Monthly Archives: March 2010

Pioneer of muscle contraction

My own small contribution to Ada Lovelace Day… Students tend to think that discoveries underpinning what they get taught in first year lectures were made long, long ago, by ancient scientists long-dead. Of course, this is not true in “young” … Continue reading

Posted in History, Uncategorized | Tagged | 11 Comments

Jargon I can take – its abbreviations I can’t stand

NN blogger Jennifer Rohn has been writing recently about the use of jargon between scientists. As she points out, one of the points is to convey information succinctly from one person familiar with the vocabulary to one or more others … Continue reading

Posted in Annoyances, Humour, The Life Scientific | Tagged | 24 Comments

They’ve got (a) form for that

One of the things UK academics can probably all agree on – apart from that they are not yet entirely convinced by NN’s new MT4 blogging platform – is that meaningless oversight, audit, form-filling and box-ticking has risen inexorably in … Continue reading

Posted in Annoyances, Grumbling, Universities | Tagged | 4 Comments