• All ok.

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    For anyone who might be checking, everything is OK with me amidst the chaos in London. Now I have to work out how to get back to Oxford, where I live. Echoing Gia’s sentiments: Londoners Rule. We are not terrorised.We are just annoyed. Update: Made it home, finally. I need a beer.

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  • End of the Universe

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    Today, alas, will see the end of The Centre of the Universe. Thanks, again, to Jem Finer for creating it, a work of thought and beauty. But I’m sure he’s looking forward to sleeping in a warm bed, surrounded by his family, rather than a shed in the middle of a park surrounded by weird…

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  • Weekend notes: LISA

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    With Live 8 on in the background, I was able to get a bit of work done: colleagues from Imperial and 13 other UK institutions are putting together a “Letter of Intent” to the European Space Agency for the analysis of data from the LISA satellite. ESA, as expected of a multi-governmental agency guiding the…

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  • Weekend notes: Live 8

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    Live 8: Normally I would be cynical, or at least pessimistic of the prospect of change, but then Geldof, after showing a film of the poverty-stricken children of Ethiopia in the 80s, brought out one of the starving infants we had just seen, Birhan Woldu, grown up into a beautiful, healthy and well-educated twenty-four-year-old. My…

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  • Stood up, got counted

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    (The server is back up; they say this is the last time… Stay tuned for a whole bunch of posts saved up over the weekend.)

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  • Down, again

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    The power will be out to the server again this weekend, Friday evening through Monday morning (UK time). Get some fresh air! The song for the weekend is the bittersweet “Fourth of July”, written by Dave Alvin, performed by X on See How We Are (which seem to come up a lot around here).

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  • Satellite Maps in the UK

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    Google now has satellite maps of the UK! (But the level of detail seems to depend on where you are.) Here’s where I work. The strange round thing just above is the Royal Albert Hall.

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  • Academics: blogs and publishing

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    The Village Voice has an article about academic blogs. And BlogScholar is attempting to organize the joyous but chaotic noise we make (but I’ll wait to see how serious it is before I sign up). Meanwhile, after a discussion of various models for academic publishing over on CosmoCoffee, moderator Antony Lewis has set up a…

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  • Blog spam

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    I’ve noticed a scary trend in the spam I’ve been receiving in the comments and trackbacks of this blog: they’ve started using plausible non-spam domains (businesses, organizations — I’m not going to do their work for them by mentioning the names here) for obvious spam content (poker, drugs). This makes it hard to tell if…

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  • Sense of irony

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    Nancy Ellman’s review of A Changed Man by Francine Prose opens with this charming summation of American culture: American sentimentality may once have seemed endearing, but now we know it’s just another instrument of evil. Every aspect of American culture has begun to stink of the grave. The pizzas and hamburgers: this is how world…

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