I arrived at the college where I work this morning to find it had been turned into a hospital overnight. At least that was what a new sign by the door declared it to be. Walking through the doorway, I met a team of workmen hanging up signage redesignating what I thought was a classroom as a ward. It turned out that my employer had not sold the site to the health service and forgotten to tell me, but there’s a film crew in town.

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This is Grammer a Week, the periodic blog program-thing where I soapbox about a grammar subject I find interesting. You might, too! This week's installment is about the Oxford comma. Also known as the serial comma, the Oxford comma is a subject of intense debate among grammarists. Not as vicious as, perhaps, the debate about single vs. double spacing, but it's still something you'll see people screaming

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New Particle Gadgeteering post: Particle Tracking: Joining the Dots in the ATLAS Experiment. More exciting adventures about building particle detectors...

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A few bits of random news:

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Hello readers, and welcome back to another Monday installment of Being a Better Writer! Though today just isn’t any old Monday. Today is also Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so named in the honor of the individual whose name it bears.

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Let's mark July 4 with something from the Master of Chaos...

“How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!”

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Apparently, a court case was just decided based on the omission of an Oxford comma. Several ironies follow.

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