Just a few.
• There’s a worked solution to the brainteaser in my February Diary here.
• A reader of the transcript from my March 8th Radio Derb:
Only because I am an opera singer (baritone) and thus familiar with most singers, do I point out to you that the soprano singing the Bellini clip is not in fact Lucia Aliberti, with whom I sang I Puritani in Marseille, but Edita Gruberova.
Thank you, Sir, but the singer in the podcast is Aliberti. If you click the link on the transcript, though, you do indeed get Gruberova. I’ve added an explanatory note to the archived transcript.
• A reader of the March 16th post distilled from the previous day’s Radio Derb got his attention snagged on my remarks about ferocious Irish females.
I read your latest ... and it brought to mind a few papers I came across during the past week. It appears that the use of hormonal contraceptives [Available in fhe Republic of Ireland from 1964 unofficially and legalized 1979] is associated with increased aggression in women using them. I wonder if this research will have the same effects on these researchers’ careers as Mr. Murray’s work on IQ distributions has had on his.
He sent me links to three relevant published papers:
Fascinating stuff; and am glad to have met the vomeronasal organ again after a lapse of 24 years.
However, my advice would be to not attempt a deep dive into psychoneuroendocrinology (yes, there really is such a field) unless you are confident that you know your estriol from your estradiol, your cortisol from your calcidiol, etc.
My own contribution to research in this field will be a paper, so far unpublished, arguing that once a person of either sex has passed the age of 75, his/her body begins to produce ever-larger quantities of a hormone previously present only at trace levels: the hormone fukitol.
