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The exotic life of television documentary making
I am sitting on the train down from North Yorkshire (well Lancaster to be precise) to London Euston. It’s nine o’clock on a Friday evening and I am not going to get home this side of midnight. That’s despite the scares of weather delays proving unfounded. It’s been a long day as I’ve been up since five, having had a restless night’s sleep in my less than comfy bed at the New Inn Pub in Clapham in the Yorkshire Dales (who remembers the opening sequence in American Werewolf in London?)
Yes, another exotic day of filming is over.
The Chinese Pythagoras and the Iraqi Darwin
I’d like to touch on two quite different topics this week. The first is something neat that you may have seen before, but it was new to me. As some of you might know, I am currently writing a book on the history of Arabic science. I have been working on it for a year and a half and am due to hand over the manuscript to the publishers, Penguin Press, at the end of July. Still a long way to go though (as in: it is only half written!) Anyway, I am finding the historical research absolutely fascinating and just as thrilling as anything in physics, but quite different; in science we don’t have nearly as much opinion and conjecture as historians. But their disagreements are so much more lively and colourful. Well, in researching material for an early chapter on the mathematics of antiquity I came across a beautifully simple proof that requires no maths other than an easy diagram!
British Science Re-branded
Since I have decided to keep a blog, I think this means I am meant to update it fairly frequently. Damn, I knew there’d be a catch. Anyway, my good friend Anna has asked where the next one was so at least one person read the first blog. So any advice on how to improve on it or topics for discussion are welcome (email me at j.al-khalili@surrey.ac.uk).
So, what has been happening in science over the past week? Well, just in case the big news has passed you by, I will report here on what should have been a momentous event last week deserving of appropriate pomp, fanfare, razzmatazz and, well, a bit of a fuss I suppose. Instead, it passed unnoticed to the outside world with all fizz of a cheap sparkler on a damp bonfire night.
My first blog
Well, my very first blog! (And an exclamation mark after the fifth word.) Not that I haven’t had anything to say, you understand – I’m just a little behind the times. Although I must admit that I cannot understand why so many people feel the need to constantly tell the world about the minutiae of their lives via Facebook’s ‘Status Updates’.
Oh, I am so going to enjoy ranting.
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