I had to face a quandary today — am I a legal com­ment­ator or not? I write a blog, which has been known to dis­cuss legal mat­ters in the pub­lic aware­ness, or indeed com­ment on indi­vidual cases, from time to time. But is that enough? And does it even matter?

The reason for this thought […]

Some­time ago I pos­ted a link to another blog con­tain­ing a link to a degree clas­si­fic­a­tion cal­cu­lator for Open Uni­ver­sity degrees. How­ever, the way the clas­si­fic­a­tion is cal­cu­lated for OU law degrees is slightly dif­fer­ent. Luck­ily, it’s pretty simple to work out.

The OU law degree con­sists of 4 man­dat­ory courses: W200, W201, W300 and W301. […]

Look what French kids get up to at their A-Level equivalents:

Con­tro­versy Erupts in French Classrooms over Per­mit­ting Teens to Genet­ic­ally Modify Bac­teria: Sci­entific Amer­ican:

A row has broken out in France over whether 15– and 16-year-olds should be allowed to cre­ate trans­genic Escheri­chia coli bac­teria in the classroom.

Prac­tical exper­i­ments in which students […]

Vik­ing Found Organ­ics on Mars, Exper­i­ment Con­firms : Dis­cov­ery News:

Using Mars-like soil taken from Atacama Desert, a study con­firms Mars has organ­ics, and Vik­ing found them.

A reana­lysis of Mars Vik­ing exper­i­ments shows the probes did find organ­ics.
The res­ult was not ini­tially under­stood due to the strong oxid­a­tion effects of […]

I always look ret­ro­spect­ively at years in my usual vague sense of dis­sat­is­fac­tion — because yet again over the course of the year I get no fur­ther toward feel­ing ful­filled. 2010 has been little dif­fer­ent in that regard, but I can’t com­plain about it not keep­ing me occupied.

This is to where, one day, I would hope to retire:

View Lar­ger Map

It’s a dream, but it’s a good one. Look around in the map on the link. The house to the left of the blue door is where I spent many many hol­i­days as a kid.

The main win­dow, on the […]

I was a child of the mid-80’s,  and I don’t empath­ise with the gay films of that time — the UK work of Derek Jar­man was too arty– I appre­ci­ate this some­what now but it has no greater rel­ev­ance to me now than in 1983; and most of the films from the US depic­ted a […]

The acer tree is turn­ing red, it’s a bit cold in the morn­ings, and it’s been four months since I’ve even tried to write a blog post. It’s been a fun summer.

Work­wise, at the start of the year, a friend and I star­ted work­ing on a start-up idea: spe­cial­ist web-based pro­ject man­age­ment soft­ware. We […]

Be strong, Nick Clegg and the Lib­eral Demo­crats, and don’t get seduced into a coali­tion gov­ern­ment. A sop-seat in the Cab­inet isn’t worth it. You won’t get to for­ward your agenda. And the voters, next elec­tion, won’t for­give you. This has happened before, in 1979. It took the party a gen­er­a­tion to recover.

There is […]