It’s Christmas Eve and the Curry household is getting ready for the big day. All the shopping is done and work has been put aside for a couple of days. Now I can turn my mind to the serious business of recording the festivities. This is not something to be undertaken lightly.

It’s all been rather unsettling but I guess that’s life these days. Moving the blog to its new home was a bit more fraught than I had been anticipating. Though I can piece together a rationale for Nature Network’s rather precipitate decision to change the locks, I’ve not really had a satisfactory explanation from them for their actions.

This amused me. It might amuse you too. The other night Ed Yong asked on Twitter if anyone could remember mention in a recent blogpost of the fact that salts of arsenic often contain phosphate.

Hi All – this is just a short placeholder post for anyone who may have wanted to leave a comment about my farewell post at Nature Network, which is now up. I’m afraid I am unable to respond to comments there, so thought I’d make a space here.

The time has come to say goodbye to Nature Network. I am moving Reciprocal Space to at new site at Occam’s Typewriter, which launches today. In part, to be perfectly honest, the move is motivated by the frustration accumulated in the transition to MT4 and other problems that have been aired thoroughly in the discussion threads and don’t need to be revisited today.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Dublin Airport,” says the pilot. “Please remember to turn your watches back thirty years.” So goes the time-worn joke but last weekend that’s more or less exactly what I did. I flew to Dublin to hear a band I first saw in concert in the summer of 1977 when I was just thirteen years old. It was a little bit crazy but I’m glad I went — I was not the least bit disappointed.

I’m not proud of myself but I have to confess to a lascivious addiction. I know. It’s disgusting. But I can’t help it. The problem started in 1999. I remember all too clearly my first glimpse of the well-proportioned curves and smooth, smooth skin. After that I was hooked. Oh. God. I couldn’t resist. The Apple G3 PowerBook, my first ever laptop, was gorgeous.

Having delighted in Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man earlier this year, I sat down to watch Carl Sagan’s Cosmos , which several commenters had recommended to me. You can read what I thought of it in my guest post at Grrlscientist’s Punctuated Equilibrium blog over at The Guardian . As you will see, it is wrapped up with the recent apparition of shiny sculptures by Anish Kapoor in Kensington Gardens.

The British cardiologist Dr Peter Wilmshurst was reported in 2007 to have made remarks critical of a clinical trial involving a medical device made by NMT Medical. He is now being sued for libel. The case is complex and I have not mastered the detail.

The firework screamed upwards into the night sky and burst, with an almighty crack, into a vibrant spray of light and colour. Everyone looked up. Some people cheered. And then the murmur of conversation resumed. Is that what happened with the Science is Vital campaign, which bloomed and boomed in the UK this past September and October?

Despite having a physics degree and some notion of the stretchiness of space and time in Einstein’s theory of special relativity, I’ve never felt comfortable with these ideas.