Following thirty years of work by mathematicians at the University of Southern Neasden and the Max Planck Institute for Extracting Sunshine from Cucumbers, it’s been found that mathematics will start to disappear around July, 2014.
At first only very arcane spheres of activity inhabited only by mathematicians will start to erode away, such t Continue reading
I have to say, I’m really enjoying the return of the NHL – having games to watch on dark, rainy weeknights makes me very happy!
The pool, however, is not going so well for me. Here are everyone’s points for Week 2:
Today, 2 February, is Candlemas day, halfway between the shortest day and the spring equinox. It is officially the end of the Christmas season, though I suspect most people would be surprised to learn this. I only know it because when I was an undergraduate at Bristol I sang in a church choir and we sang on most religious feast days. I recall that Continue reading
Some time ago I had the curious experience of being an observer at a series of decision-making meetings covering different disciplines. As a mere observer I didn’t have to do any preparation myself, none of this producing scores for the applications, or having to do the difficult task of comparing apples and pears. But I could be an observer in al Continue reading
One of the podcasts to which I subscribe is called 99% Invisible – “a tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.” Each episode covers an aspect of design that someone outside the industry just wouldn’t usually think about – for example, how architects incorporate Continue reading
Science Online 2013 kicked off yesterday in North Carolina.
For those of us who are not able to make it to the conference in person, watch parties the world over facilitate virtual attendance. In the UK, Eva Amsen and I are co-hosting the London Science Online 2013 Watch Party this Saturday, 2nd February. Continue reading
The Science and Technology Committee of the House of Lords, the second chamber in the UK parliament, met this week to hear evidence from various stakeholders on the implementation of government’s policy on open access.
In three separate sessions, which you can watch on Parliament TV if you have the time, they quizzed representatives of univer Continue reading
Back in 2010, I wrote a blog post about how although my sister and I took very different career paths, we’ve ended up with similar kinds of job. I am sad to have to report that since then, we have discovered a gaping chasm between us that threatens to destroy this new-found unity…
and then:
Narratives of sacrifice are woven into many stories about research. Nobel laureate Dr Barry Marshall famously drank a culture of Helicobacter pylori in order to demonstrate that the bacterium is indeed the causative agent of stomach ulcers. Closer to my home, one colleague who is now a postdoc took to sleeping in his office during the closing weeks Continue reading
Each scoring week in this year’s pool runs from Saturday to Friday, which I prefer to the usual Monday to Sunday – it’s much easier to find time to update the spreadsheet and post the results over the weekend than on a Monday!
As you can tell, I still haven’t quite optimised my use of Google Documents Drive to make charts Continue reading
