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  • Facts and things

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    3–5 minutes

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    3 comments on Facts and things

    Facts from around the world! In South Africa, they use the same word for ‘demonstration’ and ‘riot’, according to a friend from Cape Town who was alarmed to read about the mass ‘riots’ taking place in London for Bush’s visit. In Australia, when the public transport workers go on strike, they don’t go home. Instead,…

  • Perfect Circle

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    3–4 minutes

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    No comments on Perfect Circle

    One of the more annoying aspects of my PhD course at Oxford is that I have to go to these ‘Personal Development Course’ events every so often, which are about as bad as they sound. In fact, all new biology graduates have to go to them, perhaps fifty in total. The first one, held some…

  • Eve of Destruction

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    1–2 minutes

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    1 comment on Eve of Destruction

    Some photos of my trip to London to belatedly toast the destruction of the Culture Listserver, courtesy of Steve.

  • Vignettes of an active lifestyle

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    4–6 minutes

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    4 comments on Vignettes of an active lifestyle

    After I got back from Australia in August, I started doing an awful lot of exercise so that I might develop some good habits that would last in Oxford. I hadn’t been to the gym for about a year or so, and so when I went there and did my usual workout, I basically felt…

  • Lyra’s Oxford

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    8–12 minutes

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    2 comments on Lyra’s Oxford

    Lyra’s Oxford is more than just a short story and a collection of colourful extras. Pullman has set us a mystery, and judging by his past works, it’s going to be interesting.

  • Senses

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    1–2 minutes

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    No comments on Senses

    Senses (Flash) – a nice little interactive quiz from the BBC that deals with psychological phenomena and illusions (and some other not quite as interesting stuff), via Bhisma.

  • Killer Chairs

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    2–3 minutes

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    My karma was restored to its correct level this evening when I went to a signing by Neil Gaiman at Borders. I turned up half an hour early, just in time to bag one of the last chairs available (handily situated near some Philip Pullman novels); by the time Neil came out to talk there…

  • Delivery

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    1–2 minutes

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    1 comment on Delivery

    I spent the weekend visiting friends in Cambridge and fully expected to come home to Oxford to pick up my new laptop, which I ordered a while ago. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t at my college. When I checked the TNT website to track the package, it said that it didn’t have a correct delivery address for…

  • Wake Up

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    1–2 minutes

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    No comments on Wake Up

    Wake up calls in Portugal – people pay for personal wake up calls in Portugal, and we’re not talking the automatic hotel-variety calls either. We’re talking human operator wake up calls. No, I couldn’t believe it either. More on those calls (scroll down).

  • The Rules of the Game

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    1–2 minutes

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    No comments on The Rules of the Game

    I’ve just finished reading John Gribbin’s Science: A History, which is by all accounts a very well-written and interesting book. Gribbin could have probably done with making some of his sentences a little shorter and more readable, but other than that it’s an excellent review of science and the people who discovered it, starting from…