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WindbagsOne of my personal bugbears, aside from the continually frustrating British licensing laws and the current vogue for local bylaws banning street drinking, is the spurious scientific survey. You can barely come into contact with a news medium nowadays without being told that some over-funded eggheads have 'proved' that driving green cars causes haemorrhoids or drinking a litre of scotch a day is a sexual stimulant (I haven't actually seen the second of those but if it does exist I suspect I may fall into the old 'exception that proves the rule' category). And so it was with immense irritation that I last week read that a bunch of nerds with - no surprise here - time on their hands at Texas Christian University have discovered that trading patterns in Chicago are linked to wind. That would be fair enough if they were suggesting that afternoon...