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 :-)