I just noticed a recent entry of mine which mentions BASE jumping. No, I haven't taken that up, but I have taken up rock climbing. I was chatting to one of my climbing buddies, who used to BASE jump. He said he once went jumping with this fella who took his dog with him and had designed a wee parachute and harness for the dog. When they jumped ( Read more... )

I see I haven't posted in ages. I've been too sucked into work and music to be bothered ranting about the things I would normally rant about on livejournal and I suppose thesession.org is a more interesting way to procrastinate on the internet than self-serving posts about how interesting my life is. Because lets face it, it's really kinda not. ( Read more... )

I am over the moon about the election. It means I can go back to the US, which I was threatening never to do if the Republicans won again. Maybe I am overly optimistic but I think Obama has as a good a shot as FDR at making significant changes. FDR had a failing economy, a Democratic congress, and okay, a tetchy Supreme Court which he had a to ( Read more... )

There are times when getting basic things done in this country is so unnecessarily difficult that I just want to bail on the whole thing and go back to the States where they don't go out of their way to make your life more complicated than it has to be. No, it's not drive-through Dunkin' Donuts I wish I could find (although I could use one about ( Read more... )

I am at a conference in Glasgow and it is like being an observer to a snapshot of evolution, where graduate students are like the protozoa- type creatures and it goes through amphibians and reptiles (postdocs) to small, simple mammals (assistant lecturers) and all the way to fairly advanced vertebrate mammals which would be full professors and ( Read more... )

As usual, PhD Comics hits the nail on the head.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive_print.php?comicid=1064

I am reading a paper titled "Images and Impulses: Representations of puerperal insanity and infanticide in late Victorian England." The first case the writer discusses to make her argument is one from the Fife and Kinross District Lunatic Asylum ( Read more... )

I wonder how is it the uni lets some people do PhDs. I really do. I walked into the office today and my colleague (who shall remain nameless but some of you undoubtedly know who it is anyway) greets me with, "Is it raining?" Our office has a lovely window which looks out over Holyrood Park, Leith, and the Firth of Forth. You can even see the ( Read more... )

First of all, I thought it seemed to be rather a small world when I read on the UK news that the four people arrested in Beijing for putting "Free Tibet" banners on lamposts were a guy from Edinburgh, a girl from Cambridge, and two people from America. I then read in the American news that the four people arrested were a guy from Boulder (who is ( Read more... )

I was away in the Highlands this weekend and left the mostly dead phone lying in the flat kitchen. When I got back to Edinburgh today I attempted to turn it on. Lo and behold, it came back to life!!! Seems to be working fine. Fantastic ( Read more... )