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Micro-bio-hydro-dynamicism

Life, maths and science down under

August 26 / Travel

How to endure your next long-haul flight

Flying sucks. The takeoff and landing are great, but the bit in between where you actually go somewhere is roughly comparable to immersing yourself in a bath of angry hedgehogs accompanied by the entire roster of Big Brother housemates. The greater the ratio of hedgehog…

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August 21 / Academia & Maths

Academic wordclouds: we’re so predictable

What scientific field do you think this represents? How about this one? The answers are at the bottom of this post. These fascinating pictures, called wordclouds, are maps of the buzziest words in two different categories of the arXiv, a free, open-access academic repository of…

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August 10 / Academia

Prof McWritewell and the perils of peer review

A few weeks ago, I introduced Prof McWritewell and his merry band of collaborators. They toiled tirelessly to pull together a paper proving the hypothesis that cats sit on whatever you are reading because their neurons interact with the Higgs boson. It was a multi-skilled…

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August 9 / Maths & Travel

Lighting up the Australian outback

I am still getting used to the scale of Australia. The verbs “nip” and “pop”, so abundantly employed in my native Britain, are gathering dust in the corner. In order to get my head around the vast swathes of outback, and how poor, lonely Perth…

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August 3 / Academia

Collaboration: parcel passer or group hugger?

Without collaboration, modern science would be impossible. We now know so much that, unless you’re a medic, being called “Doctor” has little bearing on whether you know much more than a finger of your field. Only in groups do we amass enough power to locate…

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July 31 / Academia & External writing

Are we nearly there yet?

I wrote a guest post for The Research Whisperer on life as an academic in Perth, the most isolated city in the world.

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July 6 / Academia & Food

Cooking up the perfect paper

I cooked risotto the other day. As I warmed my soul over the gas hob, deep in a rice-stirring trance, I was snapped back to reality by a startling revelation: the stages of crafting an academic paper map exactly to the stages of making risotto.…

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June 29 / Travel

Wisdom in a storm

I recently journeyed to Sweden for a conference, plodding from Perth to Gothenburg via Singapore and London. The longest leg of this trip was remarkably unpleasant thanks to the adjacent two-year-old intent on licking my shirt and abusing me with his colouring book. Perhaps this…

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June 4 / Academia & Musing

Rock, paper, scissors, Bacon, Erdős

The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a great pub game. You pick a starting actor and try to make a chain to Kevin Bacon, where the steps in the chain are other actors linked by co-credited appearances. If you can do it using at…

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May 25 / Travel

Twenty-four hours in Baku

Back in January, my better half and I paid a visit to Baku, Azerbaijan. Lucky us, right? Fascinating heritage, excellent chess. What a blast it must have been; how jealous you all are. Don’t be. It was involuntary. And it wasn’t really a blast, but…

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Micro-bio-hydro-dynamicism

Life, maths and science down under

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