"The age of passive sponging is nigh!" -> A cry I would thoroughly love heard resonated throughout cafes, campuses and offices. A pattern I've noticed over the last near-quarter decade,...
The few times I snuck into philosophy lectures during university I remember being confused. Not so much by the philosophical terminology (having spent a good few years in the larceny...
Sidenote: Long break! Ouch. One-post a week minimum from now. (Challenge Accepted) So one of my favourite hobbies (particularly on days approaching deadlines & work responsibilities) is the browsing of...
Before I forget all I learned, I’d like to put up a series of posts around the research I was doing in Bonn. Slightly glia-centric (on OPCs / NG2 cells...
Written for Pi newspaper Amped up on scifi with films ranging from epics like Solaris to the big-time Hollywood hits Inception and Pacific Rim, it’s sometimes hard to distinguish fact...
In UCL Pi newspaper, print edition. My unedited, unabbreviated version below: A rant on our government's uselessness Re climate change. Woman up, world! Get the fuck up and start investing...
Posted in UCL Pi magazine, my original version unedited: We’ve been brought up to believe sleep is a necessary but avoidable luxury – Watching Grey’s Anatomy, Mad Men, 24 –...
If you had to lose your legs to save your unborn child – would you do it? It’s one of those typical (and frankly preposterous) TV plots that demand a...
What a terrible day: a day when I am lexically stumped and mentally stupefied. However, it was also the day for the Wellcome Trust / Guardian Science writing competition. Having made...
Whilst neuromarketing has often prominently featured in the media (getting into the brains of clients to subliminally seduce them into frivolity), a surprising lack of reviewed research lays a shoddy...
Not the cognizant kind, anyway. We all know first impressions can be remarkably shallow. Who hasn’t been in a pub and automatically picked out the smouldering shape of sexiness at...
Taking a break from marauding the ‘neocortex-not-required’ landscape.. Soil, the movement of said soil and its properties can be a pretty fascinating thing. I remember being shocked last year when...
Bit of a re-hash, but worth looking into associated links. Especially buildings created from wood - brilliant. In the same way that local filter bubbles can inhibit our capacity to...
“Why do I feel scared in some environments, but not in others?” For a while I thought the answer to this question was based entirely on events in that environment...
Dancing is not getting up any time painlessly like a speck of dust blown around in the wind. Dancing is when you rise above both worlds, tearing your heart to pieces...
Written a few months ago, this look into endorphins was a submission for the Biochemical Society’s annual Science Writing competition – for the layperson. I can see some flaws, but figured...
“Fracking has the real potential to drive down energy bills” Hydraulic fracturing operation at a Marcellus Shale well Cameron’s foray into the Shale gas debate is convincing. Who wouldn’t like...
In UCL Pi newspaper, print edition. My unedited, unabbreviated version below: A rant on our government's uselessness Re climate change. Woman up, world! Get the fuck up and start investing...
“Fracking has the real potential to drive down energy bills” Hydraulic fracturing operation at a Marcellus Shale well Cameron’s foray into the Shale gas debate is convincing. Who wouldn’t like...
Often I feel frustrated by the huge separation between clothes for men vs women.
I’m all for optimising for body forms.. but why not just do exactly that?
Last year a friend of mine, having heard I’d never read The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, immediately brought it off his shelf and into my temporary possession.
I’m reading a book I love right this movement and, for someone who grew up watching the films and revelling in the style, the fantasy, I still can’t quite point...
Balancing example code when teaching always feels like tricky business. If you take real world examples then they might be too lengthy in code and too verbose to explain. On...
I’ve been setting up various workflows in Airflow for my job. One thing I’ve seen in online examples is task branching. The thing I haven’t seen is branching (and expansion!)...
I’ve seen some great examples of jinja in recent years outside of web development. Airbyte’s connector development for example has some nice jinja templating going on. They enable you to...
I recently started a new job (an exciting few months, as shortly after my last post my partner and I went to Japan.. got engaged! Then work began). So I’ve...
I plan to add to this post - absolutely not comprehensive, rather a few notes on dbs / warehousing solutions I’ve used. Also given the pace of deleveopment at places...
When you have a hammer.. everything looks like a nail. Similarly, when you know Postgres.. Postgres is good for all problems right? It’s like the proverbial porridge in the 3...
In my last post I gave an example of a class you’d only inherit and not directly instantiate and so it seemed worthwhile to write a bit about abtract base...
In a previous post I joked about how misleading dynamic assignments of attributes can be when using descriptors like property. Something that’s a useful way to ensure you don’t (accidentally...
As the documentation tells us, a descriptor is just something that implements the __get__, __set__ or __delete__ method(s). You’ve probably used them yourself and not known it - examples include...
There are various cool python builtins and property is one of them. It’s pretty much an easy way to implement a descriptor using method decoration. In python we don’t actually...
There was a really amusing (and informative?) video someone linked a few weeks ago on Reddit for horrifying python to get you fired. I would recommend watching it because it’s...
In the desire to get myself to write more frequently I’m tagging upcoming posts as “shitpost”. This will be short thoughts or snippets that don’t take much time.
I’ve been wanting to start writing little notes here and there for useful tidbits I’ve found in my work over the years and somehow never get around to it. Work,...
Balancing example code when teaching always feels like tricky business. If you take real world examples then they might be too lengthy in code and too verbose to explain. On...
I’ve been setting up various workflows in Airflow for my job. One thing I’ve seen in online examples is task branching. The thing I haven’t seen is branching (and expansion!)...
I’ve seen some great examples of jinja in recent years outside of web development. Airbyte’s connector development for example has some nice jinja templating going on. They enable you to...
I recently started a new job (an exciting few months, as shortly after my last post my partner and I went to Japan.. got engaged! Then work began). So I’ve...
In my last post I gave an example of a class you’d only inherit and not directly instantiate and so it seemed worthwhile to write a bit about abtract base...
In a previous post I joked about how misleading dynamic assignments of attributes can be when using descriptors like property. Something that’s a useful way to ensure you don’t (accidentally...
As the documentation tells us, a descriptor is just something that implements the __get__, __set__ or __delete__ method(s). You’ve probably used them yourself and not known it - examples include...
There are various cool python builtins and property is one of them. It’s pretty much an easy way to implement a descriptor using method decoration. In python we don’t actually...
There was a really amusing (and informative?) video someone linked a few weeks ago on Reddit for horrifying python to get you fired. I would recommend watching it because it’s...
In the desire to get myself to write more frequently I’m tagging upcoming posts as “shitpost”. This will be short thoughts or snippets that don’t take much time.
Today’s mini-shitpost is not about code but just a wave-hands-in-the-air-bafflement at how apparently, prompt engineering has become not only a thing but.. a job post?
Working in many startups I’ve noticed trends for environments that seem to succeed versus those that don’t. One thing that stands out to me is enabling and keeping high trust....
