Occasionally, in comments on environmental stories and such, you see the old "we're so small and the Earth is so big, we can't possibly be to blame" line of argument. Of course, everything on the Earth affects the Earth, and vice versa, because everything interacts with everything else. Therefore, the question is really whether or not we have a significant effect on the whole planet. As a really basic way of assessing this, I've been trying to explore the potential consequences of the oil we use by illustrating the volume of oil that is consumed.

Science commons, the video, explaining all about how the science commons works.

If you're having trouble sleeping, you could try downloading a highly exciting readable article called Lattice-switch Monte Carlo for binary hard-sphere crystals. If you don't have access to that journal, you can download the electronic pre-print here. Although that kind of thing has rather little to do with the work I do now, it was good fun and it's nice to see the work getting published.

Well, it's been a hectic couple of weeks, but the work has come along quite well. We've even managed to finish the poster for the AMN-2 conference in Queenstown. I've placed a copy of the poster here, so if you really are terribly bored (or are coming to the conference and want a geeky sneaky peek at the work, which is about as long a long shot as I can imagine) then you can click the on the thumbnail image thar....

The conference is my first proper physics one, so I hope there's some interesting stuff there. And then after that, I'll be off to do the Milford track with some folks from work and my good old Edinburgh chum Suzanne (not that old). So hopefully, this blog might actually get more interesting over the next wee while. You know, with pretty photos and suchlike.

I've recently finished reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, and I must say I was very impressed. I've read quite a few pop science books, and it's probably the best one I've seen. The early parts were related to physics, and I found this quite satisfying as the things I know something about were covered well - the analogies never jarred and the explanations always rang true. Generally it was eloquently simplified, always managing to retain the essence of the science...

image:1539 right margin=5 Here's a slide from the talk I gave to the group last Thursday. It went well, and it was probably the most relaxed talk I've ever given. I used to be horribly nervous about giving talks, so it's nice that (after lots of self-inflicted aversion therapy) I don't have a problem with giving them and indeed winging it. I'll be giving some variation on the talk to IRL while I'm here, which will hopefully go just as well.