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Yep, the month of frantic novel writing is nearly upon us:


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rose_griffes  has given me a reason to use my Doctor Who icon with a Mickey Smith story:  Rocket Man

A comedy about a complete lack of thingyness. Full of kitten arithmetic (including when zero stands for a steamroller and how to come up with the answer of 'trident submarine' during the cat arithmetic round of Countdown), a teleporting egg, hundreds of sheep, how ethics can constrain science (but not rocket science) and a legendary fight between a ( Read more... )

... Industrial Espionage as a Form of Knowledge Transfer in 18th Century Birmingham ( Read more... )

I have to admit I had reservations about booking this one but it turned into one of the most entertaining series of lectures so far. Starting off with a general overview of the Solar System right out to the heliosphere and the oort cloud, we then had a wonderful talk on the weather systems on other planets followed by two talks on how the view from ( Read more... )

All whole bunch of talks today but mostly on the same subject - the exodus of early hominins from Africa and how the development of material culture (as seen in knapped hand axes) leads to them becoming modern humans ( Read more... )

An interesting look at the latest developments in artificial aids to heart failure, from balloons that sit in the aorta for a few weeks to help blood flow to implanted ventricular assist devices that take some of the load off the heart and allow it to regenerate. While the engineering was quite good I was expecting more about the blood itself and ( Read more... )

Two well explained talks on exoplanets; one on the various different methods of how to find exoplanets and the other on how to figure out the atmospheric composition of them once they've been spotted. While there was due to be another talk it was cancelled at the last minute and instead there was a round table talk on the possibilities of detecting ( Read more... )