Just realised I never posted these here.

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Dan and I went along to watch the first round of the Scottish Tooling Series at Glasgow Climbing Centre. Drytooling, for those of you who haven't heard of it, is climbing (usually outrageously overhanging) rock using ice-axes and crampons. It initially developed as a way of ( Read more... )

I've got a problem: I've had an idea I want to write about, but it depends on two or three other ideas I wanted to write about but never got around to. So I'm going to write this post in a top-down, Wirthian fashion, stubbing out those other posts: maybe, if there's enough interest, I'll come back and write them properly and replace the stubs here ( Read more... )

Congratulations to wormwood_pearl, who climbed her first F6a at the climbing wall today! That's apparently a 5.9 in the US system - do you use the same system for top-roped climbs as for lead climbs over there ( Read more... )

I like knots ( Read more... )

I'd like to clarify the question in my last post, namely "what is mountaineering?". Let's start by introducing some standard terminology so we've got something to work with. ( Fun things to do in the mountains )

A guy on Reddit pointed me at this article today. It's the Wikipedia biography of the Welsh computer scientist Donald Davies. Like my father, he was from the Rhondda Valley; he was the co-inventor of packet-switched networks (like this big one you're using right now); and he once found a bug in Alan Turing's code, before the first computer had been ( Read more... )

• My supervisor, who's been away in Barcelona for the last month, dropped in for a flying visit last weekend. We had two mammoth three-hour meetings in two days, which was excellent in that I now have lots of stuff to work on and some idea of how to fix up things that were broken, but utterly knackering. Momentum has been lost a bit (hence the Fine ( Read more... )

I've been doing what for me is a lot of exercise recently.

( Read more... )