Yearly Archives: 2025 | occamstypewriter.org
The University Vice Chancellor Debbie Prentice, with Lord Patrick Vallance and Minister Pennycook at this week’s Innovate Cambridge Summit This week saw various significant announcements for and from the University of Cambridge, the Cambridge region and the wider so-called Ox-Cam … Continue reading →Continue reading →| Occam's Typewriter
No, not the name of a pop-group (although it might be quite a good one), but an episode from my early life. In later life I’m sure people had me in the category of those difficult women I wrote about last week, but by and large at school I was a goody-goody who (as my mother continued to say long after I’d become a professor) couldn’t say boo to a goose. I was, in general, not one for breaking school rules, unlike those who will remain nameless who put potassium permanganate in our scho...| Athene Donald's Blog
Yearly Archives: 2025 | occamstypewriter.org
Yearly Archives: 2025 | occamstypewriter.org
Tributes poured in following the death of Jane Goodall, with stories of her remarkable life and doings, the way she set out new paths in research and lived a different kind of life. The quoted remark of hers that most … Continue reading →Continue reading →| Occam's Typewriter
When I set off for University, I wasn’t surprised to find there weren’t many women on my course: there were only three Cambridge colleges that admitted women back then (i.e. no coeducational colleges at all), so of course I would … Continue reading →Continue reading →| Occam's Typewriter
When I first moved to London in 1997, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Long hours in the lab would spill into the evening streets and underground tunnels of a city so large that you could never experience it all. … Continue reading →Continue reading →| Occam's Typewriter
I’m essentially a year into retirement and, being the age I am, it is not surprising that I get invited to attend other people’s retirement celebrations. Of course, not all academics want such an event in their honour, and for … Continue reading →Continue reading →| Occam's Typewriter
William Boyd Stars and Bars A rare mis-step by a usually reliable author who ventures into slapstick comedy of the uptight-Englishman-in-America variety. If it’s satire about America you’re after, Dickens did it first (and better) in Martin Chuzzlewit, which — … Continue reading →Continue reading →| Occam's Typewriter
Moses was old, a chill in his bones| Blogging by Candlelight
Yearly Archives: 2025 | occamstypewriter.org
Ironically, in the week when my co-authors and I are publishing a paper proposing framework to tackle the reluctance of researchers to publish negative results, one of the most important null results of recent times – the lack of any credible link … Continue reading →Continue reading →| Occam's Typewriter
While we wait for the Schools White Paper and the report of the Curriculum and Assessment Review, other bodies have been busy, reporting specifically on the state of science education in (predominantly) English schools. Over the last few months, both the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and the Institute of Physics (IOP) have produced significant reports looking at the, not entirely happy, state of the teaching profession. The annual report from the Royal Society of Chemistry, brought togethe...| Athene Donald's Blog
Ken Liu (ed.) Invisible Planets Hungry as I am for more SF from China, and with birthday requests on the table, Mrs Gee ordered me this collection of contemporary Chinese SF, edited and translated by Ken Liu. Thirteen stories, all by authors of whom news had yet to reach mes oreilles. All except, of course, Cixin Liu, author of the extraordinarily successful Three-Body Problem trilogy (reviewed here and here). Liu (sensu Cixin) is an author of two of the stories here, and one of the three ess...| The End Of The Pier Show
Anna Mackmin Devoured Oh, but this struck a chord. This is a bizarre coming-of-age-novel in which the initially unnamed protagonist — a girl on the verge of puberty – recounts her life in a commune living in a ramshackle house somewhere in Norfolk in the the early 1970s. Our girl lives with her (selectively) mute sister Star and her parents who give house room to an eclectic assortment of deluded and self-absorbed poets, new-agers, artists, ne’er do-wells, druggies and dropouts. Eventua...| The End Of The Pier Show
Kaliane Bradley: The Ministry of Time The British government has acquired a device to transport people from past centuries to the present day. The people concerned are recorded as missing or dead, so the course of history should not be changed. At this end, Ministry employees have to give house room for the ‘immigrants’. Our protagonist, a young twenty-first century woman of mixed British-Cambodian parentage, is put in charge of an officer from the doomed Franklin Expedition to the North-...| The End Of The Pier Show
John Higgs: Exterminate, Regenerate As someone once said in another context, one should never underestimate the power of cheap music. And it doesn’t come much more powerful, or more cheap, than Dr Who, the long-running children’s science-fiction programme that aired on the BBC from 1963 to 1989, and again from 2005 to the present day. Higgs gives a comprehensive, readable and honest account of the genesis, exodus and revelation of the show. The book is far, far better than most effusions ...| The End Of The Pier Show
Four months after my open letter calling on the Royal Society to take action over Elon Musk FRS’s breaches of their code of conduct had attracted thousands of signatures from the scientific community, but only a very muted response from that most learned organisation, I was beginning to think I should let the matter go. After all, Musk is no longer part of the Trump administration, his relationship with the president having exploded in spectacularly bitter fashion a couple of weeks ago.| Reciprocal Space
1 Prof. Stephen Royle University of Warwick| Reciprocal Space