This year’s question: is it pathetic that Adventures in Wonderland has turned into an annual top-ten-photo blog? Perhaps I’ll do better in 2020. Recent history suggests not, however.
Anyway, on to my favourite ten (plus one, as usual) photographs of 2019, in no particular order.
Continue readingDominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s right-hand man, currently is said to be set on shaking up the Civil Service. The three elements that are rumoured to be on the agenda are:
I am quoting Continue reading
My computer tells me I took over 3,700 photographs in 2019. Yikes!
However, I have winnowed them down to just 31, should you care to take a look. I have been fortunate this year to travel far and wide – or should I say reckless? Continue reading
In a kinder, happier age, when I used to write regularly for the Guardian’s science blog network, I would post summaries of the books I had read at the end of each year. Since the network closed in 2018 I have rather lost the habit. Looking back a the list of titles I got though in 2019, I realise how much I share with Robin Ince the problem of retention. I can only marvel at those who seem to be Continue reading
What was your carbon footprint for 2019? Mine was more of a bootprint, almost entirely because of flying.
International travel has long been considered one of the perks of academic life, something that lifted the job out of the ordinary and cemented our membership of a trans-national community of scientists and scholars. Over the years I have travelled to Grenoble and Hamburg for experiments, to Continue reading
The winter always belonged to my mother and me.
We both loved the late autumn, when the last of the leaves plastered the pavements in a smear of color, and our breath fogged the morning air. November also usually brought the first snows, in that faraway land of four proper seasons – a land that seems so dreamlike now in this drizzly country of muddy ivy green.
Continue readingGirly swot Brenda Hale, otherwise known as the outgoing President of the Supreme Court with an impressive taste in brooches (see figure),
was quoted recently as saying:
“I encountered many young men from public school backgrounds who felt entitled to good jobs. And I realised that actually, quite a few of them were no better than me and, in some cases, not as good as me. And that made me feel: OK Continue reading
The general election is now done and dusted. The UK’s future is determined, for good or ill. Scientists (along with everyone else) now must work out how to interact with the new policies, new ideas and – if some of the Tories statements are to be taken at face value – substantial new money going into fresh initiatives. One of those touted in the run-up to the election, courtesy of Dominic Cummings Continue reading
I think of Sunday as the last day of the week, not the first. Today, at the end of a hard week on political and personal fronts (though why the political and personal should be seen as separate I am not sure), I flew to Ireland to visit my parents.
The election has come and gone and delivered a result that leaves the country in a deeply worrisome state. The Conservative victory was built on simpl Continue reading
This past week, I attended the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) & European Molecular Biology Organization’s annual meeting in Washington, DC. This is a meeting that I have been attending since 1997, almost every year since then—for 22 years.
When I first attended in 1997, it was at the end of my PhD at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and it was my first big international conferenc Continue reading
