Dr Laura James's writings

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...