Sunday, January 30, 2011

one of the boys

This article has caused an uproar in our house.

It started with Dad - he said he'd heard the interview and was incredulous that Tony Veitch (remember him? He beat the hell out of his partner) could ask John Key if he'd like to be Shane Warne. This as a slight tangent from asking who Key's favourite sportspeople were.

But lo and behold, Key would be Warne in a heartbeat because of that thing he's got going with Liz Hurley. Other "normal manly sentiments" include a liking for Jessica Alba and Angelina Jolie too.


So Katie and I checked out the online article ourselves and what do we find? Not a single sportsman in sight, but John Key at the top and pictures of Alba in a bikini, Jolie looking rather lovely, and Elizabeth Hurley showing a lot of cleavage down the side of the text.

Then there was this stunner of a quote from former league player Dean Lonergan:

"Those women who might be upset at his comments are obviously just disappointed they never made John Key's list and never will."

Friday, January 21, 2011

Women and Science

So I was watching the TV today (as you do) and a name was given to me.

Rosalind Franklin.


Today I learnt that Rosalind Franklin was a British biophysicist, specialising in X-ray crystallography.

Of course we've all heard the names Watson and Crick.

But I'd never heard of Rosalind Franklin. At the very same time Watson and Crick were building models of the molecular arrangement of DNA, Franklin was taking x-ray photographs of DNA.

Without Franklin's consent, her research partner Maurice Wilkins showed photograph 51 to Watson.

Because Rosalind Franklin died in 1958, she is not eligible for a posthumous Nobel Prize. However, her former partner Wilkins joined Watson and Crick in receiving a Nobel Prize in 1962 for work on nucleic acids.



IMHO, her research contributed to Watson and Crick's work on the double helix, and it's a damned shame her name hasn't been a part of my vocabulary until now.


Rosalind Franklin on Wikipedia

Thursday, January 6, 2011

pardon me?

Did someone suggest they pardon convicted rapist Moshe Katsav?

Oh, wait, no, he's some bigwig in Israel. A politician. His humiliation is enough.


NOT.



What rubbish.