homunculus

I’m excited. Really. I have just discovered that my friend Mark Miodownik is going to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures ...

OK, my article on agent-based modelling of the economy is now out in the Economist – you might be able to get it here , but if firewalls...

This is the first of the pieces I've written on the back of a workshop that I attended at the end of June on agent-based modelling of...

I’ve just been directed towards P. Z. Myer’s Pharyngula blog in which, during the course of a dissection of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini...

I have a review of Sam Kean’s book T he Disappearing Spoon in the latest issue of Nature . I am posting the pre-edited version here most...

Here’s my latest Muse article for Nature News. I hope it does not sound in any way critical of the peg paper (reference 3), which is a v...

How do you make and use a Grignard reagent? This isn’t a question that has generally kept me awake at night. But last night it gave me ni...

I have a Muse piece on Nature News about a forthcoming paper in Nature on cooperation and punishment in game theory, by Karl Sigmund a...

My latest Crucible column for Chemistry World   (July) is mostly non-technical enough to put up here. This is the pre-edited version. *...

Last week I had the immense pleasure of going to the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk to interview the pianist Leon Fleisher in front of an ...

This morning I found myself sitting outside a café in upper Regent Street watching passers-by sample three types of water and offer their...

I have a review in Nature of Albert-László Barabási’s new book Bursts . The book is nice, but the review was necessarily truncated, and ...

I have a piece in the FT about the forthcoming events on ‘music and the brain’ at the Aldeburgh Festival . The piece is so unadulterated...

There’s a piece in today’s Guardian Review by American author and novelist Marilynne Robinson, who bravely challenges the materialistic...

I’m still not sure whether I did right to join the panel for the online debate being launched by Icon Books on ‘The World’s Greatest Ide...

I’m thrilled to see my friend, photographic and video artist Lindsay Seers , being given some respect in Ben Lewis’s excellent piece for...

Artificial life? Don’t ask me guv, I was too busy last week building sandcastles in Lyme Regis. However, now making up for lost time… I h...