I've been enjoying a glut of books and media lately. Just before Christmas I bought Fortune's Pawn by Rachel Bach on a bit of a whim actually as I was already on a mission to buy my Godmother a new historical thriller/crime mystery novel at the local Waterstone's. It's been a while since i read anything new, especially in sci fi/spec fic and as ( Read more... )

So I've been getting back into blogging again and taking a tour through all the old platforms. Lots of good folk no longer active either which is expected but sad as our blogs were the only way to keep in touch ( Read more... )

... I know. I was wondering what I was going to do with dreamwidth as a blogging/social platform after so long, but then I started going through my reading page and I realised, I knew some pretty awesome people.

Anyway, it seems I'm going to be one of those irritating people with a finger in every piepot going. From twitter to several tumblr blogs ( Read more... )

I am in fact alive and kicking and still as ranty as ever. Of late it's mostly been ranting at the eternal sky but eventually i'll come back to the interwebs...

So I'm sat here revising Soft Matter Physics when it occurs to me just why I increasingly find the 'pseudo-medieval' world building that you often get in fantasy so weird (as opposed to slightly cliche by now).

Now, I'm just thinking 'out loud' because as you well know, I am nothing but the plebbiest of historical dilettantes (and I know if anyone ( Read more... )

 

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Found via the Mary Sue

So. Trying to catch up on my political watching/reading and the first stop was yesterday's Question Time. Now I know, I know, it isn't really any good for actual politics, but it is a good source for references, a bit like a poor man's political New Scientist in televisual form. It was actually quite good this time round. There was very little ( Read more... )

In that great and noble tradition of science students everywhere, due to the fact I am currently running an experiment (a really cool little simulation of linguistic evolution), I will use my time explaining in mind numbing, petty detail just what I thought about the last thing I watched instead of doing data analysis or catching up on sleep.

( ...Firefly! )

 It's taken 4 weeks and 400 lines of clunky, ugly code but I have finally got the first draft of a selection based linguistic model done. Now to mess around with some objects and slightly more interesting networks... The clean up doesn't usually take too long so hopefully I'll have lovely clever code in another two weeks. After that perhaps a cute ( Read more... )

 Just taking a break from some math and by some strange sort of miracle found some episodes of the generally highly esteemed Firefly online (without having to go through any dodgy looking sites). Good Lord but it's mediocre. At first I thought it was terrible but then I remembered I'd sat through all six episodes of the BBCs sci-fi series 'Outcasts ( Read more... )