Proven By Science
2 March 2011
The diagnosis came at the age of 2. My father had set me down some distance from the hives, handing me a jar of honey, and he went to tend the bees. Or “keep” them. I got stung as I sat there, and my little body swole up like a tomato. The hospital nurse (my father claims) said I was the most allergic case they’d ever had.
I was stung 11 times in the next eight years. Each sting required a trip to the emergency room. Trust me when I tell you that “the ER” isn’t as sexy as George Clooney made it out to be. One time I saw a guy with multiple stab wounds in the waiting room, sitting calmly on one of the orange plastic seats, holding his sides. (Many of my friends had never been stung at all. Is there something about the flesh of allergic kids that proves irresistible to bees – and indeed to yellowjackets, wasps, and hornets? Something about the way they smell?)
The full-body swelling is what distinguishes your allergic types from run-of-the-mill stingees. When it happens, it’s serious. So throughout my childhood I went every six weeks, like clockwork, to get “my shots” – four injections, each with a different blend of hymenoptera serum, designed to mitigate any systemic reaction to a bee sting. But the shots hurt, too. Was it worth it? Getting “stung” 30-some times a year by a needle just in case I got stung once by a bee? more »
Elisha Sessions in Proven By Science • 5 Comments
23 August 2010
2 August 2010
In part 1 of this series looking at artist metrics on Last.FM, I talked about PPL (Plays Per Listener) and also the relative popularity of each act’s top track.
In this part we dig a little bit deeper into an artist’s catalogue, with two more metrics based on their list of top tracks (which, remember, are the tracks with most listeners over the last six months, not over the whole of LFM’s history). I’m calling these metrics – rather unimaginatively – head and body. “Head” is the number of listeners to the tenth most popular track expressed as a percentage of the number of listeners to the first. “Body” is the number of listeners to the fiftieth most popular track expressed as a percentage of the number of listeners to the tenth.
Both of these are based on the same principle – ratios of popular and less popular songs in an artist’s catalogue – but they turn out to measure quite different things. Head measures the extent to which an act is a several-hit wonder. A high head means that your top track isn’t that much more popular than your tenth, which usually means you’ve racked up either a bunch of successful singles or have at least one album that people are keen to listen to in toto. A low head means that you have a few, or maybe just one track which people are particularly keen on but that interest doesn’t extend very far – it suggests a big chunk of casual listeners in your audience. more »
Tom in FT /Proven By Science • 5 Comments
9 June 2010
Ah controversy. So many people court you but when is the wedding? I have always found the ideas of religions advertising to be a bit odd*, though even I cannot help but smuggle a small smile when I think of cheap posters saying Carpenter Seeks Joiners (flocking Eastern Europeans not wanted – pah). Nevertheless the teacup tempest caused by this ultrasound poster campaign for Christmas** does seem to flap around the resemblance this poster has to those used by anti-abortion campaigns of recent years (of course no-one really minds pro-lifers using Christianity for their own ends but I digress). This poster however is so staggeringly bonkers that it cannot help raise a large number of secondary thoughts, a number of which are pro-choice. I mean Mary didn’t really have a choice about harbouring Jesus in her womb, and honour that I daresay it was, it probably put Joseph’s back up a bit and she didn’t even have the benefit of a quickie with a swan that she might have got from a different pantheon.
Anyway it made me think:
a) That halo must be a bit uncomfortable. more »
Pete Baran in FT /Proven By Science • No Comments
26 March 2010
I was lucky enough to attend a fascinating talk hosted by Mark Earls at the RSA last night on “cultural evolution” – using evolutionary theory to examine the mechanics of how stuff spreads through culture. I then came home and found a great Nitsuh Abebe post on my tumblr dashboard about music critic cliches – when and how they’re used.
The link between these two things? One of the most interesting parts of the talk was when Dr Alex Bentley of Durham university showed some analysis of the spread of “buzzwords” in academia – how particular language choices move through a population. He was looking at the change in use of words like “nuanced”, “apropos”, or “agency” as well as more obviously loaded terms like “Marxist” and words like “retarded” (which academics tend to use to mean ‘slowed’). So of course I found this quite exciting, as it seems to me not wholly unlikely that the use of words like “ethereal” or “soundscape” might well spread in similar ways. more »
Tom in Proven By Science • 5 Comments
19 February 2010
Yesterday’s long overdue unveiling of the Pumpkin Publog’s favoured list of friends – friends who unfailingly keep our fettles fine on these February nights – let’s not speak of the mornings – prompted a bit of “who dat?” and “wha??” – at least from this corner – so if you too, dear one, find yourself in need of some architecural certainty, a solid platform from which to launch yourself towards certain bin death, look no further. Courtesy of Flickr user John Bullas, this CAD-rendered chart has pretty much everything you need to know if you want to make classic American cocktails with the precision of a construction foreman. You can click on it to go through to a gigantic version, suitable for framing.
Elisha Sessions in Proven By Science /Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
29 December 2009
Every year since pubs were invented (nine years by my reckoning), the fine drinkers of Freaky Trigger and ILX have spent the 29th December in a pub. Well, at least seven pubs infact, for the 29th is the date of the Annual Between Christmas and New Year Pub Crawl. Why the 29th? Well it’s the quietest pub day of the year, so we do our bit for the licensed trade and try to bolster their coffers.
Past crawls have taken in the Euston Hexagon, the Mornington Crescent, strange arcane routes across the river and last year a foray into Marylebone. This year we are again pushing further afield, by about half a mile and have settled on the wonderful environs of Pimlico, and its surprisingly large number of estate pubs!
So I give you Das Pimlico Boot (when you see the map it makes sense). more »
Pete Baran in FT /Proven By Science /Pumpkin Publog • 9 Comments
18 November 2009
I will say not one bad word about Sam Smith’s in this review. Someone else wants to talk around that issue, but safe to say that as someone with a large social group of varying incomes, Sam Smith’s pubs being cheap has always been a factor. The John Snow in Soho is one of those pubs we rarely go to these days (in the area the Shaston Arms or Star And Garter get more visits) but hasn’t really changed, and holds a firm and fond place in our memories. I probably pop in there a couple of times a year and have whiled away a fair few hours with a pint of Hefeweisse reading about the good Dr Snow upstairs.
So things to note. The John Snow is named after John Snow the health campaigner, not the newsreader, which is amusing in itself as John Snow was a confirmed teetotaller*. The pub is near the pump that Snow brought fresh water into Soho thus sorting out the cholera epidemic. This marks it out in Soho already, for an area with a pretty full history an awful lot of the pubs are highly anonymous. more »
Pete Baran in FT /Proven By Science /Pumpkin Publog • 18 Comments
30 October 2009
An occasional series where we mock the nonsense written on crisp packets.
“It takes a more adventurous homegrown spud to volunteer for our sizzling Jamaican Jerk Chicken. Some spuds simply ‘dreaded’ not being picked so they went back to their roots (man!) to prove their worth. But the ones in this bag just chilled out ‘cos they knew they ware far better than the rest of the others.”
Well done Walkers, skirting accusations of racism and cultural stereotyping in three needless sentences to add nothing to a bag of crisps that tastes just like you mixed up the roast chicken powder with the picked onion powder.
Pete Baran in FT /Proven By Science /Pumpkin Publog • 1 Comment
17 October 2009
As part of my job, I am the recipient of lost property, contents of unused lockers and the like at a university. These usually sit on a shelf until claimed, however yesterday I was contacted regarding the contents of a locker which the student no longer wanted. “Give the contents away” he said from Dubai. So I went through the books to distribute to new students, and thought I would claim as my payment a packet of Quavers. Lovely, lovely quavers, the cheese corn puff curl which both crunches and is insubstantial. A hard mans Skip, a weak mans crisp. Moreish in all the best ways.
The locker had been in use recently I had assumed by the phonecall, accidentally left full at the end of September. Unfortunately the same could not be said of the Quavers. After eating the first one, I noticed something wasn’t right. Checking ont he packet I discovered the truth. The Quavers had an expiry date of the 30/12/08. They were ten months out of date. So what happens to cheesy Quavers after they have expired?
They taste of Humbol Messerschmitt Grey Enamel Paint. Who knew?*
*Note, I know what this paint tastes like from an accidental brush sucking moment as a child when painting an airfix kit.
Pete Baran in Proven By Science • 2 Comments
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