Doctor Who and a link or two

[heliopausa]

Links first!

The Royal Society has been publishing in science matters for 350 years, and is celebrating by flinging all their online archives open free until the end of November. 

Here's an interesting and fun interview with a Tourette's Syndrome activist. (about ten minutes, you tube.)

Here are some great photos of Kazakh eagle hunters - like falconers, except they ride out with eagles on their wrists.  There's a recording of an interview with someone who's just written a book, too, but I haven't listened to that, just looked at the pictures. (Do I hear cries of "shame!" out there?)

I thought the Doctor playing Amazing Grace was a great intro to a very edgy episode, with so much terrifying switcheroo going on between who is family and who can be trusted after all, and what is an enemy, and can there be a friend inside the enemy, really?  (I think the Zygons' physical appearance is great.)  Yes, it's horribly easy to kill unknown people Not Like Us at a distance.  :(  I thought the soldier who didn't press his mother (or not) on his place and date of birth was surprisingly not on the ball, though.  Though then again - who was it, exactly, who were reduced to piles of smoking ash - the soldiers or their 'families'? - and as Osgood demonstrates (and Donne also hinted) doesn't every death diminish us all, anyway?

I found it a little difficult to be engaged, even so - partly because of not having lots of the background which the series now assumes.  (Like about Osgood, for example.  I have a vague feeling she's a descendant of Clara?  But I don't know why she's important, or where I got that idea from.  I don't even know all that much about Clara - though I guess there's not much more to know about her from now on, anyway.) 
also, it looked so much like a set-up for a lesson on how to be open to immigrant-led shifts in culture, and while that's a worthy end-point to be working to, I don't like great lolloping dobs of didacticism mixed in with light entertainment, especially if the light entertainment in question doesn't think its own stories through, as per the soldier, above, or askaffyr pointed out an hour or so back, the Doctor's odd decision to not use the most sensible means of transport available to him.

 

Late addition!  News from the Melbourne Cup!  I love that it was an outsider who won,that it was a female jockey, that her brother (with Down's Syndrome) is working right alongside her as a strapper.