Science

Lacking in pep? Looking for some extra zing as winter sets in? The Spectator recommends our energy conference on 1 December. Tickets are still available, sign up here. I don’t want this to become the ‘Tom Tells You To Get High’ blog, so this will be the last time I write about cannabis for awhile, I promise. Unless there’s something interesting in the news about it again. Anyway, pass the dutchie on the left-hand side and all that. The Daily Mail, the BBC and the Telegraph report that teenagers who smoke cannabis regularly do worse in their exams. Per the Mail: ‘The findings. . . add to a growing weight of evidence

James Delingpole’s latest Spectator column laments the pernicious portmanteau afflicting this fine month: Stoptober. Geddit? That’s ‘-ober’, as in the second half of ‘October’, with the word ‘Stop’ cunningly positioned where the ‘Oct’ would normally be. And what marketing genius was responsible for this rebranding? Why, someone from an Orwellian body which you’d probably much prefer didn’t exist, let alone to have to fund with your taxes. Public Health England. James closes with his own call to action: ‘Let’s start by reclaiming October.’ In that spirit, and on the conviction that public tediousness is a greater hazard than the odd puff, here are seven non-catastrophic health-related outcomes observed in association with smoking. 1. Revenge

Where to start with Prof Dawkins’ latest observations about religion and fundamentalism? In response to questions from an audience in Edinburgh where he was promoting his autobiography this week he observed that ‘nice’ religious people give credence to suicide bombers. It’s remarkable, really, that after a good eight years of debate and dialogue with people like Rowan Williams and Jonathan Sacks — viz, perfectly rational believers — he can still say the following: ‘…there is a sense in which the moderate, nice religious people – nice Christians, nice Muslims – make the world safe for extremists. ‘Because the moderates are so nice we all are brought up with the idea that

Terry Eagleton, the Marxist literary critic, has been something of a hero of mine since the publication of his Reason, Faith and Revolution, a thoroughgoing demolition of the Richard Dawkins critique of religion – on the sound basis that Prof Dawkins didn’t know what he was talking about – and his latest, Culture and the Death of God, promises to be pretty good too. listen to ‘Terry Eagleton on the Today programme’ on Audioboo

People get competitive about the difficulty of their degrees. The accepted line at Oxford is that Science is harder than Arts, and everything is harder than PPE – three years of sleeping until 1pm and waffling about Mill’s Utilitarianism, and you still get to tell employers that you have a degree in economics. It’s probably true about the PPEists, but the Arts vs. Science stuff is a myth. Scientists’ claim to the tougher time is based on the fact that they have more contact hours. More contact hours, we are often told, make a more serious degree: it was reported as a scandal in May when Bahram Bekhradnia, director of

After months of study, scientists have at last discovered the most amenable way to urinate without suffering what they call ‘splashback’. In a study entitled ‘Splash dynamics of a male urine stream’, the researchers suggest that a ‘narrow angle of attack’ and close proximity to the receptacle are both crucial factors. There was no word, however, on the vexed dilemma of whether or not you should remove the washing up from the sink before weeing or just leave it in and hope nobody notices. Incidentally, the scientists concerned are Mormons at the Brigham Young University in Utah, where every academic endeavour must be, er, guided by the Lord’s spirituality. Next

The outgoing chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, Lisa Jardine, has been paying graceful tribute to the woman whose report enabled the Authority to be set up: Dame Mary Warnock. She was, observed Prof Jardine, in an aural essay on Radio 4’s A Point of View, regarded as something of a philosophical plumber to the establishment, a woman who cleared away all the tiresome impediments in the way of getting things done with her practical, no-nonsense approach. And the Warnock Report of 1984 on in vitro fertilisation and its attendant moral problems was a case in point. Now, Dame Mary’s utility to the establishment as someone who can