But he also had non-Muslim friends and enjoyed playing football and snooker.As if choice of sports really had anything to do with one’s personality.
Another journalistic blunder was the inclusion of a 1/3 page story about the upcoming Harry Potter game. The article highlights the various obstacles Electronic Arts developers had to overcome in order to make the game work. No wonder she’s the richest person in Britain when she gets this sort of free publicity.
Gains and losses in the local elections, with a clarifying subheading
There was good news and bad news for the main parties. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Oh, and another thing: one FT writer referred to Matrix as a ”cult hit”. What a weird definition that is.
An ex-editor on Science is quoted in the article as saying If a child destined to have a permanently low IQ could be cured by replacing a gene, would anyone really argue with that? It is a short step from that decision to improving a normal IQ.
Errors of this ilk are quite common but it gets worse.
A passage such as Of course, the problem is that if everyone’s adding 30 IQ points, then having an IQ of 150 won’t get you any closer to an elite university than you were at the outset
shows exactly what the confusion is about. For IQ is defined in such a way that the median of all people will have an IQ of 100, meaning that if ”everyone adds 30 IQ points”, the resulting median still won’t be 130 but 100 and therefore talk of IQ points is quite useless, even misleading.
There is a possibility that this could be understood to be analogous to percentage points, but this theory can be easily debunked. Note how the author writes about adding 30 IQ points and thus resulting in an IQ of 150, not 150 IQ points. It’s the same as saying ”by adding 20 percentage points, the result is 150 percentages”, which is utter nonsense.
I’m not worried about possible mistakes I’ve made with statistical terms and concepts here, for I know I have an avid reader who’ll surely point out my possible shortcomings in no time.
Ethical guidelines promulgated by the scientific monitoring boards so far prohibit actual attempts at human germline engineering, but researches have walked right up to the line, maybe even stuck a toe over it.
promulgate (v) 1: state or announce [syn: proclaim, exclaim] 2: put a law into effect by formal declaration – source: The Guardian Weekend 3.5.2003, p. 21
Alas, more fun was on the way. Come to think of it, everything worked out in a way that bears a strong resemblance to self-fulfilling prophecies: once you know what to look for, it becomes much easier to find. But I’m hurrying ahead of myself here.
So after American media satire it was the turn of an old British favourite. 
Tell me this headline isn’t something out of a vintage Monty Python episode.
Luckily things then started to slow down. 
This headline doesn’t actually have anything to do with the paper but with the English legal lingo in general. Could someone please tell me what constitutes a legal killing?
One more item before I stop. This was a brilliant example of spoof advertising, more clever than the little scuffle between Ryanair and Easyjet (no way am I going to endorse their silly way of capitalizing the name). In case you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, Easyjet has been running ads with the line ”High prices to Spain? That’s bullocks!” to which Ryanair responded by quoting a survey about the reliability of various airlines and the line (paraphrased) ”Punctuality? That’s bullocks!” But I digress.
Take a look yourself. First the one pushing BT’s new number directory service and then the competing one:
But then again, anything is better than the slogan of one local bar / club / restaurant / whatever, the name of which fortunately escapes me: ”Be scene, not herd”. Now I might be a tad on the slow side but doesn’t being part of the scene mean exactly being part of a group of people, ie. herd?
How was I supposed to know you didn’t want a trepanning?
trepanning (n) : to perforate (the skull) with a trepan, so as to remove a portion of the bone, and thus relieve the brain from pressure or irritation; to perform an operation with the trepan – source: The Onion Ad Nauseam, p. 144