• On memory

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    My 4 year DPhil here at Oxford is funded by a studentship from the Wellcome Trust. This is a great thing because it means I have enough money to, for example, live, and it also means that any research groups I join will not have to pay for me. It’s even better than that, though,…

  • Busy busy

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    Not much has been happening in my life that has been worth posting about lately. I’ve been keeping myself busy doing lots of writing and website design, and I’ve been using my downtime to mull over a couple of future projects. The article is coming along nicely; I have all the material I need to…

  • Mars

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    Tonight I saw the planet Mars with my own eyes. We’ve all been hearing that Mars is as close as it will be to Earth for the next sixty thousand years. Unfortunately, since I live in the UK I haven’t really had the opportunity to look for Mars since our skies have been swathed in…

  • PowerPointSleeping

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    While reading a thread about PowerPoint on MetaFilter, I remembered something a friend said about me last weekend. She was a fellow student in my neuroscience course this year, and she said, “You could always tell whether a lecture or workshop was going to be any good by watching whether Adrian fell asleep in the…

  • Brief Hiatus

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    I’ll be having a brief hiatus from posting here for the next few days, as I’m about a thousand words into an article I’m writing on an interesting new type of multiplayer online game. I’ve been looking forward to writing it for over a month and so far it’s not looking bad, although it’s finished…

  • Lucid

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    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…

  • Fourth time unlucky

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    Four times I’ve tried to go hang-gliding in Australia: Wednesday: good windspeed, but in the wrong direction Thursday: too windy Friday: too windy Saturday: too windy The annoying thing is that the weather was perfect when I first got here. The even more annoying thing is that hang-gliding here is almost half the price of…

  • Altitude

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    The woman sitting next to me on the plane was snoring. The roar of the engines drowned most of the noise out, but she was definitely snoring. It was the more common variety of snoring, with a regular rattling sound as air passed through her nose by her epiglottis, not one of the rare snorers…

  • AFL

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    Today was my last full day in Melbourne. In a vain attempt to try and buy some non-tacky souvenirs, we went to Victoria Market in the city. I did actually manage to buy two souvenirs that didn’t fall into the general category of ‘koalas and other Australian miscellaneia’ although it did take some time. To…

  • Walking Away

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    I did an awful lot of walking today. Whenever I travel to a foreign city, I always end up walking practically everywhere, unless I’m going somewhere over an hour away. It’s not that I have anything against public transport, it’s just that it’s more immediately convenient for me to stroll around, and of course it…