Last week I took the train through a snowy landscape to Warwick University to give a seminar at the Department of Chemistry. I arrived a little early to catch up with a couple of virologist friends; in the coffee bar we chewed over funding politics and hot topics in viral replication. I met my hosts for lunch and a pleasant chat about common interests in serum albumin.

Abandoned

X.

This post is completely justified since crystals are a central topic at Reciprocal Space and I awoke this morning to a landscape covered with them: Snow has the wonderful property of making the world look fresh and new. Even the disaster area known locally as ‘our back garden’ manages to look appealing under its cold white blanket.

It’s over. And over a week ago at that. But I only finally caught up with the third and last episode of Prof Jim Al-Khalili’s BBC4 series Science and Islam last night. I flagged it up just before the series started and had been quite excited, having enjoyed Atom, Al-Khalili’s earlier documentary about the hey-day of physics in the early 20th century.

A discussion initiated by Katherine Haxton prompted me to check out ResearchBlogging.org and there I discovered the Virology Blog written by Vincent Racaniello. Vincent is a poliovirus researcher at Columbia University; I’d met him a few times while working on the same virus in Boston and it was nice to get back in touch. Racaniello definitely qualifies as a senior blogger, being a Professor of Microbiology and a very eminent virologist.

You choose, but both paths involve outrageous fortune. Me? I can’t figure it out. Until six months ago I had never heard of Richard Hamming, a masterful mathematician and computer scientist from Bell Labs. I’d heard of Bell Labs all right, a celebrated hot zone of physics and computational research and home to no less than six Nobel laureates. But of Hamming? Nothing.

I don’t know what it is about 2009, but I don’t seem to have got going. My posts so far this year have amounted to a note about what’s on telly and a photo of some over-sized dice. And it’s not just in the blogosphere that things seem to be stalled. As ever at work there are many balls to be juggled in the air at once.

Sparked by a remark made by Kristi Vogel on blogging with images, here is one that’s been hovering at the back of my photo collection. Does God play dice? Apparently, despite Einstein’s objections, the deity is a bit of a gambler. What is disturbing is that this picture was taken in Palermo, Sicily last summer so it seems He may have been gambling with the mafia.

This is normally Matt’s brief but I thought people (in the UK at least) might be interested to know that a three-part series on Science and Islam , fronted by Prof Jim Al-Khalili, starts at 9 pm tonight on BBC4.

It’s easy if you try. I’ve never much cared for John Lennon’s song: despite the wistful melody and admirable sentiment, the scientific precisionist in me could never quite get past the poor grammar. “And no religion too, Mr Lennon? And no religion either !” But the song does at least draw attention to a very important human attribute: imagination.