September 2010
3 posts
2 tags
To Provence and Paris
Tomorrow I fly south to Provence. I’m meeting a few friends from The Vintage Club1 to hit the vineyards of Côtes de Provence, Cassis and Bandol, with hopefully a blast up to Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The plan is thus: Swim, drink, eat, drink, swim, drink, eat, repeat.
After seven days, and with a thoroughly marinaded liver, I then blast up to Paris on the TGV for a few days staying with an old...
“Science is what you can get away with.”
– Zen Faulkes
August 2010
9 posts
1 tag
“You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on...”
– Carl Sagan. The title of today’s but does if float. Whilst I concur with the second half of the quotation, I feel very uneasy about the first statement.
berezina replies:
“Scientists have faith that the material world can be explained through observation and logic. So do religious...
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“The metric academics need to hit is “good enough,” and after that,...”
– Iterate toward perfection - Matt Might.
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“It was also a wake up call for me, living in cultures that endorse “instant”...”
– Lana was just one of the amazing people I met at Roche Continents. Here she recognises a great point: The course as a call for a passionate, engaged life. We all can be so much better.
I really must get around to writing my own thoughts on the whole surreal experience, before the memories start to...
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Quid Est Deus. A live translation →
On Monday I had the pleasure of hearing Wolgang Rihm’s epic cantata for choir and orchestra Quid Est Deus (What is God?) performed in Salzburg’s beautiful Kollegienkirche.
It consists of twenty four answers to the question What is God?, taken from a Latin text from the Apocrypha, ascribed to the mythical Hermes Trismegistus. The programme to the Kontinent Rihm concert series, of...
“I looked at the children asleep after dinner before joining Henry [Asquith, the...”
– Prime Minister Asquith’s wife, Margot, on 4th August 1914.
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Now everything changes
Roche Continents at the Salzburg Festival was the most surreal event of my life. I’m simply lost for any sort of words to describe it. Amazing people; incredible creativity; beautiful, inspiring and shocking music; Ridiculous generosity.
To maintain the suspense for future participants, I’ll avoid discussing the magical programme of events, but hopefully I’ll post something on...
July 2010
17 posts
2 tags
Disconnecting
Today I’m departing sunny England to head, via Paris and Munich, to Salzburg. I’m attending Roche Continents, a week-long programme at the Salzburg Festival exploring the common ground of creativity and innovation in the Arts and Science, along with 100 students of science, music and fine arts from all over Europe.
I really feel that this will be valuable time to disconnect from the...
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Paris. Alone
Due to a series of unfortunate events, I now find myself in Paris and free to my own devices for a day and a half on Monday & Tuesday next week. I haven’t been to the La Ville-Lumière for years and, as a somewhat rusty solo-traveler, am feeling somewhat lost. I’d appreciate mining your collective wisdom for your tips, secrets, and recommendations to make Paris alone magical. What...
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cheapdate →
This is why I have a soft spot for fly-boys (or Drosophilia geneticists): cheapdate is a fruit fly gene whose mutation causes Drosophila to be extra sensitive to alcohol.
I’d also heard a great story about a fly lab where all new genes discovered were named after wines. If you were the lucky investigator who got to naming rights, the PI would buy you a really expensive bottle of it’s...
“I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be...”
– Isaac Asimov on his writing style
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I Write Like →
An academic friend pointed me towards I Write Like, a statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them to those of famous authors. Throwing a sample of my writing its way, I was quite pleased to discover that I write like the biochemistry professor, turned science-fiction author, Isaac Asimov. My friend was somewhat less pleased to be told that his...
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Realisations
In no particular order…
Cycling to work next year feels like a real possibility
I need a brief ‘Regenerative Medicine for Dummies’ pitch to tell people what I do.
Cambridge is still one of my favorite places
A weekend away from a computer screen is great for my eyes
Real people are excellent
My fencing has improve dramatically in the last six months, but I still suck
My...
“What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut
With diamonds? Or to be...”
– The Duchess of Malfi. Act IV, scene II.
Just 21 days until I get to see the ENO/Punchdrunk production of John Webster’s celebrated seventeenth-century tragedy of love, incest and murder. God knows how I’ll hide from spoilers and reviews after the premiere on 19 July.
June 2010
31 posts
When the Doctor says it's cool, it's cool.
River Song: What in the name of sanity have you got on your head?
Doctor: It's a Fez. I wear a Fez now. Fezzes are cool.
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“You are joining a special profession. Doctors and scientists, we are all in the...”
– Atul Gawande, speaking to the graduating class at Stanford’s School of Medicine (via haunted).
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“You play with some ideas as a composer, you want them to show you something....”
– German composer Wolfgang Rihm, speaking about his work in an interview with The Guardian.
I imagine that that music composition, more so than writing or visual art, lends itself to conversational creativity as described by Rihm - by its very nature it’s a labile media and responds to the...
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“The Isner-Mahut battle is a bizarre mix of the gripping and the deadly dull....”
– The Guardian’s Wimbledon 2010 live blog at 4.05pm, in what turned out to be only the early stages of this record breaking stalemate - Play suspended after 10 hours played and 59 games each in the fifth set.
I loved Henman’s suggestion that the umpire should have called...
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The one where the guy kills his wife
CJ: I understand you've got a big date tomorrow night. [...] You're taking her
to the opera?
Bartlet: Verdi's Othello, romantic eh?
CJ: Isn't that the one where the guy kills his wife?
Bartlet: It's in Italian, I'm hoping she won't notice.
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WatchFinally found a full, if very low quality version of Infra from McGregor/Richter/Opie. It’d be great if the BBC broadcast it again.
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ajohnny asked: Hi - I stumbled across your blog while doing a tumblr search for Wayne McGregor, and I find it pretty interesting. I must say that you're one of the most personally interesting academics I've encountered!
No refills →
The Atlantic:
Tougher safety and efficacy standards may also be keeping good drugs out of the public’s hands. Most people agree that today’s FDA would not have approved aspirin; even penicillin, the miracle drug that helped dramatically extend the human lifespan when introduced in the early 1940s, is questionable. Allergic reactions to penicillin kill a higher percentage of its takers than...
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“At any rate I have known since about 1931 […] that the future must be...”
– George Orwell, 8 June 1940.
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“In the middle of a fearful battle in which, I suppose, thousands of men are...”
– George Orwell, 8 June 1940.
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An open letter to David Karp
David,
I’m sorry to say that I thought Tumblr’s recent “heart-of-BP-executive black” dashboard fundraising effort went slightly too far.
I have no issues with, an indeed applaud, business for holding high moral standards; actively lobbying government and other corporations; or making political and charitable donations from its profits. However, when these otherwise...
Give Me Something To Read: collecting long-form... →
I had to say something about the terrible AmE twang of “Berkshire County, England” in this peice. The correct (BrE) would be “The Royal county of Berkshire”, or Berks, as one would write on an envelope. As a side note, to call someone a “berk”, whilst sounding like an innocent schoolboy taunt is actually somewhat ruder: Shorthand for Berkshire Hunt, which is...
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“The fullness of form, the tautness of form, all these things are connected with...”
– Henry Moore
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