Mssv

(Photos and stories from my trip to Madrid will be up soon!)
Every time I wander around a lab, I’m always amazed at how anything ever gets accomplished, what with the innumerable racks of chemicals and samples crowded into fridges and shelves, bits of paper scattered all over the place and various out-of-date printouts and forms […]

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 […]

Lately, I’ve been thinking about why I go to sleep in lectures so often. It isn’t because I’m tired, or because I’m bored; there are plenty of times when I am both tired and bored and fail to fall asleep with the kind of dependability that I do in lectures. Nor is it because I’m […]

“The location of the Greenwich Meridian, that was decided arbitrarily, right?”
“I suppose. They put it there because our system of time or mapping or something like that was designed in Greenwich.”
“But if it was designed in, say, America or Russia, the ‘zero time’ could have been there?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“So, in a way, it’s […]

I arrived back in the UK yesterday morning after a 24 hour journey from Sydney. Predictably, it was raining.
What I tried to do during the flights back home was to time my eating and sleeping so that I could reduce any jetlag I’d have caused by the ten hour time difference. The easiest way to […]

During dinner yesterday, I mentioned to Andrew Paul and The Official Bear Of The Third Millennium that I’d recently had an MRI scan done of my brain. Someone then said how strange it must be to see the activity of your brain in real time. I was just in the middle of replying that the […]

There was a lot of driving today to go and see the Penguin Parade at Phillips Island, about two hours south of Melbourne. This will hopefully explain all of the exposition on driving that I’ll make later.
On the way to the Penguin Parade, we stopped off at a little wildlife sanctuary to see some of […]

Some people believe that China is really serious about human spaceflight. Really serious, as in, intends to establish a permanent human present on the Moon in the near future. At least one Japanese politician thinks it could happen within four years.
To be honest, it doesn’t really matter exactly when it happens; if China decides to […]

E-Ink announced their prototype electronic book display last week. Finally, the dream of a portable, long-lasting electronic book reader may finally be upon us. The contrast and resolution of the display (160dpi) look quite acceptable and I’m not really bothered about the fact that it has no colour; neither do any of my paperbacks.
As long […]

A couple of days ago over dinner, I was having one of those typical university conversations about whether the Internet had really changed the world. As was pointed out, “We’re still not buying all of our groceries over the web.” I replied with something about delivery of large perishable goods and how in fact the […]