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Prizes and Books, As Yet Unread and Unwritten
Over the last couple of months, I’ve managed invites to a few swish literary shindigs. For no literary reason at all (I’m the proud godparent of someone who works for the prize’s sponsors), I was able to make my way into this year’s ceremony for the Man Booker Prize, held in the rather splendid Guildhall…
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Traversant la Manche
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Until now, I have been forced to resist the clamour brewing among both members of my extensive readership (hi, dad!) to post a bit more often: my excuse is that, in the little over a month between early September and mid-October, I have travelled back and forth from Paris to London five times, spent a…
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Harmony in the Universe
Cosmology fans in and around London: Please come here my colleague Jean–Philippe Uzan, visiting us from Paris, who will talk about “ Harmony in the Universe: between science and music” this coming Thursday, 25 October 2012 in the Huxley Building here at Imperial College. It’s free, but please contact us at astro-outreach@imperial.ac.uk if you’re going…
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Cage 100
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Today (September 5), John Cage would have been 100 years old. A few weeks ago, I went to the John Cage Centenary Celebration at the BBC Proms. Cage is probably best know for 4′33″, his infamous 1952 piece consisting of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence (originally in three movements — although he eventually…
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This sporting life
[Warning, this post will be largely about sport(s), a subject I am even less qualified than usual to discuss, and so is mostly an excuse to brag about my having seen the fastest man in the world live — along with 80,000 other spectators, and post some of the pictures I was lucky enough to…
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Higgs vs Religion on the Radio: no contest
The Higgs day continues (and I’m not even a particle physicist). At about 5pm, just as I was dialling into one of my several-times-a-week Planck teleconferences, I had an email from Tim at the BBC, who works with the World Service “World Have Your Say” show, coming on at 6pm. Would I be able to…
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Expat playlist
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I am in England for Independence Day this year, having just spent last weekend back in the USA. Here’s a taste of the view from my ancestral (i.e., my parents’) home: So I’ll eat a burger in celebration, and listen to some appropriately-themed music from my playlist (in order of release): Van Morrison, Almost Independence…
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Fundamental Scalar found?
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I am just back from STFC‘s media event covering what did, in the end, turn out to be the discovery of a particle that appears to be the long-predicted Higgs boson, the last component in the Standard Model of Particle Physics to be discovered, and in many ways its linchpin. Via a mechanism known as…
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Future Science Bloggers Wanted
Attention Imperial Postgraduates*: I’ll be helping lead a course in Science Blogging this Friday, 6 July 2012 at Imperial, along with a couple of fellow (science) bloggers: biophysicist Professor Stephen Curry and biostatistician (and actual graduate student!) Erika Cule, both of whom write at Occam’s Typewriter, an excellent grassroots network of scientist bloggers. Imperial students…
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50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong
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I wandered across Prince Consort Road from my office in the Blackett Laboratory a few weeks ago — to the Royal Albert Hall and Elvis Costello‘s Spectacular Singing Songbook tour. Elvis has settled into a comfortable phase of his career; he hasn’t quite managed a late-period resurgence — his last true masterpiece was probably Blood…
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