I'm out of the country for 27 hours and you managed to have snow and get rid of it before I came back. I also missed a power cut, but I'm not so upset about that.

...as a nascent migraine. Thanks for that, brain.

Work today was particularly draining. Don't know why, but it did have the advantage of tiring me out of my early morning grumpiness. Often we will work through lunch etc. because when your job effectively involves taking over other people's working space when they want to use it, you like to get out of their hair as quickly as possible. I'm ( Read more... )

Was in Dublin briefly yesterday and picked up a copy of the Irish Times to keep me occupied at the airport. It was working well until I got to William Reville's column. That just made me cross. I have no problem with identifying problems with published research. I would encourage it, results should be open to close scrutiny. (See Ben Goldacre' ( Read more... )

Why does VT's creative team keep coming up with ads that highlight how slow trains are? First there was the woman giving birth, then the movie stars that started their journey back in the B&W days and now horses keeping up with the train. Is it a crisis of conscience or something that they feel compelled to be honest? Although the side order of ( Read more... )

Some time ago I wrote about clambering around a plane looking for radioactive things. This is the plane.

Amongst all my astronomy books, I now only have one that accurately numbers the planets of this solar system. (It was written more than 120 years ago.)

And the silly question:
Why do ships transport cargo and land vehicles transport shipments?

I've been doing a fair bit of audit recently and some other, not-quite-audit reviewing of procedures and policies. This is not good. People with pedantic tendencies should not be encouraged by providing them with this kind of work. It only ends up in them pointing out to the nice policeman (who was, as it happens, returning the stolen laptop) ( Read more... )

This year I've read a couple of books by Keith Devlin: The Maths Gene and The Millennium Problems. He has a really nice writing style. Very understandable. I can't say I agree with all his hypotheses and he's thrown in a really inappropriate analogy or two, but it's a pleasure to read the sentences he crafts. (And if it keeps me off the streets ( Read more... )

The company that's provided me with my main email account has gone out of business. At the moment I am trying to rescue all my messages from their server. This is going to lead to a very confused mailbox for a while. I'll try to decide very soon which address I'm going to use in future. Too many of them are spam ridden (even though I've never ( Read more... )