For the longest time I have been meaning to get back to—ugh!—blogging. Regular readers, should any remain, will see that this is the first post of 2022. I haven’t broken any promises with the hiatus and have no excuses to make. I’ve been busy. I know – who hasn’t been busy in UK academia? Nevertheless, the first half of this year was intense, with several major deadlines that left little mental spare capacity.
I am on holiday – in Mauritius, a tiny tropical island in the Indian Ocean. And when I go on holiday, I make ridiculous plans. I told myself I’d start running again. I’d get up early every morning, slip out of bed without disturbing my wife and cross the road to the beach. It might be hard at first but I could jog along the compacted sand at the shoreline, the sun rising at my back. It would be good for me.
New Year’s Eve is almost upon us, so here we are again at the close of one long year and the start of another. Personally, it has been a year of endings and beginnings. Readers of this blog would be forgiven for thinking that it is one of the things that I have wound down in 2018, but in fact I am hoping to stir it to new life. Sunrise or sunset?
Today is the tenth anniversary of my very first blog post. When I look back at that day in 2008 when I set out my stall on Reciprocal Space it seems a long time ago and a long distance away. It’s been quite a journey. Some things haven’t changed. I still hate the terminology, though I have mostly managed to swallow my embarrassment.
At the risk of getting uber-meta, here is a blog post about writing my latest blog post at the Guardian. This was an account of a scientific discovery, albeit a minor one, that occurred during the process of shepherding the latest paper from my lab to publication. Why write about writing this post? Because maybe it will help others, and maybe it will help me to think it through.
It has happened. Yesterday RCUK published the revised guidelines on its new open access policy and, as requested by this blog and everyone who signed up in support, the document (PDF) now includes, on page one no less, a statement that: RCUK’s Alexandra Saxon was good enough to make particular mention of our request in her blogpost to explain the most significant revisions in the new guidelines.
Well this is nice. Today Occam’s Typewriter opens a new cornershop, so to speak, at the Guardian. For me, this closes a social media circle that started over four years ago because I can trace my entry to the scientific blogosphere to the time I heard someone called Jennifer Rohn talking about ‘Lablit’ – literature threaded with science and scientists – on the Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast.
This is a big deal for me: my first ever article in New Scientist – a magazine that I read in the library in Ballymena as a teenager. Pardon me for preening a little. What’s it about? You guessed it: open access. My thanks to Simon Singh for suggesting that I pitch it to them.
It cannot have escaped your attention this past weekend that the Earth was treated to a supermoon. The correct terminology for this felicitous event is a perigee syzygy, but the reasons for the interesting nomenclature need not detain us. The point is that Saturday night was clear in London and gave those of us who live there a magnificent view: Which, just like a lunar orbit, brings me to a place I’ve been before.
In many ways Travis Bickle, the disturbed taxi driver in Scorsese’s famous film, is a model of public engagement. For one thing, he really thinks about his audience. He rehearses in front of a mirror so that he will be fully prepared for his encounters with the people he wants to reach. Legs apart, arms folded, his stance is confident — his body language is really very good. Then, with the merest tilt of the head: “You talkin’ to me?