Not been much of a traveller for years. It’s impractical with the children but even before then ( Read more... )

Last week I watched an old Fritz Lang movie Human Desire loosely based on Zola’s La Bete Humaine. The atmosphere was certainly Zolaesque, miserable, ground down people trapped in their miserable, animalistic lives with the industrial background an ever present metaphor. The industry in question being a railroad the metaphor was almost comically ( Read more... )

An article in Tuesday’s Guardian talking about how the possibility of gene therapy for various forms of congenital blindness raises issues about ‘disability’ and identity.

Do I want my sight back?From physical to political blindness a whole series of recent posts on colour blindness and racial stereotyping in the UK and other places outside the US ( Read more... )

Book reviews that make you want to read books are doing something right. One in last week’s Nature on Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness by Nicholas Humphrey ( Read more... )

In S4 of Angel there was an episode (Awakening) that began quite rationally but gradually grew more and more fantastical. Never quite crossed the line into out and out nonsense but began to feel weirdly off from the third act in and ended with the hotel basement echoing to the maniacal laughter of Angel’s alter-ego Angelus - the entire episode had ( Read more... )

For reasons best known to my non-existent therapist I’ve been playing a game of seeing how long it’s possible to go without renewing my identity card at work. 5 years and rising but today got rumbled by the new electronic security system at the main science library. So if it’s only possible to access the journals electronically does that mean my ( Read more... )

Feeling virtuous. Abstracts written, essays marked, meetings organized. Read a nice little piece in the Saturday Guardian about Jonathan Coe’s obsession with The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes with a (possibly) happy ending.

(  Spoilers for ‘Dalek’ )

Nature has a supplement this week with a ‘Science from the Artist’s perspective’ reciprocal theme. In it AS Byatt writes about how she’s included scientists and scientific ideas in her books and mentions Lewis Wolpert’s contention that its not possible to understand science, or how scientists work, from general principles alone - to have any ( Read more... )

Reading some articles about brain disorders, as you do, I had some thoughts on River and the basis for her madness in Firefly.

( Spoilers for Earshot (BtVS) and Ariel (Firefly) )