Tuesday night is not traditionally a great night for a party. Your invitees have recovered from the weekend, and who wants to go out on a school night?
It is not my fault, though, that Shrove Tuesday falls midweek. Known in the UK as Pancake Day, and around the world variously as Mardi Gras or Carnival, Shrove Tuesday marks the day before the start Continue reading
It is a particular joy about life for many of us in Cambridge that we don’t need to rely on a car, or indeed public transport. Cambridge is a city whose size and terrain makes cycling feasible, and whose drivers are well enough inured to the idiocies of some cyclists that they can generally avoid colliding with them. I’d like to think it was the vi Continue reading
Copying is entwined with technology, and ideas about copyright have changed as technology changes. In the days of stone tablets I don’t think many people worried about copyright. The invention of pen and ink (see this lovely brief history of writing) made it easier to make copies of texts but it was still a slow process. Gutenberg’s d Continue reading
Colwiz stands for ‘collective wisdom’ (terrible name!). It advertises itself as ‘research management, collaboration and productivity in one place for free’ and has just been launched by a group of scientists at Oxford University. They say it will help you to “manage the entire research lifecycle from an initial idea, through a complex collaboratio Continue reading
In doing research for my previous World View piece for Nature about the lack of female science pundits, I came across the notion that women might be discouraged from expressing their views in public in part because they didn’t want to deal with nasty responses. I can sympathize with this perspective. Even though I don’t let it stop me from speaking Continue reading
Seeing as it’s now exactly almost 100 years since the first celebration of International Women’s Day, I thought it might be important to have some perspective on the equality of women in Israel, a country where I spent many important years of my life.
It would probably surprise many people to know that the reason that I did not return t Continue reading
As both my readers will know, I am a keen supporter of Norwich City FC, known to its fans as the Canaries, on account of their bright yellow strip. I can haz season ticket
and on any Saturday afternoon when the Canaries are playing at home, I am almost always there cheering them on.
Now, enamoured as I am of the Beautiful Game, I have started to w Continue reading
Well, it was a week where the rich got richer and the poor got poorer…
Lavaland’s 30 points saw her hold on to top spot, but it was The Week Of The Ricardipus, as he picked up an impressive 36 points and made a run for the top. Bob looks safe in third, meanwhile, with a very creditable 28 points for the week. Continue reading
It’s easy to feel cynical about the world, especially at the moment; but this week I am amazed at the acts of human kindness in this world.
One of my in-laws suffered a stroke or rather a sub-arachnoidal hemorrhage late Monday afternoon on his way home from a weekend visit with us, his family, in a car park. He is still in intensive care and Continue reading
I’ve been meaning to highlight Zygoma, a great blog by my friend Mr P. V. of Lewisham. Among other things, he offers, every Friday, a mystery object the identity of which his readers can solve over the weekend. The object is usually a bone of some sort, and quite a few experts gather to pick over them. Continue reading
