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Academics and blogging don’t mix?
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The Chronicle of Higher Education has an offensive article on the pseudonymous Ivan Tribble’s experience on a (reactionary, shortsighted, but perhaps not unusual) faculty search committee which rejected all the bloggers who applied. Aside from the obvious “don’t blog”, the lessons don’t seem to be restricted to the internet: Don’t have any interests outside of…
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Church comes out against science
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We scientists had somehow managed to fool ourselves into believing that, since John Paul II said that evolution was “more than just a hypothesis”, since they admitted some wrongdoing in the persecution of Galileo, that the Catholic Church was on the side of science. Sadly, perhaps inevitably, we were wrong. In an Op-Ed in yesterday’s…
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Nil Desperandum
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On September 11, having just moved to the UK about 10 days before, I was on a train up to a meeting in Durham, in the North of England, when news started filtering in via mobile phones (I didn’t have one myself at the time) and passengers coming on and off the train. With only…
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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
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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