This post was inspired by a Guardian article about the American University Harvard (probably the world’s richest university) announcing that “Major Periodical Subscriptions Cannot Be Sustained” by which they mean that the journals (aka periodicals) where academics like me publish our research results are getting so expensive that Harvard can no longer afford them.
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Yesterday was the 2012 postgraduate graduation ceremony where physics graduands got their masters and PhDs. A student of mine got her PhD, so I was there, and very proud. She is from Malaysia so her parents could not be there, but her husband was and lots of pictures were taken so her parents could see […]
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I have just got back from a scientific conference in Bristol. I thoroughly enjoyed it; it was great to hear of interesting science, and to meet up with friends I have not met for a year or two. Most of the talks were quite pure science and quite technical, but I did learn about ‘blue […]
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Homeopathy claims to treat illness with dilute solutions of molecules, very dilute solutions of molecules. A standard dilution is to take a solution of a plant extract and then dilute by a factor of 100, 30 times in succession. This dilutes by a factor of 10030. This is seriously dilute. Consider 1cm3 of a 1% solution […]
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Extraordinary levels of drive. This kept both of them at the top of their respective professions for decades. I watched ‘The Secret Life of Bob Monkhouse‘ on BBC4 last night. Monkhouse was a driven complex man who worked very hard to stay at the top of comedy/light-entertainment from the late 1940s almost until his death […]
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