So, over the weekend Rita and myself made a big step. We both sent in resignation letters for our jobs in France! Neither of us likes living in Montpellier and, although Rita's job is more interesting for her than mine is for me, she wants to have a change of career and is trying…

So, we've come to Austria on holiday for a month. We drove from Montpellier and stopped off in Vorarlberg in western Austria for a couple of days of mountain climbing before coming here to Ravelsbach, where Rita's parents live.

The drive from Montpellier through France and Switzerland was fine, and Winnie was well-behaved. We stayed in a village called Hittisau, just over the border into Austria. Navigation was no problem until we actually reached the village itself, which probably has a population of about 2000 people. All of whom appear to be called Hagspiel, which was the name of the family who owned the place we were staying. It took three goes and a phone call to other family members to locate exactly which "Pension Hagspiel" we were booked into. Confusion was compounded when the people at the first place responded to Rita saying "Hello! We have a reservation for two days: we're the couple with a dog." with "Are you sure? The couple with the dog already arrived this morning!". Obviously a different couple with a dog arriving the same day as us at a different pension owned by different members of the same family...

I was up at our experimental site at Puéchabon the other day, installing a new PC to collect images from our webcam. The previous one had been stolen by some local yokels, along with all the solar panels and the electronics to go with them, and a load of other hardware. The…

I was originally planning to write a quick-and-dirty implementation of the simplex algorithm myself to demonstrate some of the gritty details, but I decided to leave that kind of thing for later, since there are going to be other, less well-known, constraint solving algorithms that I want to look at . There is a Haskell implementation of a simple version of simplex algorithm in the Matrix.Simplex module in the dsp package, although that comes with a comment that says "I only guarantee that this module wastes inodes", so let's view this more as a way to play with some interface issues than a serious attempt to implement any kind of constraint solver! The code that goes with this article is available here.

We saw something cool on the way to work this morning. It turns out that they're considered pests in this part of the world, but a five metre string of nose-to-tail caterpillars counts as cool in my books even if they are pests. Apparently, these little critters make nests high in pine trees (we think we saw the nest -- looked like a big ball of spiderweb), then troop down the tree and off into the world to make caterpillary mischief of one sort or another.

My second attempt at a PhD went off rather better than my first. It was all done, dusted and examined in the allotted three years, without too much psychic suffering. Even more remarkable was that, in a period of four years, both my partner Rita and myself finished, wrote up and graduated. Without any domestic bickering at all (well, more or less).

Here's a rag-bag of entertaining things... Whatever: John Scalzi's blog John Scalzi writes entertaining science fiction books and is also an all-round good egg. His blog, Whatever, has been around since forever (in internet terms). Scalzi has a magic touch when it comes to…

by Francis Spufford

How do you make a book about central economic planning in the Soviet Union into an entertaining page-turner? You do what Francis Spufford did with Red Plenty, a book that is almost impossible to classify, a mix of fact and fiction and dramatised might-have-beens, plausible if not quite verisimilitudinous narratives populated by a melange of real historical personages and imagined characters.

To compensate for the psychopathic driving habits of the French, the Mediterranean climate is often offered up as a benefit of life here. For those of us who are not all that keen on temperatures in the 30s for weeks on end in the summer, that's not much of a compensation.…

I spent the period from October 1998 until November 2001 as a graduate student in the atmospheric physics department in Oxford. This all started out swimmingly.

Over the course of the month of January, I: published 24 blog articles. Less than thirty, but not a crushing failure. had 13 days when I didn't write anything, compensated by two days when I wrote 3 articles and 3 days when I wrote two. wrote about 17 articles that I would…

Trident is the UK's _independent nuclear deterrent_. Except that it isn't independent and it doesn't deter anyone. It is nuclear though, so we do have that. Apparently, Trident is our ticket to sit down with the big boys, to strut around as part of the Nuclear Club, to be on the…

I recently read an interesting article by John McCarthy that set me thinking. The paper is called The Well Designed Child and talks a bit about about the old nature versus nurture debate: to what extent is a newborn child a blank slate, and to what extent are human intellectual capabilities intrinsic and instinctual?

To me, the whole question of nature versus nurture has always seemed odd. It's clear that both aspects are important. We are all limited to one extent or another in what we can do purely by the physical parameters of our existence: as much as I would like to teleport myself to Europa to frolic in the sunless sea beneath the ice, I can't, and never will be able to. Equally though, the potential that exists in all of us at birth can be squandered, and without education and opportunity, none of us can make of ourselves all that we might. So, we need a bit of both.

Today, we had an early morning outing to the Plage de l'Espiguette, a _big_ beach about 30 km east of Montpellier. We got up at 6:15, picked up the Modulauto car at 7:00, persuaded Winnie into the back (she's still a bit scared of cars...) and off we went. We arrived at the car…

After referring to a paper in _Agricultural and Forest Meteorology_ in the last post, I remembered something I read on Crooked Timber the other day. Many people have a pretty good idea of how toxic the world of academic publishing is -- if you don't, take a look at this recent…