Category Archives: Uncategorized

It is today perhaps taken for granted that the potential for the most exciting (dare I say ‘ striking ‘?) scientific discoveries lie at the interfaces between traditional disciplines. This presupposes that scientists will collaborate with each other: just within … Continue reading →

… I just play one in real life. So. Out here in the boonies , surrounded by man-eating spiders , spider-eating snakes, man-eating sharks and shark-eating crocs (shut up, Henry), an internet connection is a very good thing. For one, … Continue reading →

Lovely little article on turning the clumsy and ambiguous CIA interrogators stripped naked and played earsplitting music to Abu Zubaydah, the first henchman of Osama bin Laden captured by US after the September 11 attacks there five years ago, according … Continue reading →

Quite frequently, as I drive around the ‘Lucky Country’ [0], I see roadworks. As Australian workmen appear to be the slowest and laziest in the world these persist for quite a while. Which gives me plenty of time to read … Continue reading →

Woah. This is what science is about. The cut and thrust of informed debate. Elegant hypotheses slain by the dragons of empiricism. Clinical, evolutionary, and molecular evidence refutes their hypothesis. Conclusions […] are uninterpretable and untenable — from a letter … Continue reading →

The New York Academy of Sciences and the United Nations Millennium Project have launched a database aimed at fostering partnerships among scientists in the developed and developing world and to coordinate science-based activities to help solve some of the big … Continue reading →

This rather splendid piece of apparatus is sitting on a trolley just round the corner from my office. Mitch Guss uses it to demonstrate the use of the Ewald Sphere in indexing crystals for space group determination and data collection … Continue reading →

Having always been of a somewhat literary bent (i.e. the production of it, if not necessarily uncritical consumption), I have a thing for spelling and grammar (not a word, Rohn). Writing and other forms of communication are also important to … Continue reading →

Katie has been discussing how to write covering letters . I was always fascinated by how my previous boss managed to make our work sound of fundamental importance to . . . well, just about everyone, really. A well-written covering … Continue reading →

A couple of days ago I was talking with a friend about the graphic novel (no, not the ‘comic book’) _”Watchmen”:http://www.amazon.com/Watchmen-Alan-Moore/dp/0930289234 _. In this story there is a character who at one stage is discorporated, yet somehow manages to reincarnate … Continue reading →