Favourite eBooks

August 04, 2012
I've always enjoyed reading, but when Kindles first appeared I was a little dubious: Surely they couldn't replacethe experience of a real book? Then I was given a kindle about a year ago by my lovely wife, and have to...

Open access publishing

July 17, 2012
The BBC is reporting that the UK government is planning to pay publishers in return for making papers publicly available. According to David Willetts this will "herald a new era of academic discovery". The BBC story is based on a...

Just what is it you do?

June 29, 2012
Occasionally someone will ask this, and it's hard to say exactly. I usually mutter something about physics and they'll either go quiet and look a bit shifty, or ask if it's something to do with CERN or Brian Cox. No...

That Better Way... D?

June 10, 2012
Although I'm a plasma physicist by training, I spend the majority of my research time at the moment programming whilst waiting for simulations to run. This is almost all numerical: A fair sized simulation code which runs on supercomputers like...