Category: Research

  • 14/10/2020
    I had forgotten this piece I wrote a few years back for Reto Caduff’s amazing book onFreckles. Here it is: Imagine at…
  • 09/10/2020
    Many years ago I was expressing exasperation at what I took to be the layers and layers of foolishness that…
  • 03/10/2020
    That “scientific management” bungled the algorithm for children’s exam results, verifies a maxim attributed to J.R. Searle, an American philosopher:…
  • 01/10/2020
    “We’re going through a Copernican revolution of healthcare, where the patient is going to be at the centre. The gateway…
  • 29/09/2020
    Alas, there will no more new ones of these, as arguably the greatest of modern biology’s experimentalists, Sydney Brenner, passed…
  • 30/07/2020
    More accurately, late night thoughts from 26 years ago. I have no written record of my Edinburgh inaugural, but my…
  • 02/07/2020
    Defining the appropriate probability space is often a non-trivial bit of statistics. It is often where you have to end…
  • 22/06/2020
    Freeman Dyson died February 28th this year. There are many obituaries of this great mind and eternal rebel. His book,…
  • 12/06/2020
    The best way to foster mediocrity is to found a Center for Excellence. This is a quote from a comment…
  • 09/06/2020
    The Nobel laureate David Hubel commented somewhere that reading most modern scientific papers was like chewing sawdust. Certainly it is…