My resemblance to Blanche DuBois has not been remarked on before but last Wednesday evening it was unmistakeable. There I was travelling on the tube to the TalkScience event at the British Library when, like Tennessee Williams’ fateful Southern belle, I found myself entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers. Still recovering from a cold, I was suddenly overcome by a severe coughing fit.

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?

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.

It’s the name of this blog. But why? Well, in Web2.0-land, a blog (can you hear my teeth grinding?) is quintessentially a space for the reciprocation of views, the exchange of ideas. So far, so good, but the title is also a rather cheesy crystallographic pun because reciprocal space is a real thing.

Attending the SciBlog 2008 conference last week gave me a chance to weigh up my opinion of blogs, bloggers and blogging. And I’ve decided that I hate them all. Not the concept or the people or the activity, you understand, but the words. They stick in my throat. As I would have said when I was growing up in Northern Ireland, they make me want to boke . I know the etymology: web-log, b-log, blog.