It Ain't Necessarily So: Why Much of the Medical Literature Is Wrong

What is a brain, and who said so?

A love affair with dictionaries began when I was a schoolboy. My parents encouraged me to "look it up in the dictionary" whenever a word was questioned. It was an ingenuous time. The meaning of a word was enshrined in the dictionary, and words existed because they were recorded there. When someone said "ain't" we chanted, "Ain't ain't a word, because ain't ain't in the dictionary." The concept ...

It ain't necessarily so: the cost implications of health care reform.

Why we need to read and understand literature: literariness and Hans Rosling’s Factfulness (2018)

My article addresses the qualities of “good” literature and how an understanding of the nature of literary devices, so-called “literariness”, can enhance the reading experience. Focusing on Hans Rosling’s Factfulness (2018), I discuss some of the most important features of good writing. Six literary devices have been selected for special attention: point of view, tone, amplification, anecdotes,...

It Ain't What You View, But The Way That You View It: documenting spreadsheets with Excelsior, semantic wikis, and literate programming

I describe preliminary experiments in documenting Excelsior versions of spreadsheets using semantic wikis and literate programming. The objective is to create well-structured and comprehensive documentation, easy to use by those unfamiliar with the spreadsheets documented. I discuss why so much documentation is hard to use, and briefly explain semantic wikis and literate programming; although p...

On the Flying Carpet of Orientalism: Reading Anita Amirrezvani’s The Blood of Flowers

This article draws attention to the ways in which Anita Amirrezvani’s The Blood of Flowers (2007), a historical novel set in 17th-century Iran, can be placed within the neo-orientalist discourse which informs many of the post-9/11 memoirs and novels set in contemporary Iran by women of the Iranian diaspora in the United States. Besides being a novel on Islam and Islamic rule—which makes it much...