Life in 2017

Life in 2017 is pretty shit. It's not that I can complain about anything in particular, it's more a general feeling of utter crapness on all sorts of levels - some expected, others totally unnecessary. Level I: Family life is busy and the boys keep us well occupied with their various …

Save the Royal High School

One of the finest buildings in Edinburgh - the former Royal High School - is under threat to be developed into an exclusive 5 star hotel. The Royal High School is one of the finest examples of the Greek Revival style and is of international importance. The economic merits of the proposed …

The Future of GradSchool Conference

Yesterday we had a big gradschool forum where the future of the GradSchool Conference was discussed. This post repeats and expands my initial thoughts yesterday. I work at the School of GeoSciences which is at the triple intersection of traditional geo-sciences (ie if you want to be provocative supplying talent …

Broken World

A stormy night last night and although the weather somewhat calmed down during the day I still feel very upset. I needed some time to think about Wednesday's shooting in Paris at the Charlie Hebdo magazine and the reactions I observed. The terrorists struck at one of our fundamental principles …

Dashed Hopes

So the predictions turned out to be reasonably accurate, Scotland voted NO and there is a bit of a hang-over mood. The waiting is over, and people voted for known unkowns. A great missed opportuinity and as someone commented - the greatest country of the 19th century remains stuck in the …

More Musings on the Scottish Referendum

Even though my last post on the Scottish Independence Referendum ended up being quite long there is still much more. First of all, I found a very good essay by Charlie Stross on the referendum, well worth a read. I tried to come up with some reasons why I would …

The Scottish Indy Referendum

I promised myself that I should write down my thoughts on the Scottish Independence Referendum before it actually happens on the 18th September 2014. It certainly has been a roller coaster ride of thoughts and only now a few days before the referendum my ideas have settled on a somewhat …

New Flickr Design

So, flickr.com updated its site layout quite drastically. I think it's a mixed bag. The new design is really good for viewing photos. However, I think it is quite difficult to get the information that used to be easily available. In particular the new home page is very difficult …