Help the USA into the 21st century (even if you’re not American)

[This is cross-posted from my other blog, Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week. I never cross-post: this is, as far as I remember, literally the first time I have done it. But this issue is so important and so urgent that I am making an exception. Please, please: sign the petition, upvote the Reddit and Hacker News submissions, blog about it, tweet about it, tell your friends.]

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Good news! If you want to read research that was funded by the U.S. National Instututes of Health (NIH), you can. Their public access policy means that papers published on their dime become universally accessible in PubMed Central.

Mike’s bang-up-to-date review of The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

It’s taken five months, but tonight we finally all sat down and watched Doctor Who‘s 2012 Christmas special again.  So I can finally expand on my extremely brief initial remarks.

Unfortunately, this is going to be a very tedious excuse for a review, because once again, I’m going to be overwhelmingly positive.  I was very disappointed by the final episode of Series 6, and remarked that “Next up will be the Christmas special — a presumably stand-alone story in which I hope we will see that Moffat has not misplaced his mojo”.  And indeed we did.

Has Apple gone too far with its iBrick?

I am a big fan of Apple’s minimalist design aesthetic, but I think they may have gone too far with their new iBrick:

Mushroom soup

Following on from the mushroom pasta recipe last time, here is a very simple but delicious mushroom soup that I’ve been making a lot recently.

Ingredients

• One large onion
• A good-sized knob of butter
• Plenty of mushrooms — I use one or two complete 250g tubs.
• Flour — maybe about four heaped teaspoons
• About two litres of real chicken stock, simmered from a carcass.
• A dash of cream — maybe 50 ml or so
• Salt and pepper

Foolproof super-simple but awesome recipe: mushroom pasta

I’ve been cooking this a lot recently, after having eaten something similar at our best nearby pub/restaurant, The Mill Race.  It came as quite a shock to realise how simple it is, and I thought it deserved to be  shared more widely.

Ingredients: mushrooms, cream, butter, salt, pepper, pasta.

Quantities: I really couldn’t say: I just use the amount that seems about right.  To give a very rough idea, I used a dozen mushrooms when I last made this, which was for three people, but you could certainly use more.  Probably about 100 ml of cream, and a blob of butter about the size of a smallish USB stick.  (I propose this as the new standard unit for measuring butter.)

Can birds fly into a headwind that is faster than their own maximum speed?

I just read this snippet in Gerald L. Wood’s fascinating Guinness Book of Animal Facts and Feats, 3rd edition [amazon.com, amazon.co.uk]:

Who needs access? You need access!

If you’re wondering why it’s been so quiet around here recently …

I’ve been working on a new site, which I and two colleagues will be maintaining, and which I think is potentially the most important thing I’ve ever done.  It’s called Who Needs Access? You Need Access!, and you can read it at http://whoneedsaccess.org/

We have a problem: the majority of the research that our governments fund is not available to most people.