 days
100 days of clean air, 100 days of having a decent sense of smell, 100 days of having a decent smell in other people’s sense, 100 days of white teeth, 100 days of walking a flight of stairs and still being able to breath normally…you guessed it: it’s been 100 days since I quit smoking! [...]
Sound of disgust
The quest for the worst sound in the world screeched to a halt yesterday. Screeching to a halt was in fact voted as one of the world’s worst sounds. But by far the worst, the proud winner, was vomiting. For men crying babies ranked higher on the chills-down-your-spine-list than for women, a predictable outcome. The sound [...]
Facially challenged
If you’re an ugly bugger and women only smile at you in pity, fear not! Aberdeen research has found that these ‘mercy smiles’ make you more attractive to other women. Lead author Ben Jones, himself “facially challenged”, says: “So when you’re out in a bar, there’s an advantage to being nice to everyone, because if [...]
Disqualifying IDea
James Randerson, the Guardian’s science correspondent, wrote an excellent article this week dispensing once and for all the “theory” of Intelligent Design. Apparently James has, like I do, had just about enough of the nonsense arguments used in the whole debate and established that the ID movement has crossed a line: they have started infiltrating [...]
Intelligently designed debate
Newsnight broadcast an interesting debate between two professors about a teaching pack on intelligent disign sent to UK schools. I know for sure that one of the two professors has a formal training in biology, namely professor Lewis Wolpert. Pay special attention to the Paxman-like style of questioning by professor Wolpert when he demands the other professor [...]
Cruel twist of fate
The founding father of the only method to quit smoking that never worked for me has died at the tender age of 72, from lung cancer… Allen Carr dies from lung cancer An anti-smoking guru who has helped millions of smokers kick the habit has died from lung cancer.
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