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My wife just asked me if I have booked that flight yet. When I get home, she will ask me if I have submitted my expenses yet. The answer to both is no - because I was reading this.

Of course, she won’t read that because she is not a procrastinator and doesn’t understand how procrastinators work so I’ll quote a little bit for her:

All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Jeff will have read it already because he has more important things to do and, when he asks me if I am done with that report yet? I will say no because I was writing this blog.

 It is easy to take this as an important task with a pressing deadline (for you non-procrastinators, I will observe that deadlines really start to press a week or two after they pass.)

The non-procrastinators among you

 may be asking, “How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?”

To find out the answer, you’ll have to read the article. But, of course,  the procrastinators have already read it.

Soccer is better exercise than jogging:

Now a new study led by Peter Klustrup offers us a new reason to play: Apparently if we don’t kill ourselves during the game, we actually get more exercise than spending an equivalent amount of time jogging:

Each period of exercise lasted about one hour and took place three times a week. After 12 weeks, researchers found that the body fat percentage in the soccer players dropped by 3.7 percent, compared to about 2 percent for the joggers.The soccer players also increased their muscle mass by almost 4.5 pounds, whereas the joggers didn’t have any significant change. Those who did no exercise registered little change in body fat and muscle mass.

It’s also more fun.

On the downside, you are more likely to get punched playing soccer. Especially if you are playing my team

What’s wrong with these pictures?

Answer in the comments before you click on the pictures to find the real answers.

Seed Magazine has just announced the winners of a competition that invited contestants to answer the question:

 What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st Century?

One of the winning essays, Camelot is only a model, praised the ability to know how to use models and when to discard them.

Understanding that our scientific knowledge is “only” a model is the key to true scientific literacy. Knowing this tells us that our science has built-in limitations, but that it does resemble reality in very fundamental ways. More importantly, that understanding gives us permission to use our models when they are useful—and permission to discard them when they no longer meet our needs.

How do you teach that in middle school?

An interesting paper in Seed magazine that suggests that the sudden emergence of language about 120,000 years ago is due to a mutation in a gene, FOXP2, that we share with most other organisms.

Essentially, the paper says, most of the ability to use language is innate and was used for other purposes in early humans and in our closest primate relatives but the final component that made language possible was the ability to parse and reconstruct complex sequences - an ability that we share with songbirds such as the finch. It turns out that finches have the same mutation.

the connection between humans and songbirds goes even deeper than all this. The finch’s FoxP2 differs from the human’s in only eight out of 200,000 positions, and the brain circuit that operates during birdsong is functionally equivalent to one of the subcortical brain circuits involved in human language. The reason the birds do not exhibit language, then, is probably because their brains just lack much of the outer cortex that we have.

The Neanderthal genome sequencing is almost complete and it is expected that Neanderthals - which had only rudimentary language abilities - will have a different version of the FOXP2 gene.

What, the paper wonders, would happen if you were to introduce the mutated version of the gene into chimpanzee? Would that unlock some latent ability?

Hey! Who’s that taking a corner? Why, it’s me!

Tom and Gina came along to watch us get our arses whuped on Sunday and took lots of pictures to preserve the arse-whuping for posterity (haha!geddit?).

In future, I will only invite people to games where we have a chance of winning…which is why I didn’t invite anyone to the final of my indoor league tonight.

If you are planning to write a Curriculum Vitae resume any time soon, read this first.

Tip #5: Avoid Wank Words

Wank Words are words that inflate your perceived importance (e.g. using “architected” rather than “designed”), or words that have simply become synonyms, such as “Rational UML Process”, for the so-called work done by people who sit on their asses and don’t know how to code anymore.

Wank Words are worse than just devoid of content; they’re active indicators of total inactivity. Resume screeners either delete Wank Words or replace them with the word “wank” (e.g., “Certified Wank Master”), which makes the resume a lot easier to scan.

“Advocate” is a common wank word, when it refers to a title or position. If it’s a verb then it’s just a weasel word, but if you think it’s your title, then you’ve inflated yourself into Wanker territory. Either way, if you’re walking around advocating stuff, it means you’re not working. Also, it means nobody listens to you, because if you possessed actual leadership, people would just do what you recommended and then you wouldn’t need advocate it anymore. So “advocate” just means “wanker”.
[...]

Hence, many wank-filled resumes wind up looking, after the screeners have marked them up a bit, like this: “Senior wanker wanking for the Wank-Wank Institute of Wankology on the wank wank wank project during which I wanked successfully with seven other wanky wankers.”

In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’

Stephen Jay Gould

The New York Times picked up the torch that Richard and I were carrying on Friday:

Some experts on science education also point to the typical sequence of high school science instruction: biology, chemistry and then physics. It would make more sense in reverse, these people say, because the principles of physics underlie chemistry, which is crucial for an understanding of biology.

Perhaps the leading champion of this “physics first” approach is Leon M. Lederman, a particle physicist, Nobel laureate and former director of Fermilab whose focus lately has been on improving science and math education. He said the current biology-chemistry-physics sequence dates from the late 19th century, when “we didn’t know enough” and biology was considered a “descriptive” subject.

In fact, Dr. Lederman said, “biology is the most complicated of all subjects, and it is based on chemistry and physics.” And, he added, “there is nothing in chemistry, no fact of chemistry or process of chemistry that if you ask ‘Why does this happen?’ you don’t go back to physics.”

It’s interesting that biology was chosen as first because it is “descriptive” (and therefore, presumably, easier). Maybe that’s why they do Earth Sciences first at Bret Harte? Maybe it makes it more interesting for people who don’t like science?

Anyway, Richard and I are firmly in the physics first camp. You can’t understand the others properly without it and - for a kids who wants to know how things work - it’s by far the most interesting.