Before heading out to a conference in Maine (on the north atlantic coast of USA) I visited a couple of museums that are part of Harvard University. Now Harvard is one of the most prestigious, and one of the richest universities in the world. Wikipedia reckons its endowment is $26 billion (£16 billion). Harvard is […]
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This is the blog post partly written in Boston Common (a large park in the middle of Boston, USA). To prove it, the picture is of the Massachusetts State House, which is just north of Boston Common. As I write this a swan is gliding by on the lake in the park to the accompaniment […]
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Last week one of our research groups exhibited at the Royal Society Summer Science exhibition. This exhibition runs from Tuesday to Sunday and is attended by thousands of school pupils and members of the public. The stands cover a wide range of research from quantum physics (ours) to bats to invisibility (well timed with the […]
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So, I have done some editing on the first section of the Wikipedia page on the Nagel-Schreckenberg model – a simple model that show traffic jams. See my earlier post for why I did this. The first section is the one that describes the model itself. The other sections I have left because I don’t […]
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If you think about it a bit, it should be obvious that sexual reproduction is a bad idea, in evolutionary terms, i.e., we should never have evolved to reproduce sexually. Consider two species: H. sapiens (i.e., us) and H. amazonius: a hypothetical species entirely of women who can give birth without sex. Now, if we […]
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It is summer, and one of things academics are supposed to do over summer is look back at how they thought the teaching went, and reflect on the student feedback on what they liked/didn’t like. Then in summer there should be time to fix things that didn’t work so well. I am very bad at […]
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