Sometimes all we have is our reputation.
This point has been illustrated very vividly this morning in Waterford, where the only thing of value, it seems, that is left in the Waterford Crystal factory is its reputation.  And indeeed, how valuable it is proving to be.  For more than 200 years this company has survived recessions, […]

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It looks like the NO vote will win today and the EU reform treaty will not be ratified by Ireland.
Scare tactics
My opinion on this is that this has been a success for the politics of the scare tactic and a tremendous success for George Bush’s mouthpiece in Ireland.  The EU project has hit a major […]

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Well, according to Paddy Power, the Lisbon Treaty will make it through.  The YES camp are odds-on favourites, with the NO camp being at 2-1.
The interesting one is the margin of victory.  The shortest odds are for a victory between 50.01-54%.  The odds here are 4-7, that is to say if you bet 7 Euro, […]

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I’m a bit ignorant of Irish poets, so Cathal O’Searcaigh has flown under my radar until the recent controversy on the documentary “Fairytale of Kathmandu”. I haven’t seen the documentary, but essentially it involved a film crew going to Kathmandu with this Irish poet and filming his charity work. The wrinkle is that […]

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So, did you ever wonder if longevity can be inherited?  Is it predetermined at birth how long you might live?

Well, for some time, we have felt that this is so, but what we didn’t know was which genes were involved and how influential these genes might be. 

There is a new report that takes a pretty […]

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Increasingly of late I have heard people describing themselves as Geeks. This is not a description that is based on these people having low self-esteem issues and describing themselves as geeks in a defeatist way.
To the contrary.
This self-description is being made in a way that is proud and indeed subversive. For it is […]

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Carl Zimmer now has a huge ‘emporium’ of science tattoos. Well worth a look:
http://carlzimmer.typepad.com/sciencetattoo
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Amy Winehouse smoked crack, got most of herself tattooed, wore hideous clothes, knocked out one of her teeth, wouldn’t go to Rehab, but then she did, has hair like its a kind of disease or at least a fence at Guantanamo bay.
Therefore, she won more Grammys than Paul MacCartney has had hot dinners and wives […]

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I am a genetic determinist, by which I mean that I am of the opinion that a lot of what we do is predetermined by our genes. We are finding more and more that behaviour and psychological traits have a genetic basis. Today I read this from the BBC website:
Becoming overweight as a […]

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I am one of those people that has blue eyes. This is what we call a recessive trait and we know that people with blue eyes must inherit one recessive gene from their mother and one from their father. However, which is the older trait? Were the first humans brown eyed or […]

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