The Wisdom of Whores

I’m spending a few days making hay with friends in the hills near Geneva. I leave you with this priceless image courtesy of the rectal microbicide folks. What can Ana have been thinking of?

So a Russian girl is worth twice as much as a girl from north China, huh? And Malaysian girls are discounted fairly heavily. There are 460 million young adult women in China. That’s 60 times more “girls” that you’ll find in Malaysia (even if you count the Chinese Malaysians). My rudimentary understanding of economics suggests [...]

I was pleased to read of the marriage of Bishop Gene Robinson and his partner of 20 years Mark Andrew. Well, not marriage actually, but civil union, the closest we allow gay men and women to get to the sacrament in most States in the US.
Bishop Robinson is Episcopalian (which is pretty High Church in [...]

I’ve been remiss about posting links to electronic versions of all of the references cited in The Wisdom of Whores (or at least abstracts, where academic journals or others continue to restrict copyright to full text). I just have not found time to post several hundred documents and links to the site yet; though I [...]

This evening, I’m speaking at London’s Southbank Centre about how to communicate uncertainties in data to a non-scientific audience. And what pops into my in box but this, from Scott Adams (via Tim Brown)?

The first review of The Wisdom of Whores hit the newsstands yesterday, in London’s Evening Standard. I was honoured that fab World of Boy novelist Will Self read the book, and thrilled that he reviewed it with his penis. (Well, he reviewed it with his brain. But he reviewed it together with his penis, which [...]

Viruses can shut down immune systems and computer systems. They cost lives and money. But they can be works of great beauty. The HIV virus, bulbous and all hung about with stubby projections, is a bit of an exception. But look at “MyDoom”, a computer virus that’s been around since 2003.

Alex Dragulescu of MIT has [...]

A while back, I posted a link to BioRad’s unlikely but delightful PCR test anthem, “When you need to know who Daddy is”.
Those tests are strictly for lab nerds. More recently, though, supermarkets have started stocking do it yourself paternity tests. It wasn’t ever going to be long before enthusiastic you-tubers had a go [...]

My gorgeous Goddaughter Poppy and her family live in Kachin state in the north of Burma, close to the Chinese border. The capital of Kachin, Myitkyina, sticks in my mind as the place with the highest HIV prevalence I’ve ever seen in routine surveillance data: over 80% in drug injectors throughout most of the 1990s. [...]