Numbers can be interesting, and there are some very striking ones in Whoops!, an excellent book by John Lancaster – on our current financial predicament. One is that (as of a couple of years ago) the RBS bank group (Royal Bank of Scotland, Natwest, etc., i.e., the one we now own) had £1.81 trillion of […]
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I like liquids, I have been studying them since my PhD. Mainly I have been trying to understand them, but many scientists and engineers study them because they are so useful. Over the last 10 to 20 years people have been developing what is called microfluidics, which is kind of playing around with lots of little droplets. But […]
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We, and many other animals, have colour vision, and so we are surrounded by our uses of colour, from football shirts to different colour iPods. The dyes used to make a football shirt red, for example, are just chemical substances that adsorb blue and green photons but reflect red photons. Then of the white light […]
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I am reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, and also an application for funds for research, a research grant proposal. The biography is for pleasure, and I am really enjoying it, the grant proposal because I am refereeing it. The grant proposal has, as it is required to, a “Pathways to Impact” section, in […]
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Over the Christmas break I hope to read at least one Montalbano detective story, plus a Scandinavian crime story or two. Incidentally, the Montalbano series is very good, light, reading. It is also set on Sicily, and reading about somewhere warm and sunlit is nice at this time of year. I also want to read about Cajal bodies.
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My PhD student passed her viva yesterday. Of course she was relieved. So was I. Basically, a PhD is an apprenticeship in research. A student, who already has a first degree, spends typically three to four years doing research, then writing a thesis. The thesis is book length, often more than 200 pages.
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