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Today I had to give two presentations; one summarising a paper about systems consolidation in memory, and another covering my research project this year. The research project presentation had been prepared for quite a while in advance, but as luck would have it, yesterday afternoon we struck on a different way of statistically analysing my […]

Yesterday, I went to an interesting talk by Simon Conway Morris (Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology at Cambridge) - it was one of those great lectures that starts off from a simple premise, in this case convergent evolution, and then takes that idea on a wonderful journey that touches upon the inevitability of intelligence, culture, social […]

How to get rich - an interesting lecture by Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs and Steel (a very good book, on the whole). Fairly woolly, but it has some useful points.

Such is the power of Google; I go to a lecture by Steve Jones tonight, and five minutes after I get back I can find the exact same image of a bull elephant seal surrounded by its army of penguins used by Steve.

A review of a lecture by award-winning SF author Neal Stephenson, on ‘Newton/Leibniz’, together with a review of Miyazaki’s film ‘Spirited Away’.

A review of a lecture given by George Dyson about Project Orion, America’s planned nuclear bomb-propelled spacecraft.

Thanks to a generous grant from Trinity College at Cambridge University, I was able to attend the full week-long British Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Festival of Science in Leicester this year, from September 9th to 13th. This is a brief report of what I learned there.

There were two things that caught my attention today in lectures. The first was a list of symptoms of mania (an abnormal emotional state, the opposite of depression):
i. Unfounded elation
ii. Hyperactivity
iii. Talkativeness and “flight of ideas”
iv. Distractivility
v. Impractical, grandiose plans
vi. Inflated self-esteem
vii. Reduced sleep
…and I thought, ‘I wonder if I know anyone who has those […]