This article discusses sexual themes heavily, but there is no explicit imagery and no direct links to any (although external websites can of course change).
Western relationships with sex, and its portrayal in art and the media, remain awkward and partly self-contradictory. Religious traditions co...
Note: light spoilers for the Foundation TV series and books.
I'm not a big re-reader of books. The total number of books that I've read cover to cover more than once is probably less than ten—not counting books I've read out loud to my children! But Isaac Asimov's 1951 novel Foundation is an o...
Amid the wave of strikes currently breaking across the UK is an extensive programme of industrial action by university staff. As with transport, health service, postal and other strike action that has been going on over the last few months, the effects of rapid inflation on the cost of living is a...
I got a Steam Deck in 2022, and I love it. The form-factor works well for me, its power and battery life are fine since I'm neither hardcore gamer nor frequent long-distance traveller, and its size, portability and price mean I don't need to justify the cost or the space required for a "proper" Wi...
Valve's Steam Deck handheld PC is a miniature marvel. While it's primarily designed for gaming, and it does that job very well—even working well with many games not written for its operating system or aware of its hardware controls—the Deck is a proper portable PC, and can absolutely be used as su...
Work hard. Be the best that you can be. Reach for the stars.
For those of us lucky enough not to have to worry about more fundamental needs, aspiration is woven into the fabric of our lives. It drives us to push on at work, to keep in shape, to self-improve. It’s underpinned by a psychological t...
On the surface, there's little that links Wiener-Dog (dir. Todd Solondz) and Maggie's Plan (dir. Rebecca Miller), except shared actor Greta Gerwig. But they are both largely about the nature of people, even if their opinions of their characters are very different. Oh, and I happened to see the...
TractoR, the medical image analysis platform for which I am the main developer and maintainer, is built on the multiplatform R language, but much of its additional infrastructure is Unix-based. That has meant that researchers using Windows have previously had to jump through some rather awkward h...
The European Union referendum debate—if you can call the circus of the last couple of months that—has not brought out the best in Britain. A vote to Leave the union, or one to Remain, might variously destroy the UK economy, lead to an influx of criminals, or cause World War III. Threats and warnings...
Feelings of vulnerability, both to the elements and to other people, are perhaps the central theme of Firewatch, the recently released debut game by young studio Campo Santo. No doubt we’ve all felt that way at various points in our lives: walking home late at night; being lost in an unfamiliar...
This article originally appeared as an invited post on the LSE Impact Blog.
Grading the quality of academic research is hard. That is why last year’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) assessment was complex and lengthy. Preparation for the REF started long before 2014, on all sides, and comp...
With the UK’s general election imminent, we, the electorate, have been treated to weeks of horse-trading between politicians on how much each party will or won’t spend on this or that if they get into power. £8bn more for the NHS here, £2.5bn extra for education there. Who would cut welfare? Who wou...
This year sees the English higher education sector writhing in the throes of a huge academic quality-assessment exercise. Known by the suitably bureaucratic-sounding title of “Research Excellence Framework” (REF), the process involves most researchers from publicly-funded universities submitting the...
The full-motion video (FMV) games of the 1990s occupied an interesting niche in the history of computer gaming. Solid storytelling in games had been established by a procession of text adventures released during the late 70s and 80s, but graphical engines were very basic and nowhere near ready for t...
Randomness is an awkward concept. Most people have some intuitive idea of what it is supposed to mean, but it’s too intangible for us to feel comfortable with. Worse, randomness is often conflated with arbitrariness, a distasteful and unsettling quality which we usually strive to avoid. Scientists a...
In the last few days, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) has announced that they will shortly require every article published in one of their journals to be accompanied by a “data availability statement”, stating how the raw data underlying the manuscript can be accessed by readers. All of the d...
The last week has seen picket lines outside UK universities as higher education staff strike for "fair pay" in a coordinated action between three national unions. The Twitter-sphere saw a flurry of related activity as well.
I am not a union member and did not participate in the strike. I also do...
Two of the nice things about git are the ability to create lightweight branches, and the ability to rewrite commit history to rationalise things after the fact. As a relatively recent migrant from Subversion, however, these are things that I sometimes forget about, and I therefore don't always mak...
At the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, I was on holiday in Greece. Although I can transliterate the Greek alphabet (eventually), I do not speak nor read the language, and the increasingly inexplicable scenes which unfolded on the TV news were all the more bewildering for tha...