Mssv

Horribly jetlagged. Probably the price I have to pay for having a wonderful break and conference. Oh well.

Well, I’m flying off to Miami in a few hours for a vision research conference, so I won’t be posting here until Monday, unless I can get network access over there and feel sufficiently bored. See you all later.

In a break from just writing game reports here, I thought I’d share a discovery I made today. I work at the Department of Physiology here in Oxford, and very recently they just finished construction on a new adjoining building which is all very high tech looking with lots of dark glass and shiny steel. […]

Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College, has written a piece in the New York Times yesterday called Some Things Are Better Left on Mars, where she argues that the risk of infection by Martian lifeforms far outweighs any scientific gain from bringing back rock and soil samples. Given that we know organisms on […]

We had a rather astounding game of The Settlers of Catan tonight. The board setup was basically conventional except for the desert being the centre tile, which I feel stunted the growth of the game quite a bit and also served as a natural barrier. Andrew and I took up positions giving us a lot […]

Almost three months after I bought it, I finally got around to playing the Settlers of Catan with my friends at college this evening. I’ve written about it before and there’s a more detailed description at BoardGameGeek but in brief it’s a very playable four-player strategy building game that features a lot of trading.
The other […]

The Atlantic ran an anti-genetic enhancement article this month called The Case Against Perfection. Written by Michael J. Sandel, a member of the notorious President’s Council on Bioethics, the article is cogent and well-argued.
Essentially Sandel believes that embryonic or hereditary genetic enhancements would remove the ‘giftedness’ of every child - in other words, the fact […]

I’ve finally gotten around to setting up the weblog editor in Newsnetwire on OS X, which probably means nothing to most people but means that I can post entries here a little easier than before. Hopefully that small reduction in time will be enough to break my iron-clad procrastination.
In the past few days I’ve developed […]

A surprising number of people have been asking why I haven’t updated my site for so long. Here are the reasons: I’ve been wrapping up my current 4 month project which is researching the basis of vision in mice (using three different experimental paradigms), planning my trip to a conference in Florida, working on Project […]