As a final year high school student I went to open days at Dutch Universities, trying to find out what I wanted to do later. Later? I did not really know what that meant. So I passively absorbed the information given to me by enthusiastic staff and students in colourful T-shirts. I had an interest […]
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This was (according to the mighty Wikipedia) the title of a talk given by Edward Lorenz, one of the pioneers of chaos theory. Apparently, Lorenz didn’t come up with the title himself. He was too lazy/badly organised to give the organisers a title for his talk, so one of the organisers, in frustration, came up with this title. I can sympathise with the organisers here. I am currently organising a workshop, and am at the stage when my co-chair and I are trying to extract the last few titles from our speakers. It can be tricky to get some people to come up with a simple 10 to 20 word title.
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I am not a baseball fan. I have been to only one baseball game. This was an LA Dodgers game when I was working in LA. The Dodgers lost, and the highlight for me was the hotdog. But baseball is known to be very nerd friendly as it generates lots of stats: batting averages, pitching […]
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The picture is of Emmy Noether, a theoretical physicist/mathematician from the first half of the twentieth century. Despite coming up with one of the deepest theorems in physics, she is not well known, in particular, her contemporary Marie Curie is much better known. A large majority of the physicists who have revolutionised our understanding of the natural […]
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Over Christmas I try to do a bit of reading, of papers I may not have time to think about during term time. I am reading a couple (1,2) of papers by McKnight and coworkers in the biology journal Cell. In a nutshell, they have discovered, at least partially by accident it appears, that important […]
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