Mssv

Is ragging - making new initiates/players/students perform pointless tasks - the key to forming a strong community?

The three words which I find most difficult to say are, ‘I don’t understand.’ Today, I was doing a bit of programming to do with convolving histograms and the like, and I had to sort out the axes. I asked my supervisor, who tried to explain it to me.
“What you have to do is to […]

When I was at secondary school, my headmaster - a very intelligent man and nice guy, to boot - made a interesting observation which has remained with me until today. He said that if you want to find the most intelligent person in a meeting, the person who says the most useful things, you shouldn’t […]

A thought-provoking article on baby signing: babies, if taught properly, can sign when they are only six months old. This expands their range of communication beyond crying, which I can imagine helps parents a fair bit. Apparently learning signing doesn’t delay the onset of speech, either.

Brad DeLong makes an electric motor and worries about kids and science.

Something I’ve been idly wondering about on and off for a while is why there aren’t any decent driving simulator/trainers for PCs (or consoles). Surely there must be a market for this sort of thing? If you sold a package with force-feedback driving wheel, pedals and gearstick, together with a fairly up to date and […]

I’ve just become a student member of the British Association of Science so that I can attend upcoming the Festival of Science for free. In the newsletter, I’m told that Science Year has been extended to the end of 2003.
I’ve never been a fan of grand gestures like ‘Science Year’, partly because I’ve never seen […]

One of the great things about being in UCSD right now is that I get to go to any classes I want, free of charge (unlike the poor saps who have to pay hundreds of bucks for the privilege - of course, they need course credit…). So at one of the recent cognitive neuroscience classes […]

Whenever I go on holiday, I always think it’d be a good idea to do something spontaneous and unusual. Most of the time though I don’t really bother since there isn’t anyone I know who’s around to watch, and in any case the ideas I have invariably involve a fair amount of risk or money. […]

While idly browsing through an Oxbridge admissions website, I came across a report of an interview written by someone who applied to the same course at the same college as I did, but a year later. Curious to see if they’d changed anything, I checked out the questions this person was asked at interview.
Practically nothing […]