Dr Laura James's writings

In the FT today, Christopher Caldwell discusses how past events can feel comparatively recent as one grows older, and in doing so reflects upon the distorted nature of past times. For example, the year when the Beatles released their first album is now as close to the First World War as it is to 2005. An interesting perspective as the year draws to a close.

Boxing Day and Bank Holiday fun: building K'nex :-) Paul made a couple of videos of the finished construction: here and here .

Online comic Bug Bash hasn't been going long, but sometimes it really hits the spot. The current strip quite accurately reflects life in R&D - but not the best bits of R&D! Last week, it was about a cool car , the Prius. Whenever I see one on the roads, the rear glass panels strongly remind me of my Smart, and I assume it's similar in that all the rear visibility is through the horizontal panel - counter-intuitive, but excellent on dirty roads.

There's a new Smart fortwo special edition, and it's pink! Wooo! I'd be all over it, except it's a rather washed out pastel and not a nice bright, bold pink. I'd also be giving a direct link, but Smart.com ain't the best website for that. Paul periodically mutters about getting a fortwo because it would be easier to park than the Audi, and parking's not really his thing ;-) but then he gets distracted by powerful things like RS4s, next generation performance hybrids, and so on. Just this morning he seemed to be thinking about a next gen fortwo, though, but I guess he won't be going for pink, alas. Also in pretty-things news, it's snowing on and off today in Impington, and the village green looked super under a heavy snow shower earlier on. No pictures, because last time I tried to use my phone under similar conditions it wisely turned itself off in disgust at the weather...

Doctor Who is back on telly today, with a nice invasion of Earth storyline for Christmas :-) Nice to see the female PM being sensible again, and it feels like there are a lot of H2G2 references in it, which is cool. Hope everyone reading this is having a good day, full of peace and joy, and that this state continues through 2006.

Christmas, always a good time to remember others . I'm going to be splitting my day between cooking and playing on the XBox 360, where I suck at racing in PGR3, and earlier I just started at Kameo, which I think I like, but in which the tutorial level is hard - please, just regenerate my health, albeit slowly, that's all I ask :-) You can find me on Live as LaurieJ, or if you actually want to race someone who might beat you using his Ferrari collection, try Paul as Hedgepog. Cooking seems slightly redundant since the advent of more chocolate and biscuits than we could consume in a year, but at least I was mainly planning to cook savouries! Going to have to make a dint in the current cheese stocks soon too, since clearly the world has realised I'm into cheese, and so has arranged for even more cheese to be available "behind the counter" at the Cambridge Cheese Company when I next get there. Thanks cheese-buyers! Mmm. Luckily we also did well for wine this year (an...

As an inveterate Radio 4 addict, I was thrilled to hear that Andrew Marr would be presenting a programme to finally, for once and for all, detail the rules of Mornington Crescent. This arcane game has been of particular interest this year for us, as Paul has a MC-based puzzle to solve for Perplex City , and embarrassingly I've been unable to help, despite a lifetime of listening to I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue . The prog was broadcast this morning, and despite popping to Waitrose at 10:30 for last minute food, my timing and shopping skills were sufficiently awesome that we were back in the car at 11:01 to hear it. Fascinating stuff, in the end, although not quite up to the quality of the trailers for it somehow, which superbly parodied the M&S food ads on the telly, which have been making me drool in recent weeks. I'm only partly a food/cooking geek (although I think I count as a 100% cheese geek these days), and really should get round to doing more proper cooking mo...

BBC 7 is rebroadcasting an excellent LoTR spoof this week - Hordes of the Things . Definitely worth a Listen Again while it's still available; it might be old (1980) but BBC radio comedy was truly great in those days. I'm also enjoying Book of the Week on Radio 4 at the moment, Stephen Fry being a reasonable substitute for Michael Bywater, although the abridged version isn't quite the same as the full Lost Worlds, with its rather poignant final entry ( Zone, the Dead ).

Finishing a PhD is a very long drawn out process, that only seems to start with the writing up. I finally had my viva last week (thanks Jon and David - I'm still astonished that anyone could claim to enjoy reading my dissertation!) and with (amazingly) only very minor corrections to do, I've been able to reprint and bind it already. Phew! Now I just need to track down the right person to hand it in to (more challenging at this time of year than one might think), and actually graduate, and then I'll be free of the need to choose between Ms and Miss on official forms...

As usual, most landscapes look better in real life than in photos , particularly the poor quality ones I take! I'm too lazy to annotate them now, and they are in random order (camera, then phone), but I visited Blickling Hall, Wells-next-the-Sea, Morston Quay, Cley, Sheringham Park, random coastal points between Cromer and Brancaster Staithe, Brancaster, and Titchwell Marsh (where I failed to take any pics of birds, despite there being many around).

Just back from a superb short break in North Norfolk, during which I combined hiking, driving around listening to loud rock music, and eating and drinking at the lovely gastropub where I was staying. Winter is a great time to get away from it all in the UK, as hardly anyone else is out, and so you get whole beaches and country estates pretty much to yourself once you get away from the carparks. Contrary to popular belief, it isn't all flat up there, meaning that both my legs and the car got a good workout. The roads are terrific for whizzing around, although they left the Smartie in a sufficiently muddy state that not only am I washing him as soon as I got back, but that I'm using multiple buckets of water to do so - a first. Driving from Cromer to Brancaster early yesterday evening I was extremely grateful to have a car which changes down when it really needs to, which is excellent for when corners turn out to be sharper than one had anticipated! Top notch full beam lights al...

I've footled with Sudoku puzzles a few times, but never really got into it - I can't imagine buying a Sudoku book, for instance. Still, I enjoyed this American Scientist article about the mathematics of the puzzles.

I have learnt several things so far today. Firstly, that someone with my limited practical skills should probably seek assistance rather than attempting to top up a beanbag by myself. There are some items in the living room which are not now covered in tiny polystyrene balls, but not many. I am certainly not one of them. Secondly, that one should not laugh at comic strips which might turn out to reflect reality. Paul - clearly rushing home to help me with my beanbag crisis - got his first (and hopefully last, but you never know) speeding ticket today. I bet he thanked the policeman in the unmarked car, too... So much for clever GPS speed camera location databases protecting one from this kind of thing. This is (one of the reasons) why I drive a car where going at 94mph is at least slightly uncomfortable. Paul's Audi is lovely, but doesn't half end up at high speeds before you realise it, especially since he got it chipped.

It's been far too long since I was tracking wearable computing advances - back then, it was a pretty esoteric field, and even other geeks thought we were a bit mad to be planning wearable devices. But it's good to see that work has progressed a long way since then. I read about the chameleon scarf today, sounds like just the job for cold Cambridge winters.

The grass is always greener, and other people always do much cooler research. I suppose in practice it must often turn out to be a long slog like anything else, but I do envy anyone who can devote their time to a single field of study and then turn the whole thing into a book which non-specialists will actually read. The example I found today is Fran Beauman's The Pineapple , reviewed in the TLS . A book entirely about pineapples - how wonderful is that?

My weekend is looking more like a write-off from a productivity point of view than it was earlier today, as I'm now reading archives of an online comic - Too Much Coffee Man . This is a particularly good one, despite being far more coffee-centric than I am; quite a few of the strips (like this one ) echo one of my many internal monologues quite nicely, only more coherently and with much higher quality illustrations. Hope no one out there was expecting a Christmas card from me... Don't blame me, blame the heel who pointed me at TMCM. I don't really mind, always enjoy having new stuff to read on the net and gotta love friends who draw my attention to new sites, but honestly, the timing sucks. As well as cards I should be doing viva preparation and work today and tomorrow, unless of course there are still more comics to get through. At least comic addiction is more transient than coffee addiction.

In some ways it is quite disturbing that I can relate to the pro-rocket-boost inclinations displayed in today's Sluggy Freelance comic. I've managed to resist adding flame decals to my wheels (although I have thought about it!); and although the car always went pretty well, the extra power from the air filter and remap are awesome. I'm definitely turning into a petrolhead, but at least I get to retain my green credentials when the amount of petrol in question is considered. In Tesco's car park last night, there were a great many blinged and noise/power-boosted motors, and it occurred to me that mine had all three too (although the filter only slightly contributes to the turbo sound). With the oft-mooted exhaust/induction kit too, I'd certainly get more noise, but haven't quite been persuaded or perhaps persuaded myself...

Was at the House of Lords today, at the invitation of Lord Oxburgh, to celebrate SETNET and the Science and Engineering Ambassadors programme. It was great to meet so many other SEAs (especially to exchange ideas - many thanks to the spaghetti+jelly babies+egg guy - you know who you are) and supporters of the scheme. The sausages were amazing, but I didn't manage to take any pics of them. Instead, you get views taken discreetly outside the main function. The angles are due to the discretion, and perhaps the wine, which wasn't at all bad either.

My list is short this year. I could do with a whistle (because it turns out my voice won't hold up to both silencing and talking to a whole school hall), books are always good (and this year I'm hoping for some usability texts, but they're painfully expensive), and that's about it. But for my current mood this merch from Cat and Girl would do very nicely.

Over at Bug Bash .

The Women In Technology conference I went to last week was great. It's always good to remind oneself that there are other techie women out there, and even better, that they aren't all shut away in academia... The amount of support available to women in Cambridgeshire who want to set up businesses (geeky or otherwise) is also incredible. Must remember to do that myself some time! At all-women conferences, there are always amazing examples of women who have overcome huge obstacles, particularly in their personal lives, and who manage to be happy and successful. At the amazing Grace Hopper Conference , there were women who had suffered terrible tragedies (such as the death of a husband) and who had managed to survive them, as well as maintaining brilliant leadership careers, and bringing up clutches of tiny children. Awesome. Their main message tends to be that you can't plan this stuff - life events just happen. It's all very well saying that you plan to achieve X in yo...

Procrastination studies.

Managed to get out of Cambridge today to Wicken Fen. Fairly wild but appallingly flat; at home (West Kirby is still home, when it comes to a sense of place) even the flat bits usually look impressive, and at least there are non-flat bits around. This is one of those flat bits, the estuary out to Hilbre Island.

Doonesbury so often gets it right. Today's strip in particular seems appropriate to me - can't say I'd relive my college years in the same way if I had the time again.

"Why is labouring to look like Paris Hilton empowering?" Ariel Levy asks, in an Independent article , about how today's raunch culture and cartoon sexuality aren't helping women.

One of my favourite sites for random browsing when I'm in an intellectual mood is Arts and Letters Daily . Although it only gets a few new links posted each week, they are always top quality reads, and often on unusual cultural or political topics from sources I wouldn't spend the time to read regularly.

but Paul's happy! Tesco last night had a queue by 9:30pm which exceeded in length the number of Xbox 360s they had for the midnight launch, so the almost-reasonable plan of returning later last night was ruled out. GAME had told me they were opening at 7am today, and would have no full systems, and only "one or two" hard drives to go with an unspecified number of core systems. This didn't sound like good odds, for such an obvious retailer. Paul was clearly excited at the prospect of retaining extremely-early-adopter status though, and after tossing and turning all night exited the house at 6am. Which, amazingly, was early enough to be first in the queue at GAME, so we now have a core system with all the extra bits including a hen's teeth rarity HD (probably worth more than Paul paid in total, if we were to stick it on ebay now). No high def video cable yet though (so no surround sound, boo hoo), but still, a new toy just in time for the weekend :-)

I'm having cake today for lunch (although not one of these). Perhaps this is unhealthy.

Went to Thetford forest today. It was very cold and frosty, but beautifully sunny too. Managed to find a very quiet path away from all the cyclists. I'm always amazed that my (now quite old) phone can actually take moderate pictures sometimes.

Spotted on GMSV : "As anticipated, when the young women in the current study were asked to select the agents who were most like them and who they most wanted to be like, they tended to pick young, female, attractive, and cool agents. However, they also selected the young, female, cool agents as being least like an engineer. When asked to select who they would most like to learn from about engineering, the women in the current study were far more likely to pick male agents who were uncool but attractive. Interestingly, it was also the male, uncool agents that they tended to rate as most like an engineer." So says Amy Baylor , a professor of instructional systems at Florida State University's Research of Innovative Technologies for Learning. This amused me greatly.

Cool - I'll be able to get the new Barenaked Ladies album on USB memory stick. (Assuming someone imports it, of course.) And it looks like Weird Al has recorded the first 6 tracks of his new album too. Can't wait.

Saw these guys in town this morning - solar-powered laptops, free for anyone to use. Cute waterproof hoods. Apparently it's Art, rather than Useful...

you need to turn the lights on. A lazy student lifestyle has wiped such details from my memory. Time for a change, perhaps.

2005 is the Year of the Volunteer, and Charlie and I got medals tonight for our work as Ambassadors over the years. Officially these are Awards for Commitment. Not had a medal before! Lots of mayors from Cambridgeshire, and the Lord Lieutenant, were there. 401 medals are being awarded nationwide, and Cambs got 36 of them. We're keen round here.

No idea when the season officially opens, of course. But I haven't baked anything for so long that this definitely counts as a new season for me.

Being currently "between jobs", I'm in an interesting situation when it comes to computing, as every day I use a range of different platforms in different locations, and none of them are really mine . At home I have a choice of Mac or PC and usually end up flitting between the two depending on what room I'd rather be in; elsewhere, I can often snatch a few minutes on a Windows machine or sometimes my own xterm and/or browser window on a Linux box. The experience is very different to that of having one's own main computer, set up with applications and preferences, and which automatically starts up widgets to keep one connected and informed. My USB key and webpages are pretty useful for documents (and at home all my files are on the network), but I do sometimes find that I'm stuck with a NeoOffice save file from the Mac which I can't edit on an alien Windows machine. Most of my document editing still happens at home, but it is good to see that I could now do...

For some time now, I've felt I ought to read a book entitled Behind the Scenes at the Museum , which had been very well received, but whenever I spotted it in a store, I'd always read the blurb and be put off. Perhaps it was because I like museums, but none seemed to occur in the book, or perhaps it sounded too much like a generic woman trapped in unhappy marriage tale. A month or two back, I needed a third book for a 3-for-2, and so bought Not the End of the World , which was a collection of wonderfully surreal short stories and which had an appealing blurb. A week or so later, I spotted another book by the same author (Kate Atkinson) which was set in Cambridge and looked like a mystery - it sounded terrific, and was. Having read that, I proceeded to devour the rest of her oeuvre, including some really splendid story telling. I finally finished Behind the Scenes at the weekend (one of her best, I think, no wonder everyone raved about it) and Emotionally Weird yesterday (a sur...

Stop Climate Chaos aims to be the next big campaign (following 2005's Make Poverty History). Sign up now on their petition, and pledge to be a bit greener in the future - and tell your friends to do the same. (Spreading the word, as promised, Anne!)

"Nothing right in my left brain; nothing left in my right brain" I assume it's an old one, but new to me. (Seen on a postcard in the house of a very helpful lady I visited yesterday.)

Received a lovely invite to "join my peers" at a conference this week. Nothing unusual in that, but it's not really my field: Directed Energy Weapons are soon to provide a revolution in military capability... potential for unlimited "ammunition" and the ability to fight at the speed of light... Yup, it's high energy lasers! Clearly lots of advances to report in this area; it does look quite a varied programme. The organisation running the event is called Defence IQ. I'm mildly worried that they have an accurate version of my snail mail address.

This week's activities brought to you by CITB , encouraging young people to consider careers in construction , and were organised and run by ExSciTe / the Cambridge SETPoint.

The "blinking eye"

Stupidly I forgot to take a pic of it in place on the river! Too distracted trying not to fall in.

For National Construction Week, we are building a new bridge each day in St John's College. So far we've managed to get them installed over water in time both days, but today it was a close thing. Suspension bridges are hard. Tomorrow it is the QE2 bridge from Dartford...

The hardest puzzle on the internet? Possibly. I still like the Stone (although haven't played for ages); PerplexCity is too diverse for me somehow, and buying cards is just tedious. In terms of games, I played Kingdom of Loathing for a while and then dropped it, but will probably return to it sometime. More recently I had a short spell in the spooky world where text adventure meets classic text, playing Hamlet , which I luckily found before the site died - can't say I did very well, despite knowing the plot details pretty well...

This year, some vehicles actually completed the DARPA grand challenge ! Wow.

Tradition prevails...