Category blog-update

Different Flavours of Research

Updated to a new blog! Beep Bloop Testing Testing..

Finally. No More Observation

"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,...

Category philosophy

Abstract Concepts

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...

Animal Consciousness (Part1)

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...

Category science

The Anthropocene

I’m a sucker for nerdy facts or news, so when I saw a flurry of articles on the Anthropocene this last week it piqued me. Now, as far as I...

Microscopy (Fluorescence and otherwise)

The development of microscopy has an exciting past & has been the subject of a few Nobel prize awards. Some notable contributes include..

NG2 cells (an intro)

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...

Different Flavours of Research

Updated to a new blog! Beep Bloop Testing Testing..

Arguing for Brain Machine Interfaces

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...

If you break it, you buy it.

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...

The City Never Sleeps –But We Need To

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 –...

Prosthetics: has Sports Media hyped up our expectations?

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...

Bias is a fickle, far-reaching and manipulative beast

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...

Neuromarketing (bit of a hoax?)

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...

Are your actions guided by logic? It seems not.

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...

Pondering Urban Soil

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...

Category architecture

Building Sustainability

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...

The Focus in Architecture Design

“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...

Category education

Kinesthetics

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...

Category health

Endorphins: crucial or not?

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...

Category nature

Sabal Palms

If there’s a few books I can entice you to buy, one of them would be by the author David George Haskell. Even if you don’t like reading a whole...

Frack off? Indeed

“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...

Category climate

If you break it, you buy it.

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...

Frack off? Indeed

“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...

Category comic

Clothes (comic)

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?

The Three Responses (comic)

I was having a thought about “know it alls” - how they act without sometimes realising how their reaction can make others feel.

Category history

Microscopy (Fluorescence and otherwise)

The development of microscopy has an exciting past & has been the subject of a few Nobel prize awards. Some notable contributes include..

Category books

Sabal Palms

If there’s a few books I can entice you to buy, one of them would be by the author David George Haskell. Even if you don’t like reading a whole...

Wasp Factory Spoilers

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.

Shades of Evil

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...

Category programming

Airflow Branching

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!)...

Terraform's Immutability

I recently did a teaching session on terraform at work and it was a good reminder of how excellent the hashicorp documentation is.

DBT's Jinja

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...

Data Engineering Interviews

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...

(WIP) Database Summaries

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...

Database groupings

There are different ways to classify or group databases together. Some of the common ways include

Which database should I use?

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...

ABCs

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...

Slots

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...

Descriptors

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...

Properties

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...

Cursed python

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...

Funky method reassignments

I saw this kind of example recently and thought it was funky. I wrote out an example

Minor python optimisations

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.

Profiling in python

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,...

Category python

Airflow Branching

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!)...

Terraform's Immutability

I recently did a teaching session on terraform at work and it was a good reminder of how excellent the hashicorp documentation is.

DBT's Jinja

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...

Data Engineering Interviews

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...

ABCs

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...

Slots

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...

Descriptors

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...

Properties

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...

Cursed python

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...

Funky method reassignments

I saw this kind of example recently and thought it was funky. I wrote out an example

Minor python optimisations

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.

Category LLMs

Prompt engineering

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?

Category devops

Thoughts on DataOps

I had a look around the other day for any new and interesting tooling used in the DataOps sphere. It seemed a bit weird to me that though a lot...