Spoof
The fine game of spoof.
Misc
Art
Alan Parker was a Leverhulme trust visiting-artist-in-residence at Warwick University. Here is an unusual portrait he did of me entitled The optics lesson of Dr Turner. It is based on Rembrandt's The anatomy lesson of Dr Tulp and was shortlisted for the BP Portrait prize.
My ancestor
Hermann von Helmholtz, he of the free energy F=U-TS, is my scientific great^6 grandfather (my PhD supervisor's, PhD supervisor's ... supervisor).
"Whoever in the pursuit of science, seeks after immediate practical utility may rest assured that he seeks in vain." Helmholtz
The world
This guy saw it coming
Quote-of-the-day
"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals." George Orwell
