I've left you high and dry all week, because I've been visiting my friend Mel in Tenby in Wales. It's a delightful place, but there's an air of tension hanging over it right now. This is because they're about to enter The Season, the period of summer school holidays when the population swells from 5,000 to 50,000. For six short weeks there's Plenty of Work, which means seventy hour weeks, then they enter the down side of the cycle, and by November the population has shrunk to 5,000 again.

These days, it shrinks even more, because so much of the housing has gone to second homes. In St Florence, a small village just outside where one of Mel's daughters lives, you can't buy a house unless you're a local, committed to living there full time. It would be a good policy for Tenby, but unfortunately the business people that dominate the local council wouldn't wear it.

I had a nightmare train journey back. It was only a little train, and it thought it could, but actually it couldn't. They must have borrowed it from Thames Water, because the pipes leaked so badly it ground to a halt after a couple of miles. The conductor begged a few kettlefuls from the bemused pensioners living next to the lines, hoping that it would get us to Carmarthen, but a few hundred yards later we had to stop again. There we sat until another engine could tow us in.

After that I got the rush hour journey I'd been trying to avoid. The carriage from Cardiff to Newport was particularly noisy, with one really annoying personal stereo and a guy with Tourettes who kept shouting out. I reflected on how difficult the journey must have been, and hoped that Pete from Big Brother might have made things easier for him, but then when he got off I realised the personal stereo was actually his. To be fair, maybe he thought it would cover his shouts.

So what's been happening while I've been away? Well, it was the 38th anniversary of the first moon landing, and as if in commemoration they found Saturn's sixtieth moon. While they were sorting things out, they solved the nagging, unresolved social problem which is draughts. I do like it when stuff gets definitively crossed off humanity's To Do list. And Science Daily says that new research has proved the single origin of humans in Africa. Apparently some people still thought we might have evolved from homo erectus to homo sapiens more than once in different places. It doesn't say why they might have imagained anything so transparently absurd, but now they can't any more. So there.

Still, draughts, the single origin theory and a new moon. Good for you, science. If it wasn't for Google Reader I might never have known. And social scientists haven't been entirely lazy either. A new study shows that the more stupid you are, the more likely you are to be too stupid to realise it.

More thematically for me, Marcus Brigstocke explains that religion isn't a very good thing. I knew it.