mssv

  • Malls

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    Something that bothers me about the malls in America is the fact that you can’t look around freely. These otherwise pleasant and interesting places have stalls set up in the centre of their ‘streets’ which are invariably populated by mobile phone companies, and if you should even glance in their general direction, they’ll call out…

  • SemiShake

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    Whenever I go on holiday, I always think it’d be a good idea to do something spontaneous and unusual. Most of the time though I don’t really bother since there isn’t anyone I know who’s around to watch, and in any case the ideas I have invariably involve a fair amount of risk or money.…

  • Work

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    Things at work are proceeding along fairly smoothly. I’ve been running the first set of subjects on my pilot experiment during the last couple of days and processing the results (too early to tell whether they’re ‘good’ or not). Probably the most exciting thing that’s happened around here was a BBC crew interviewing the head…

  • Exams

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    Exams have finally finished! Had a fun day today watching the England – Argentina match on a cinema screen, and then spent the rest of the day at a barbeque. Going off to Oxford tomorrow to visit my girlfriend as well. Now I can finally stop trying to keep all these random facts in my…

  • Travelling

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    So it seems that this summer I will be working at UCSD in San Diego for a bit over six weeks from late June to early August, and then spending a week in Washington DC. Any readers live nearby, or have any tourist tips?

  • Firewalking

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    My answer to a firewalking question was published in today’s Notes and Queries section of the Guardian.

  • Dentist

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    Went to the dentist today. As I mulled over the psychological impact of hearing the whirr of a drill on patients (perhaps if you used a silent drill people wouldn’t make the association between pain and the drill?) the dentist took a couple of x-rays of my teeth. I hadn’t been to the dentist for…

  • SBC

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    I got an email today from my psychology supervisor, Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen (the autistics guy) who said that unfortunately he wouldn’t be able to give us an extra supervision for the exams since he’s flying out to Kosovo to help with their new child psychiatry service. I think that is impossibly neat.

  • Reasons to be cheerful

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    Reasons to be cheerful: People on Metafilter liked my post about aerogel (inspired when I saw these pretty photos). I’m very pleased about this – Metafilter is being swamped with too much news culled from CNN, Slashdot, Kuro5hin and other web news portals these days, so I thought the readers might like a change and…