This is going to add minutes to my life – every time I take the bus.

Important Bus Business

The Free Speech Union (FSU) has published an article about my open letter to the Royal Society regarding the evident contraventions of its code of conduct by one of their Fellows, Elon Musk FRS. Unfortunately, Frederick Attenborough’s piece contains errors, omissions and speculative rhetoric which together contrive to misconstrue the meaning and intent of my letter.

Response to the Free Speech Union’s article on my letter to the Royal Society

Apologies, this will be obvious to some, but I have seen enough so-so images on social media to convince me there are others who could post much better pictures if they took just a little bit more care. Smartphone cameras are so good these days that everyone is a photographer. But clearly, everyone

 isn’t

a photographer.

Compose yourself

On Tuesday evening I was asked by Research Professional News for my views on a new report from think tank UKDayOne, which is calling for the abolition of the Research Excellence Framework, unlovingly known as the REF. The report is provocative and interesting. It has won loud support from one Dominic Cummings.

Abandon the REF?

“The Ruffian” is great title for Ian Leslie’s Substack given his predilection for roughing up lazy thinking.

Misreading on the tube leads to WAR “The Ruffian” is great title for Ian Leslie’s Substack given his predilection for roughing up lazy thinking. I first came across him as the author of “Conflicted”, an excellent book about how to disagree constructively, a practice he frequently deploys in his

 Ruffian

pieces. I sometimes disagree with Leslie, but not often enough to stop me paying the £4 monthly subscription to his Substack.

On the Freedom of Misunderstanding of Speech

I have been trying to put my finger on why I have found Succession — HBO’s must-see series about fictional US media mogul Logan Roy and his dysfunctional family — to be at once utterly compelling and annoyingly dissatisfying.

Tom and Roman – trapped by farce? I have been trying to put my finger on why I have found

 Succession

— HBO’s must-see series about fictional US media mogul Logan Roy and his dysfunctional family — to be at once utterly compelling and annoyingly dissatisfying. The show has an excellent pedigree.

Why Succession failed me &#8211; just

Thanks to the paucity of my education and cultural life I have come late to Isaiah Berlin, the noted philosopher and historian of ideas whose thinking provided such a guiding light to the 20th Century. But I’m definitely a fan now. I’d heard the name, of course, but would have been hard-pressed to tell you why he was well-known.

Intelligent life: Isaiah Berlin

For the longest time I have been meaning to get back to—ugh!—blogging. Regular readers, should any remain, will see that this is the first post of 2022. I haven’t broken any promises with the hiatus and have no excuses to make. I’ve been busy. I know – who

 hasn’t

been busy in UK academia? Nevertheless, the first half of this year was intense, with several major deadlines that left little mental spare capacity.

Message for my reader

One final look back before I turn to face 2022. Following a practice started last year, I have maintained a thread of tweet-sized reviews of the books that I read in 2021 – all of them. The Twitter thread of the books I read in 2021. Click on the image to see the high-res version. There are only eighteen in total, a singularly unimpressive tally – fewer even than I managed in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Books of the Year

What is it about living through a pandemic that has quelled the motivation to write? I suspect it may have something to do with the unstructuring of time, or rather its reduction through confinement to rhythms dulled by repetition. Whatever the reason, a quick glance through the log of posts here over the past year reveals a loss of activity – or is it a loss of discipline?

In the garden

Writing in The Observer a couple of weeks ago, Kenan Malik cast a sceptical eye over a report published by the history group at Imperial College that had been asked to reflect on “the current understanding and reception of the College’s legacy and heritage in the context of its present-day mission.” Linking the report’s controversial recommendation that that the Huxley Building be renamed because of Thomas Henry Huxley’s views on race to the

The Huxley Question

Having devoted a fair number of the words on this blog to open access over the past year and a half, I have found myself invited to an increasing number of meetings on the topic. Whether run by RLUK, the Royal Society or the LSE, these meetings have invariably been interesting, but they often seem to bring together many of the same people, mostly from libraries, funders, publishers and learned societies.

Open access on the conference circuit

I can’t remember how I came across this video from philosopher Alain de Botton, but I feel seen. Like many academics, I guess, I have always prized scholarly achievement.

To be or not to be exceptional?

My computer tells me that I took over 2,400 photographs in 2020. Here are my favourites. I’m afraid I have failed to whittle them down to fewer than seventy-five. Click on the first image, taken on a winter walk on the first of January, to go to the album on flickr.    2020 was the year of lockdown, but we still managed to get out and about on occasion.

Photographs of 2020

Last week I gave my first online tutorials in which I needed to scribble on a whiteboard and show the students their exam scripts from last term, which had been posted to my home. To solve both of these problems, I spent a bit of time figuring out how to share my iPad and iPhone screens within Microsoft Teams running on my Apple MacBook. For anyone wanting to do the same, I thought I’d share what have I found.

Teaching online: how to use an iPad as a whiteboard

Update (17:00 03 Mar):

all members of the UK or international scientific community were invited to indicate their support by signing the letter. The opportunity to do so closed at 17:00 UK time on 03 March. The final tally of signatories was 3494 (please see bottom of post for the full list).  Earlier today, I sent the letter below to Professor Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society.

An open letter to the President of the Royal Society &#8211; time to stand up for your values

This is a repost of an article that was originally published on the Research on Research Institute website. Comments welcome!
 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that scientists who take greater risks are more likely to make important discoveries.

Can scientific productivity be optimized?

What was your carbon footprint for 2019? Mine was more of a bootprint, almost entirely because of flying. International travel has long been considered one of the perks of academic life, something that lifted the job out of the ordinary and cemented our membership of a trans-national community of scientists and scholars.

My carbon bootprint

My feet have hardly touched the ground since I got back from the DORA-HHMI meeting on “Driving Institutional Change for Research Assessment Reform” in Washington DC last week, but I wanted to log a few first impressions. I can’t hope to do it justice but please be reassured that the videos of the plenary session will soon be available, and there will no doubt soon be wiser and more considered ruminations on the conference.

First impressions: the DORA-HHMI meeting on research assessment reform

Since its announcement on 4th September the European Commission’s plan to make a radical shift towards open access (OA) has caused quite a stir. Backed by eleven* national funding agencies, the plan aims to make the research that they support free to read as soon as it is published.

Academic freedom and responsibility: why Plan S is not unethical

This post is a transcript of my opening remarks at the a Great Debate held earlier today at the European Geosciences Union 2019 meeting in Vienna. The debate asked us to consider the question:
 
 What value should we place on contributions that cannot be easily measured?
 


 Update (13/04/2019):

A video of the whole debate is now available online.

How to value what cannot be measured?

On Tuesday morning last week MPs, MEPs, and representatives of various organisations with a stake in post-Brexit UK science gathered in the Churchill Committee room at the House of Commons for the launch of  the “Scientific priorities for Brexit” report, published by Stephen Metcalfe MP, chair of the Commons select committee on science and technology.

Grim resolve at the House of Commons on the scientific priorities for Brexit

Science is Vital this week launched a campaign to seek amendments to the Higher Education and Research Bill 2016. The bill is a rather dry and procedural piece of legislation but hidden amongst its many sections and schedules are real threats to the autonomy and independence of UK universities and to the capacity of the research community to guide the research agenda.

Higher Education and Research Bill &#8211; Letter to my MP

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a researcher in possession of interesting experimental results, must be in want of a journal with a high impact factor. It is also true – and widely understood – that journal impact factors (JIFs) are unreliable indicators of the quality of individual research papers.

Pride and Prejudice and journal citation distributions

After publishing my round-up of the books I’d read in 2015, the author Christopher Edge got in touch via twitter to offer a review copy of his new book,

 The Many Worlds of Albie Bright

. It’s a short novel for children which has an ambitious amount of science threaded into the plot. At the beginning of the story young Albie has just lost his physicist mum to cancer.

Review: The Many Worlds of Albie Bright

On Wednesday of this past week I found myself in the presence of royalty and felt quite giddy. It happened at a Royal Institution shindig to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the first televised broadcast of their world-famous Christmas lectures. As you can see in the photograph below the Duke of York was in the room but that’s not the type of royalty I get excited about.

Meeting David Attenborough at the Royal Institution

I got impatient waiting for my latest review article to come out, so here it is. The scheduled publication date has slipped twice now without the publisher getting in touch to explain why. The latest I’ve heard, after querying the editor who commissioned the piece, is that it will be out by the end of the month. But I’ve paid my £500 fee to make the work open access and don’t see any good reason to delay further.

Structural Biology: a beginner&#8217;s guide?

It’s that time of year when all clear-thinking people die a little inside: the latest set of journal impact factors has just been released. Although there was an initial flurry of activity on Twitter last week when the 2015 Journal Citation Reports* were published by Thomson Reuters, it had died down by the weekend.

Data not shown: time to distribute some common sense about impact factors

Two weeks, two books. In

 Unweaving the Rainbow

Richard Dawkins takes issue with the poets. He argues that the poetry revealed deep within Nature by scientific investigation is more wondrous than the musings of those who make do with superficial appearances.

The biologist who left me out in the cold

It’s less than 24 hours, so this still counts as a timely post. I guess I had been primed because I had been thinking about it. But although I hadn’t set my alarm I found myself awake at 02:52 on Monday morning – I can still see the digital display – and so I got up, checked out the window that the moon was visible (it was – and already mostly eclipsed), dressed and hurried downstairs, grabbing my camera and binoculars on the way.

Lunacy and sanity

I haven’t written a book. And this is it. Well, I did write it of course. The words are mine. But there is nothing new here. I’ve just pulled together a selection of my blog posts from the last six years and self-published it as a hard-back book titled

 A Thousand Nothings

using the services of lulu.com. It wasn’t that hard. Still. It is a bit… awkward.

Vanity project

My week, my cultural week, started last Sunday when I found time to catch up with Radio 4’s five-part series on Dorothy Hodgkin, an extraordinary scientist who was brought vividly to life through readings of her letters. Hearing the words created an immediacy that I am not sure I would have grasped from the printed page. If you have not yet heard it, the series is also available as a podcast.

Digital culture: my so-called week

I spent all of today attending the “In metrics we trust?” workshop organised jointly by HEFCE and the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at Sussex University. This was part of the information-gathering process of HEFCE’s independent review of the role of metrics in research assessment;

Debating the role of metrics in research assessment

A opinion piece by Anurag Agrawal that was rather skeptical about some aspects of moves toward open access was published in the March issue of

 Trends in Plant Sciences

. I felt several of the arguments advanced by Agrawal were rather weak and was glad to have the opportunity to write a rejoinder which has now been published in the April edition of the same journal.

Open Access &#8211; reasons to be cheerful: a reply to Agrawal

Last night on Twitter someone posted a ‘selfie’ taken by the Mars Curiosity rover. It’s quite a photograph, particularly since it captures a fantastic piece of human technology amidst the landscape of another planet. The detail is what makes the picture. If you click to get a larger view you can see the nuts and bolts holding the rover together and the waves of sand on the Martian surface. My reaction was immediate.

Mars Attacks (the senses)

I recently came across a film on YouTube called ‘Unedited footage of the bombing of Nagasaki (silent)’. It is one of the dullest and most horrific things I have ever seen. The film shows US servicemen on Tinian island performing the banal tasks needed to prepare the Fat Man bomb before it was dropped on Japan.

The horror is in the detail

I said the open access debate had been torrid. And it continues apace in the wake of last week’s announcements from the UK government and RCUK, the organisation that represents the common interests of Britain’s Research Councils.

Your Invitation to the Open Access Debate

The Royal Institution has made a rather lovely film about William and Lawrence Bragg, the father and son Nobel laureates who came up the method of structural analysis by X-ray crystallography around 100 years ago. The film is constructed around an interview with Lawrence Bragg’s daughter Patience, a delightful lady who has very fond memories of her father and some wonderful stories about him.

The very interesting web of connections

The Science and Technology Committee of the House of Lords, the second chamber in the UK parliament, met this week to hear evidence from various stakeholders on the implementation of government’s policy on open access.

Open Access: journey without end?

I may not know much about Chemistry but I know what I like. And I like carbon. In fact, I’ve decided that it’s my favourite element. I’ll tell you why in the short video below, which is part of the Royal Institution’s 2012 Advent Calendar.     Please take a little time to explore the rest of the calendar.

Christmas wouldn&#8217;t be Christmas without Carbon

Everyone of a certain pretension likes to think they have a book inside them. I know I do.  But I’ve looked and I can’t find it. Maybe it’s in there somewhere but at too early a stage of germination to be visible. All I know is that I have searched and come up wanting. The situation is made all the more galling by the fact that everyone I meet these days seems either to have written a book or to be in the midst of producing one.

Booked

I am sick of impact factors and so is science. The impact factor might have started out as a good idea, but its time has come and gone. Conceived by Eugene Garfield in the 1970s as a useful tool for research libraries to judge the relative merits of journals when allocating their subscription budgets, the impact factor is calculated annually as the mean number of citations to articles published in any given journal in the two preceding years.

Sick of Impact Factors

I reported before on the notes from earlier meetings of the Finch Committee, which was set up by Science Minister David WIlletts to formulate proposals for making publicly-funded research more accessible. The notes of their latest meeting, held on 27th April, are now available so I wanted to add an update. I’ve uploaded a highlighted PDF for anyone who wants to read all four pages.

Finch Committee: Update

Last week, having quickly digested the executive summary of the Finch Report on open access (OA), I told you it was complicated. I’ve now read the report in its entirety, along with a large swathes of blogospheric commentary. I’m still decidedly of the view that it’s complicated but I wanted to think through some of the initial responses. In particular, I’d like to try to address the vexed issue of costs.

Finch Report: the question of costs

This is a big deal for me: my first ever article in New Scientist – a magazine that I read in the library in Ballymena as a teenager. Pardon me for preening a little.    What’s it about? You guessed it: open access.  My thanks to Simon Singh for suggesting that I pitch it to them.

Rubicon

The Finch Committee, set up last year by David Willetts to examine how UK-funded research ﬁndings can be made more accessible — and mentioned by the minister in his speech on the subject earlier this week — has been meeting regularly and is due to report within weeks. If you would like to find out more about the committee’s deliberations, you can.

Access to the Finch Committee on Open Access

David Willetts, Britain’s minister for science and universities, trailed the announcements made in his speech on open access to the UK Publishers’ Association yesterday as a ‘seismic shift’. One learns to be wary of the more hyperbolic statements of government ministers but I was at least left wondering whether the earth had moved for the publishers in the room.

Willetts&#8217; Speech on Open Access: Analysis

This morning there have been

 two very interesting developments

on open access. First, Doug Kell, Chief Executive of the BBSRC, responded on his blog to my open letter. His reply is detailed and goes some way to clarifying progress in the approaches that Research Councils will take to improve uptake of OA publishing options. I would encourage you to read it and respond.

Some progress on Open Access

Short Version

Please read the Wellcome Trust’s policy on open access. And then adopt it. Thank you.

 Long Version

Please read the Wellcome Trust’s policy on open access. It’s short so I’ve pasted it below. The policy states (with my emphases in purple): As a policy it is clear and purposeful. It is built upon the principle that OA is good for science and good for the public.

An Open Letter on Open Access to UK Research Councils

My train of thought is still running. Last week, taken aback by the revelation of Elsevier’s deep support for the Research Works Act, an anti open-access piece of US legislation, I declined to review a manuscript for the publisher and wrote about my reasons for doing so. My blogpost received an unusual amount of traffic. It seemed to have caught a wave – started elsewhere – that is sweeping through the scientific blogosphere.

How to access Open Access?

Last week I went to Germany to talk to a pharmaceutical company about my work on the blood protein, human serum albumin. It set me thinking. But first I need to tell you about albumin. Albumin is a surprisingly abundant protein in the human body;

Real and False Economy

It has been a quiet week in lab woebegone*. Though we have been working to pack up everything for a move across campus in mid-January, Christmas has intervened to scatter us to our homes, where traditionally we have the time to reflect on the year just past and galvanise ourselves for the one to come. Except that this year I haven’t had the time.

Work and Energy

Last night, having rounded off a busy week with a day of manual labour helping to repair my mother-in-law’s kitchen floor, I retired to bed early with the newspaper. Saturday’s

 Guardian

, if you want to know. It was delightful. I hadn’t taken the time to read the paper for ages and was pleased to rediscover that singular pleasure. Unfortunately, it’s a pleasure that is unlikely to endure.

Perusing the Papers

Plagiarism is pernicious and pervasive. You can’t seem to get away from it because so many people are getting away with it. As a university teacher I have long been aware of so-called essay-writing services that tout their wares to students who think that by purchasing essays written by someone else and passing them off as their own they can buy their way to learning. Fools. That’s what universities are for.

Plague-arism

Regular readers of this blog will be probably be aware of the ongoing campaign to reform the libel laws of England and Wales. These laws have pernicious effects in many aspects of public life — including science and medicine. They place a dangerous constriction on the freedom of scientists and medics to engage in robust debate on matters of  public interest.

Libel Reform &#8211; where are we?

I spent most of last weekend and all of yesterday finalising a chapter I had been asked to contribute to an upcoming monograph on human serum albumin. Monograph is a fancy word for book in academia. And academia is a fancy word for the people who work in universities and research institutes and consider themselves smart. Yesterday I was polishing the text of my latest draft and assembling the figures.

Transport of Delight

What is the best seminar that you have ever attended? And what made it so good? I pondered this question after my name appeared on the list of speakers for our internal divisional seminar series this term. I thought that, rather than give another run-of-the-mill progress report, I might have a little fun with the format. And perhaps make a useful point at the same time.

The Best Seminar?

I was banging on last week about how scientists should use words rather than guns during public engagement. Words are safer — and often more effective. But they are not

 completely

safe. In fact, they can sometimes be rather dangerous, especially when used without due care and attention in England and Wales, where the libel laws take a keen interest in the words of any unsuspecting author.

You may not be interested in this but this is interested in you

“May you live in interesting times”, goes the Chinese curse. Chinese scientists are certainly living in interesting times (as reported today in

 Nature

) but they are unlikely to see it as a curse. The budget of the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) has increased sevenfold since 1998 and is set — as part of bold plans — to rise 70% in the coming year.

Interesting Times

Henry started it by banging on about his iPad. Somehow the subject of blogging came up and I mentioned the BlogPress app, so here I am testing it out. I used it once on MT4 but this is my first go on WordPress. Seems OK so far…  Second, what exactly is this thing called Quora? I came across it on Twitter earlier in the week and, like a social media addict, signed up straight away. Quite a few other people seem to have done the same thing.

Padding times three

For the longest time I thought he was French. It’s the name — Joule; it

 sounds

French and in my physics class at school no-one thought to explain otherwise. In fact, Joule was not even introduced as a name — the word was simply handed to us as the SI unit of energy, a replacement for Calorie who, for all I knew, might also have been from France.

Joule&#8217;s Jewel

The British cardiologist

 Dr Peter Wilmshurst

was reported in 2007 to have made remarks critical of a clinical trial involving a medical device made by NMT Medical. He is now being sued for libel. The case is complex and I have not mastered the detail.

Libel Reform: Not There Yet

The firework screamed upwards into the night sky and burst, with an almighty crack, into a vibrant spray of light and colour. ﻿Everyone looked up. Some people cheered. And then the murmur of conversation resumed. Is that what happened with the Science is Vital campaign, which bloomed and boomed in the UK this past September and October?

Science is Vital: Perturbation Theory and Practice

After the amazing success of the Science is Vital Rally on Saturday (see here for video and Jenny’s report and here for another first-hand account by Prateek Buch), it was off to the House of Commons today. Not quite in my brand new shoes, but they had at least been cleaned following extensive glue coverage in Friday night’s marathon placard-making session.

Science is Vital &#8211; Lobby of Parliament

Mark Henderson’s The Geek Manifesto is a remarkable book. Though many of its themes are not new, it is difficult to imagine such a book being published as recently as five years ago. The Geek Manifesto provides a timely analysis of the power that different groups of geeks have levered from the growing sophistication of the of the internet.

Manifest Sense

When Simon Jenkins wrote in

 The Guardian

a couple of months back about science being a new religion we all scoffed. Oh, how we scoffed. Scoff, scoff, scoff, scoff, scoff. Scoff. But having been at the Edinburgh Fringe for a few days now, I’m wondering if he

 might

have had a point.

The Seriously Funny Fringe

Ian Sample’s _Massive – The Hunt for the God Particle_ is a fast-paced account of the quest for the Higgs boson, an elusive particle that is purported to solve the mystery of mass. If you were unaware that the question of mass was the least bit mysterious, you are in good company–with about 99.99% of the population of the planet for whom the matter of matter has never arisen.

Light work of a heavy matter

This is, to my mind, a quite astonishing report about Nature Publishing Group (NPG) hiking its proposed 2011 journal subscription charges to the University of California (UC) by 400%. (NPG is the company that runs the

 Nature Network

blogging platform). That’s right: 400%. I know nothing about the ins and outs of this deal.

Inflation

It is the day after the day after the fortnight before. I had hoped to write sooner about the relentless work and tremendous fun I had participating in I’m a Scientist, Get me Out of Here over the past two weeks. But such was the nervous energy expended in the last week that it has taken me till now to recover my bearings.

I&#8217;m a scientist, and there are fantastic kids out there

Wunderkind of audiovisual media that I am, I confess to being rather late in getting around to this one. Even I hesitated at the narcissistic self-absorption of it. But as a blogger, I must learn to overcome such hesitations. Here, to demonstrate my proper credentials and my total commitment to the vocation, is a photograph–taken just now–of the computer on which I have begun to compose this post.

Something for the weekend

Confused by the title? I’m not surprised. I’m a little confused myself. Though this is a common experience in science and nothing to be ashamed of. I was thinking about the Boomtown Rats since I was using their celebrated second album,

 A Tonic for the Troops

, to keep me running around Hyde Park in the warm sunshine last Monday afternoon. More often than not I use music these days to help drive myself along.

I&#8217;m a scientist and the Boomtown Rats are here

This is a quick one. The internet’s not working terribly reliably at home so, in case you missed it on Twitter, Facebook or Friendfeed, here is a short film about what myself and some of my group got up to last Saturday. Hit it Van…  Thanks to GrrlScientist for already promoting it on her blog.

A MAD day

Ha, this’ll make you laugh. Having spent my last blogpost in wistful reflection on the endless judgements that I find myself subjected to as a working scientist, I have just signed up–quite voluntarily, of my own free will and with my eyes wide open–for a whole lot more. However, this time it should be fun. Though I confess to being a little bit terrified. I am going to take part in the upcoming round of I’m a scientist, get me out of here!

I&#8217;m a scientist, get me out of here!

Returning home from Lablit this evening at about 11 pm I scanned the clear sky in the south-east and noticed a small bright speck to the left of and slightly higher than the glowing moon. A quick perusal of Starmap on the iPhone told me that this was likely to be Saturn. At last! I dashed into the house, had a quick comfort-break (at the Americans so delicately put it), grabbed my telescope and set up shop on our front pathway.

Not at all saturnine about Saturn

I am 46 years of age and I have just discovered Jupiter. This is a surprising revelation, even to me. I have strong memories of being a child besotted with things astronomical. Looking back now, however, I have to wonder at the superficiality of my interests. I was certainly a devotee of space and space rockets.

I have discovered Jupiter

According to the New Testament account, after the crucifixion Thomas insists on seeing and touching the wounds of Jesus before he will believe in the resurrection. Jesus shows Thomas but gently upbraids him: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Which is fine, as a basis for

 faith

. If that is your response to the ineffable mystery of existence.

The Acts of the Apostles (of Science)

I am determined to finish the third and final installment of the posts about my vacation reading before the holiday season comes to an end — which I think is tonight. I want to tell you about the biography of Huxley and Eric Ambler’s

 Uncommon Danger

. Truth be told I have been struggling with this post.

Beachbooks 3: Uncommon science and danger

Thanks to the very good offices of Matt Brown, who knows everything about everything happening in London, I found myself at the Smithfield Gallery last night. Jenny, Richard and myself joined Matt there to gaze at Luke Jerram’s artful glassy virus sculptures.

Virus Illusion Confusion

I attended last year’s Science Blogging conference very much as an outsider. I’d signed on at Nature Network and passed a few comments, but was not a blogger. However, the event was a turning point for me and in the warm flush of excitement that emanated from the conference, I finally decided to jump into the strange reality known as the blogosphere.

What a difference a year makes

Just before heading off on holiday I gave notice of my intended reading matter. Pedalo-duty permitting, I hoped to get through all four books. The wind and currents of the French Atlantic coast precluded any pedalo action so the kids had to settle for surfing lessons instead, and were placed in the capable hands of an instructor.

Beachbooks 1: Trick or Treatment

I’m guessing that pretty much everyone has mixed feelings about the micro-blogging service, Twitter. The ability to rapidly post ‘tweets’ of no more than 140 characters can easily be seen as both a blessing and a curse. I was certainly in the skeptical camp for a long time and easily resisted the temptation to sign up. Blogging in 140 characters, I scoffed, what a pitiful waste of time!

Confessions of a Twitter Fritterer: slightly hipper but a little bitter

I love pictures. And photographs. Unlike some, I can’t paint or draw with any great skill, but in common with many other people I get immense pleasure from photography. I’m no expert and wouldn’t even consider myself a serious hobbyist, but I have been known to enjoy composing and capturing an image with my little compact camera. Here’s one I took the weekend before last when we were at Brighton.

Picture perfect?

The germ of this post started with a remark by Kristi, who was struck on a recent visit to the UK by the number of people

 reading

on public transport. I was reading a piece from this week’s

 Nature

as I rode the underground last Friday night on my way to a recording of the TV show QI, and the name Archibald Vivien Hill suddenly leapt off the page.

Oddly Connect

My most recent post, “Respect my Authority!”, which was an attempt to explore the origin of scientific authority, has been removed by Nature Network because their legal advice deemed it to contain some dubious assertions. The matter was handled with great care in phone conversations with Corie and an email from Timo. I am grateful to them for the consideration they have shown. I have no doubt this was a tortuous decision.

I don’t know what to say

Oh wait, I’ve just checked the poster and we’re 129 years too late. Damn. But if you had been in the Piccadilly area at 8 pm on Monday 16th Feb 1880, you could have attended his talk on ‘The characters by which dogs resemble and differ from other animals’, the first of a series of six lectures on ‘Dogs and their forefathers’. The whole series would have set you back a mere sixpence.

Are you going to this seminar? Huxley’s speaking.

Last week I took the train through a snowy landscape to Warwick University to give a seminar at the Department of Chemistry. I arrived a little early to catch up with a couple of virologist friends; in the coffee bar we chewed over funding politics and hot topics in viral replication. I met my hosts for lunch and a pleasant chat about common interests in serum albumin.

Back to the road not travelled

This is normally Matt’s brief but I thought people (in the UK at least) might be interested to know that a three-part series on

 Science and Islam

, fronted by Prof Jim Al-Khalili, starts at 9 pm tonight on BBC4.

You can call him Al

Here is the second of two guest blogs from my tutorial students, completing my inverted blogging challenge. This one is from Louie Barnett, who provides an entertainingly seasonal take on the murky world of G-protein coupled receptors. Take it away, Louie:

 
 All I want for Christmas is… a GPCR?
 

Louie Barnett 	It’s coming to that time of year when people are thinking about what they want for Christmas.

Blogging Challenge Inverted (2)

Yesterday morning I awoke in crumpled clothes on a strange sofa, my mouth feeling furry and unwashed. I’d crashed there at about 5.30 am and only snatched a couple of hours of fitful sleep. As I gazed blearily at unfamiliar surroundings, a woman I barely recognised appeared and asked if I’d like a cup of tea. I nodded and mumbled thanks. Partying hard in the run-up to Christmas?

Diamond nights

Cath Ennis wrote back in June about the reluctance of some of her colleagues to write lay summaries of their work when applying for grants. Clearly for some scientists the effort of casting their work into a form that is accessible to the general public is just too much like hard work. But, as has often been stated on NN, making our science

 intelligible

to the public is a valuable activity.

Public Engagement Ring

On Tuesday, following a tip-off from Maxine,  Richard noted the passing of the Daresbury Synchrotron in Cheshire, which shut down finally in August. This gave me pause for quiet reflection since I had been a Daresbury user since 1991, cutting my teeth as a crystallographer by spending long nights in the darkroom developing the film packs that we used to record the X-rays scattered by our crystals.

&#8220;Donuts &#8211; is there anything they can&#8217;t do?&#8221;

The Guardian runs an interesting ‘”Writer’s Rooms” feature in its Review section every Saturday in which a writer (or sometimes an artist) discusses a photograph of their office or workroom, pointing out significant objects. The idea (as in Desert Island Discs) is to gain an oblique insight into the subject’s mindset. Well, it’s hardly an original idea but wouldn’t be interesting to take the same approach with scientists?

Scientific Spaces and Places

I have been thinking about this for a quite while, but finally got a kick up the backside. And now it’s done. With two members of my group I’ve put together a short movie on our research and, thanks to the good folks at Nature Network who enabled video embedding just last week, it is presented here for your… delectation? What can I tell you?

Six minutes of your life (Updated)

In my last post I tried to elucidate the classy and artful

 double-entendre

title of this blog. My

 Reciprocal Space

, I explained, is a place for exchange, but the name also belies a play on words that invokes the peculiar mathematical construct used to interpret the X-ray diffraction patterns from crystalline samples.

Art intimating Science

A combination of life’s distractions, ill discipline and slow reading mean that I have only managed to finish 11 books this year. I am almost embarrassed to admit to such a paltry tally. There are people who can rip through that many titles in less than a month. I envy them their capacity. But it is what it is. Eleven. As is now my habit, there is a tweet thread of brief reviews of each book – summarised in the image below.

Books of 2023

Well this is nice. The Celebrating Crystallography video made last year by the Royal Institution, which I narrated and helped to script-edit, has won the the EuroScience New Media award. Full details are available on the RI blog but it’s great to see a project come to such fruition.

Prize-winning video

What the hell is Stanley Kubrick’s

 2001: A Space Odyssey

about? I’m sure I don’t know. I’m really, really sure I don’t know.

Movement and Music

Everyone we knew who had been on safari told us they’d had such an amazing experience that I was worried our expectations for our trip to Kenya were being set too high. Elephants trekking across Amboseli National Park  I needn’t have been concerned. For six days we bounced and rattled in a Toyota Landcruiser driven by our knowledgeable and sharp-eyed guide, Senei, and each game drive seemed to be better than the last.

Kenya: Where the Wild Things Are

Entrance to Auschwitz I  Last week I visited Auschwitz. I find myself hesitating to write or say anything because I can’t find the words to convey the horror of the place and, in any case, so much has already been written and said far more powerfully by the Jewish survivors of the evil that was the Holocaust.

A day in Auschwitz

Another year, another two thousand or more photographs, some of which I thought were quite good. There’s a little taster below but if you want to see the full set of 55 pictures that were my favourites from this year, you need to click through to my album on Flickr. Silhouetted Robin. Louvre Reflections. Colourful Communication Barcelona Balcony The Circle of Light. No Cafe Society in Autumn.