Life and Opinions

Entries by Title

• Feeding the Cookie Monster
• Smelly Buses
• Market Place, Reading
• Recursive Equations are the Assembly Language of Functional Programming
• GADT Syntax for Haskell Type Definitions
• Meteors
• North Kensington Misplaced on Google Maps
• Concave Translucent Mushrooms
• Hoverfly
• Harlequin Ladybirds
• Bird Strike!
• Swan
• Gatekeeper Butterfly
• Potter Wasp Nests?
• Greenbottle Fly
• Tufted Vetch
• Six-Spot Burnet Moth
• White Clover
• Hogweed
• Birdsfoot Trefoil
• Great Willow Herb
• Rub not thy Feet on Bread
• Picasso on Computers
• Dijkstra's Beard
• Using Wget to Download a Web-Site
• Tick
• The Razors and Tweezers Culture
• My Walking Speed
• The Case against Manned Space Exploration
• Jim Coplien on Design by Contract
• Online Compilers
• Echos of Stars Past
• The 'Beast' of Frimley
• Glade 3, pyGTK, and "Beginning Python"
• Reformation
• Swarm
• Canada Goose
• Strange Power Supply Problem
• COLOURlovers
• Writing Haskell
• "You Never get a Cup of Bovril in an Ian Curtis Lyric"
• Relativity for Dogs
• Book-Sniffing Breaks
• Software Construction versus Building Construction
• How to Cook Oven Chips
• Ubuntu 8.04 Runescape Problem
• Ubuntu 8.04 Sound Problem
• Saturday Morning
• Great Crested Grebe
• Spring
• Air-Raid Shelters at Hardwick House
• The God Delusion
• Web Annoyances
• Non-Confusing Quantum Mechanics
• Bird Days
• Egyptian Gosling
• Bertrand Meyer SCOOP Video
• Installing BizTalk Server 2006 Trial Version on Windows XP
• Sparrowhawk Attack?
• Discussion between Erik Meijer and Bertrand Meyer
• Molluskan Cross-Stitch
• Brain Removal and Skull Cleaning
• The Descent of Me
• White Deer
• Lotteries and Hope
• Some People Need to Get Out More
• Bearded Pig
• Golden Poison Dart Frog
• Fish
• Rhinoceros Iguana
• Patagonian Maras
• Neanderthal Language
• Abdim's Stork
• Getting the Job Done
• Scientific Press Peleases
• Flying Molluscs
• Surgery Blogging
• Teaching Lies
• A Red Kite Day
• Great White Egret?
• Google as Problem Solver
• Things that cell biologists shouldn't say in public
• A Problem with Peer Review
• Language Evolution driven by Prudishness
• Egyptian Geese Again
• Egyptian Gosling
• Byzantine
• Stemonitis Slime Mold
• Where's a Mathematician when you need one?
• Photosynthesis Cartoon
• Evolution and Creationism Compared
• Google Maps Street View Horror Video
• Why Static Typing Matters
• Not Ageist
• The Nagyrev Poisonings
• Timberrrr!
• Hanging Stone in the Mist
• We will Gas them on the Beaches
• Adblock Plus
• Exciting Mathematics
• Donald Knuth on the Presentation of Quantum Mechanics
• Manage Your Electronic Environment
• Like a Hurricane
• Masks
• What I changed my Mind about in 2007
• Time and Determinism
• The Northern Pennines
• Frederick Accum and Food Safety in 1820
• Move over Feynman!
• Swan
• Spice Girls Reunion Concert
• Affinity Fraud
• Wood Duck
• Chance Linkage is the Main Source of Change in Human Genes
• New Words
• Lotteries are for Losers
• On the Benefits of giving School Children Homework
• Verity Stob on Acrobat Reader
• Java Quotes
• Hate Mail for Linguists
• Multi-Track Hollow Ways on Kempswithen
• Yor Divorced, Lol
• Upgrade from Vista to XP!
• Advice on Giving Presents
• Middlesbrough
• Possible Human-to-Human Transmission of Bird Flu
• The Ultimate Time-Waster
• The Brass Trinket
• Solving Linear Equations on the Train
• Ancient Tracks on the North Yorkshire Moors
• Pluvialis almost loses her Goshawk
• Leukocyte Extravasation Video
• Arcyria Slime Mould
• Explicit is Better than Implicit
• Teddy Bear Protest
• Rejecta Mathematica
• Anglo-Saxon Jewellery in East Cleveland
• Perpetuum Mobile
• Not so much Fly as Plummet...
• My Short Illustrious Collaboration with Sir Francis Crick by David Ng
• Birds of the Week
• Goshawking
• Danegeld
• How to Deal with an Incendiary Bomb
• Coggia's Comet of 1874
• Phew!
• Door Zombie
• Bishops and Apes
• Mare Humorum
• Philipp Fauth's Map of the Moon
• Early Morning Birds
• The Misanthropic Principle
• The 9-Day Old Moon
• Kitchen Castle
• Railway Shed
• Comet Holmes: Then and Now
• Face Animation from Single Images
• House of Flying Cushions
• The Superiority of Debian Package Management System
• Three Reviews of the Alloy Book
• LibraryThing
• Cool Topology Video
• Venus, Saturn and Regulus
• PortAsm MOVEM Translation Bug
• Mahoosive Meme
• Autumnal Plague
• Cached Thoughts
• "We Know Only One Argument: Death"
• A Nineteenth Century Daylight Meteor
• How To Disable Firefox Quick Find
• The Tipler Point
• Windows Dead Messenger
• Yawning and Sex
• A Lichen and a Moss
• Knots as a Tracers of Language Evolution
• Random Acupuncture
• Naughty Pluvialis!
• The Single Helix by Steve Jones
• The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
• Buying Safety Pins
• Nautilus Open Terminal
• Assault Prams
• Sparrowhawk Victim
• The Nicene Creed as a Rationality Test
• Mushroom
• Snail Shell Graters
• Snail Telegraphy
• Everyday Graphs, No 2: Losing Weight
• Investors in People
• Everyday Graphs, No 1: The Monday Morning Effect
• Friday Afternoon Commute
• 'Tis the Season to be Arachnophobic
• Deer
• A Real Printer's Devil
• A Starfish Decoy Site on the Cleveland Hills
• Avoiding the Age of C++
• Emperor Dragonfly
• "Hiring the Creator as a Consultant is not considered Part of the Scientific Method"
• "Mr. Compositor, I ask your Pardon" - The famous Dr. Johnson and his Printers
• Two Possible Ring-Ditches on the North York Moors
• Goshawk meets Joggers
• A Predator in Reading Town Centre?
• A Fix for Slow Program Launch in Ubuntu
• How Far Can You See From Highcliff?
• Possible Mouse-Wheel Scroll Bug in Windows XP
• Search Engine 'Cloaking' by Academic Publishers
• Intellectual Bookshop
• Train Journey
• Mathematical Biologist Humour
• Holiday in Guisborough
• Hedgehog
• Glacial Lakes and the Formation of the English Channel
• Ravenspurgh in Shakespeare
• A History of Ravenser Odd
• Uncertainity, Doubt and Theorem Proving
• Go For Grammar!
• Rhinoceros Flag
• Goldfinch
• A Rainy Morning
• Some Very Impressive Swearing in the BMJ!
• Natural Nuclear Reactors
• Herding Behaviour in Children
• Pluvialis on Predators and Young Children
• Mystery At M&S
• A Day In The Life Of A Mathematics Undergraduate
• The Evolution of the Bicycle
• From Today The Keyboard Is Dead
• Evidence-Based Management Fads
• What String Theorists do on Saturdays
• Forgetting the Words
• Ball's Popular Guide to the Heavens
• Does Not Inspire Confidence
• The Flying Star
• Snakes
• An Unnecessary Notice?
• Pluvialis on Sparrowhawks
• A Norton Problem and its Solution
• Aquarium
• The Importance of Archaeology
• McAfee Woes
• A Long Forgotten Memory
• A Compliment
• School Science -1 BBC Science - 0
• Deer at Ascot
• No Running With Fish
• Young Egyptian Goose
• QLink Deception
• Lamport on Program Design Methods
• Another Blue Tit Nest
• Quantum Physics for Dogs
• Cat out of the Bag
• Time Management
• Blue Tit Nest
• Excuse
• The Skin Cream Testing Paradox
• Corruption and Parking Tickets
• Building Large Large Systems in C (and C++)
• What happens when you generalize Probability Theory to allow Minus Signs ...
• Owls at Ascot Station
• The Crow's Nest
• Atheistic Librarians
• Oh Joy! Installing MinGW and MSYS on Windows XP
• Installing Blender on a Multi-user Windows XP Computer
• Get a Degree in Evasion and Deception
• What Zoologists get up to at the Breakfast Table
• Unethical ShopOnLion
• The Sense About Science Lecture 2007
• Deer at Ascot Again
• Wallace and Gromit do Molecular Biology!
• Pluvialis plays Truant
• A Deer near Reading Town Centre
• Egyptian Goslings
• The First Chicks of 2007 on the Reading University Lakes
• "I'd like to see Bill Gates' goats"
• The Amazing Idea to Re-Name Reading
• Feeding the Ducks
• Ken Arnold on Object Design
• Uche Ogbuji on Object-Oriented Programming Languages
• The Cormorant Tree
• Brinch-Hansen on the History of Operating Systems
• A Day in Birmingham
• Windows Vista is Broken
• Learning by Scent Coding
• Steven Hawking Near-Death Experience!
• Microsoft Excel is Broken
• Dying Mouse
• Signs of Spring
• Bluefoot
• You Are What You Buy
• Something New on the Web
• My Walk to Work this Morning
• Installing Xubuntu on a 200MHz PC
• Sunrise in Ilulissat
• Experiences with News Aggregators
• Java as Damage Limitation
• Sunday Times told: hands off Science
• Epsilons as Vectors
• Train Delayed by Deer
• Ray Mears's Wild Food
• Bad Science of 2006
• Hinchliffe's Rule
• Two for the Price of One
• After the Fall: the Drip
• The Spinning Egg Illusion
• Reflections
• When Palaeontologists send Christmas Cards...
• Fox
• Falcon by Helen Macdonald
• The Die Hard Problem in Alloy 3
• The Economics of Colonizing Other Planets
• Lisp as an 'Improved XML'
• A New Version of Alloy
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Role of Proof in Software Development
• Mark Chu-Carrol on Haskell
• "Here is a List of Incorrect Things..."
• Answers To Questions
• Why Alloy has no in-built Notion of State
• Windows Programming
• Interval Arithmetic and Prolog
• Leonid Meteors
• The Fundamental Forces of Nature
• "A Triumph of Engineering over Design"
• Making my Walk to and from the Station more Interesting
• No Miracle Cure Yet for Bad Science Reporting...
• Spend a Year in a Couple of Hours...
• A Long Time Ago in a University Far, Far Away…
• Train Delayed
• Pluvialis meets a Goshawk
• Spider in the Living Room
• Windows XP Login Bug
• Me Reading
• Spider above the Bath
• Slime Mold Hemitrichia
• A Million Random Digits...
• Talking about the Problem Domain instead of the Language
• The Origins of Formal Methods
• An Impossible Requirement
• Conkers!
• Buzzard
• A Nuclear Bunker in Reading University Grounds
• Back to The Origin
• Darwin and Galileo
• Parasites and Social Behaviour
• Two British Migratory Thrushes
• Programming with Warts
• Symmetry in Mathematics
• An Ice House in Reading University Grounds
• When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro
• 1 + 1 = 2
• Me and My Bug
• Royal Berkshire Hospital Panorama
• Mallard Ducks as Agents of Species Extinction
• Missed Photo Opportunities
• Evolutionary Symbols on Bibles!
• A New Camera
• Sir Patrick Moore Cloned?
• More Deer
• Are Tests really Specifications?
• McAfee Internet Security Suite 8.0
• Poor Abstractions as a cause of Software Failures
• Design by Guesswork
• Reading University Panorama
• A DNS Problem and its Solution
• Ubuntu 6.06 (LTS) Upgrade
• The Poor Quality of Most Science Reporting
• A Mallard - Tufted Duck Pair?
• The Place of Pokemon in Science Education
• The Place of Scooby Doo in Science Education
• Rabbits, the War and Watership Down
• Anagram Solutions
• Beware the Optimistic Engineer
• Daniel Jackson's new book has arrived!
• Deer
• Anagrams
• From So Simple a Beginning - The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin edited by Edward O. Wilson
• Egyptian Gosling Set on Flickr
• If, before you die, you want to understand why you lived in the first place ...
• The OS Titanic?
• The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks
• Breaking the Spell by Daniel C. Dennet
• Monkey by Wu Cheng-en
• Daniel Jackson's New Book
• Two Herons, a Chiffchaff and a Greater Spotted Woodpecker
• The +CAL Algorithm Language
• First Gosling of the Year
• Michael Jackson's Papers
• Nuthatch
• The Head of the Black-Headed Gull
• The Maya project
• Upside-Down Wood Pigeon
• NaN Nonsense
• Railway Pheasant
• The Search by John Battelle
• The Reading University Lakes in Early Spring
• Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson
• Opening Files in Java
• Google China
• Big Garden Birdwatch 2006
• Signs of Spring?
• Another Red Kite
• Advice to Beginner Programmers
• State the Problem Before Describing the Solution
• Great Spotted Woodpecker
• Reinventing Zero (the hard way)
• Not Part of the Conversation
• Watership Down by Richard Adams
• Cormorants
• Logic for Computer Science
• I think I can do this, but ...
• Traces of Wood Pigeon Take-Off
• The Return of the Shoveller Ducks
• The Effects of Firefox and Open Office on Microsoft
• Kingfisher Glimpse
• Nodding Ducks
• The Best Software Writing selected and introduced by Joel Spolsky
• Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
• Birds and Railway Stations
• The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft
• Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky
• Tree-top Egyptian Geese
• Red Kite over Broad Street, Reading
• The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory by Jorge Luis Borges
• Fred Hoyle: A Life in Science by Simon Mitton
• Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
• Birds of Sardinia
• A Quotation on Object Identity and Time
• How Mumbo-Jumbo conquered the World by Francis Wheen
• A Reason for Everything by Marek Kohn
• Dreadnought Geese
• Some Time with Feynman by Leonard Mlodinow
• The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham
• A Pigeon takes to the Water
• Wood Pigeons and a Red Kite
• Herons and Kingfishers
• Definitions and Designations
• A Common Tern
• Natural Selection and Social Theory by Robert Trivers
• Coots Building 'Second Nests'
• Four Herons
• Carrion Crow taking an Ant-Bath
• A Black Wagtail
• Sparrows trying to be Swallows
• Yet More Chicks!
• Red Kite over Reading Town Centre
• Chicks Galore!
• Blackcap Songs
• The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
• Blackcaps
• Young Birds on Reading University Lakes
• Coots and Swans on the Kennet
• Eric Hehner on Model-Checking
• The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg
• A Dead Goldcrest
• Coot Chicks at Last!
• Ducks and Coots on the Kennet
• Mallard Chicks on the Kennet
• Coots Again
• Chiffchaffs
• Coots on the Kennet
• A Skirmish between Magpies and Carrion Crows
• Woken by a Woodpecker
• Ostriches
• Egyptian Goose Chick
• Long-tailed Tits no longer in Flocks
• Goldfinches
• Six Cormorants
• Duck Path
• Injured Carrion Crow
• Redwings
• One Surviving Egypian Goose Chick
• Red Kite over the Royal Berkshire Hospital
• Eiffel and 'Design by Contract'
• Two Sets of Egyptian Geese Chicks
• Egyptian Geese Chicks
• Kingfisher and Grey Wagtail
• Three Birds of Prey
• Bullfinch
• Signs of Spring on the Lakes
• Mallard Chicks in Oxford
• The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck
• Ducks, Geese and Zoe
• Cormorant on the Kennet
• Red Kites near Pangbourne
• Treecreeper, Kingfisher, etc
• Pied Wagtails in the Dark
• The 'Strange Duck' is a Snow Goose?
• Shoveler Ducks
• Goldcrests, Cormorants, etc
• Bertrand Meyer's Word Games in OOSC2
• Pied Wagtails
• Strange Duck
• Free as in Freedom - Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software by Sam Williams
• Kingfishers, etc
• Long-Tailed Tits
• Goldcrests
• Hip Priest - The Story of Mark E.Smith and The Fall by Simon Ford
• Diving behaviour in a Lesser Black-Backed Gull
• Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
• Heron in the Dark
• Niko's Nature by Hans Kruuk
• The Return of the Egyptian Geese
• Golden Pheasant
• Kingfishers Again
• Undefined Values should remain Undefined
• Kingfishers on the River Blackwater
• Object Identity and Time
• The Principles of Specification
• Chiffchaffs
• Children's Books for Adults
• Young Adolph by Beryl Bainbridge
• Invariants should be Unadorned
• The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
• Specifications are for Reasoning From
• Stargazing by Peter Hill
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel
• 31 Songs by Nick Hornby
• Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Cormorants
• Object-Z is not a 'pure' Object Oriented Language
• What do UML Class Diagrams mean?
• HTML and All That
• Buzzards over Reading
• Egyptian Geese on Reading University Lakes