Envy
cwilcox | September 2, 2009Sure, there's the cute accent. There's the funny hats. There's the feeling of intellectual superiority when it comes to humor. There's even the fact that I could ignore painful dental visits without becoming socially ostracized. But mostly, I occasionally want to be British because of things like this:
Last Chance to See, BBC2, from Sunday 6 September, 8pm
Mark has joined forces with Stephen Fry to present a new series about threatened species, as inspired by the best-selling book which Mark wrote some 20 years ago with Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See.
The six-part series - which is…
purepedantry | April 14, 2009I don't think I am alone in saying that I often feel a little envy and schadenfreude towards my peers. Science is a particularly competitive business with few remunerative rewards, so a lot of my self-worth is tied to comparisons with my peer's successes and failures. I won't deny being envious when someone gets a Science paper. And while seeing the abject failure of my peers isn't high on my list of priorities, I won't deny the small satisfaction that I get when someone who breezed through their PhD gets taken down a peg.
These aren't happy-joy-joy emotions. They don't make me swell with…