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Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid
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2–4 minutes·
No comments on Some Things Are Better Left UnsaidOlivia 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…
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Power Play
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…
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Where’s the Brick?
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…
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Genetic Enhancement
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…
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A new leaf
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…
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Word Count
A little experiment I want to try, perhaps tonight, is to count how many words I read in a day. Obviously it’s not going to be a comprehensive count, but I think that counting everything I’ve read on the Internet (which on some days constitutes 80-90% of the total, e.g. when I’m not reading a…
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The Debate
A transcript of the debate between Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy and Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. Essential reading for Pullman fans and anyone interested in the portrayal of religion in contemporary fiction.
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The Race
8:30am – I wake up with a totally parched throat, despite drinking a huge quantity of water the night before. Less than six hours to go before the relay race I signed up to a couple of weeks ago begins. 3.6 miles per leg – I’m hoping to do it in under 30 minutes, at…
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His Dark Materials
Lal, Kim, Lat (Lal’s sister) and I met up in London last night to see the first part of Nicholas Wright’s adaptation of ‘His Dark Materials’. Naturally, in true Culture style we only managed to get to our seats in the very nick of time, not once, but twice! (it is nothing less than an…
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