University Challenge is a great British institution, only improved by picking a side to support each week. Some people get a bit tribal about football, but I’m a bit more up my own arse and cheer on academics instead.
So anyway, this is my flowchart for who I support on University Challenge each week.
Will Hutton makes some interesting points about class, and why it still matters, in a recent Observer piece.? But he’s also made a rather startling mistakes in his maths.? He states that
The good luck of being born into the right family is profound. Two American researchers, Betty Hart and Todd Risley, show how children from professional families hear on average 2,153 words per hour compared with 616 words per hour for kids in welfare families, so that by the age of three, there is a 30 million word gap between the vocabularies of children of families on welfare and those of professional families.
A 30 million word gap in vocabulary?? Surely just reading it back would tell you that there is something wrong in that statement.? It looks as though Will has mistaken occurrence for uniqueness.? Continue reading
At the start of the year I spent 10 days on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands.? The whole island has been created by volcanic activity and I was fascinated by its many different geological features such as the Jameos del Agua and La Cueva de los Verdes.
I also visited one volcano where you can walk into the crater created by an eruption. I climbed up the outside and looked down into it before I realised that you could just walk in at one point where there was a gap in the crater wall.
View of crater from above
The other Sunday I went for a walk around a part of the boundary of the Eastside regeneration area in Brum. No, really.
It was a part of Nikki Pugh‘s Uncertain Eastside project and turned out to be less of a “walk” and more of a “people clamber around a bit and take photos”. Only I don’t take photos. Sometimes I have pretensions and imagine that what I take qualify as snaps.
Anyway, ambling along Watery Lane we went by Birmingham City Mission. Here’s the view coming up to it.
Birmingham City Mission