This afternoon, I spent a bit of time wandering along the canals that encircle Oxford. Their relative abandonment during the winter makes them a good place for general contemplation, even if the schedule of classes and other projects makes you feel guilty about time spent so idly.

Proving the adage that technology is actually driven by evil spirits who let it fail just when it is most inconvenient: the MySQL database that serves as the back-end to my wiki has chosen this morning - an hour before I need to give a presentation stored in the wiki - to go kaput. SQL [...]

It cannot be taken as a good sign to have a presentation in twelve hours and still not really be sure about the main thrust of what you are going to say. I feel like I have a lot of structural elements, but only a semi-rough conception of what I am going to build out [...]

Now that I’ve had these earbuds for about five months, it seems worthwhile to make a few comments. While they have their peculiarities, these are acoustically excellent devices. The noise isolation is so good that I use them to sleep on planes and buses. Indeed, when wearing them I am unable to hear whether my [...]

Now nearly finished with Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I am pondering how to apply it to my thesis case studies. Basically, what Kuhn has done is sketch out a theory about how scientists interact with the world and each other, generating new scientific ways of understanding the world. You start with one paradigm (say, [...]

Sorry to be less esoteric and entertaining in my writing recently, but I have been focused by necessity on issues pertinent to ongoing projects. The process distorts one’s perception of the world. I cannot really judge, for instance, the extent to which the apparent increase in coverage of climate change issues in the media is [...]