Being impolite is good science

I have the habit, whenever I review a scientific paper or attend a scientific talk, of trying to find a hole in the case being made. Are the...

Urinal cakes

I was thinking about urinal cakes today, mostly because I've noticed that they seem to have all but disappeared. Instead, urinals seem ...

The politics of traffic offences

My usual disclaimer: nothing about what I write below should suggest that I trivialise driving under the influence or that I think it should...

How on Earth are Harley Davidsons legal?

Most developed countries have fairly strict legislation around noise pollution from motor vehicles. For the most part it works pretty well, ...

Things I like about blogging

So I haven't been in this blogging game for very long, but I'm already discovering a few things that I like about it: It's self-...

On being lazy

I've done the Myers-Briggs personality type test a couple of times now (I'm an INTJ, FWIW). While I found much of it less than usef...

How to give a good presentation

(This is a lightly-reworked version of a posting I originally made on my internal blog at IBM) The art of giving presentations is a difficul...

How should countries react to a recession?

I seem to be getting into the habit of putting disclaimers at the top of my posts: for the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to ass...

Melbourne: one year on

I read once that there is a Native American tribe who believe that when you travel, your soul follows you at walking pace. This imagery has ...

I don't get the whole Julian Assange thing

I'm not going to write about whether the Wikileaks thing was right or not... that just seems like too much of a can of worms and I have ...