Started playing octopush (wiki) two weeks ago. Great fun. the game is basically underwater hockey, 6 players to a team. You have short wooden hockey sticks (about a foot long), flippers, snorkel and a lead puck (called a squid). The goals are made from two bricks on the bottom of the pool.

Great fun

Spent last weekend at my band’s drummer’s house jamming. Was awesome, got some good licks recorded. Unfortunately I left the PS for my laptop there, but its being sent back in the post Will post up the best bits next weekend.

Im now being swamped in end-of-term-work. Sucks. I have 3 projects and an extra set of questions due in, on top of my usualy weekly problems. Oh well, might have to sacrifice some drinking and guitaring

!!!
fucking wastred 1

viking raid ! flell over WAA,LL ! wo ~

damn JD 1

Took this last night with some mates using hte the university observatory. We couldnt make the imaging software with the telescope work, so we pointeed a digicam down the eyepiece

Technorati: moon

I like to type up my notes onto my laptop after a lecture. Helps me remember them, and I can go through stuff I might not understand so well. Being a physics student, I ofter get a lot of diagrams. I like drawing these on PowerPoint (its amasing what you can do on there with a bit of imagination). After grouping my picture into a single object I copy and paste into word (thought about keynotes and writer…but cant be hassled with it atm. Maybe once im thouroughly fed up of Office).

Unfortunately, for some uknown reason, my picture gets pasted into word some arbitury distance above my cursor. Sometimes its a few lines. Sometimes page. Everything else I paste into word (images etc) gets put it at the cursor. So why doesnt powerpoint images :@

Being a student of physyics, I decided to join the Institute of Physics (IoP). Got a student membership which was dirt cheap

It also comes with a magazine (called Physics World) every month or three, containing book reviews, news and the odd paper.

The most recent issue was concerning the distribution of papers across the internet.

Up until now distribution of these papers has been via journals. Now, these are expensive, so usually you find them in a library (my university has a ridiculous amount of space for these journals). Theyre also expensive due to the peer review process - I dont fully understand how it works, but it involves other scientists going over your paper, your notes and repeating your experiment to confirm the results. Physics World reckons the cost per paper is ~£1500 to £2000. This cost is taken by the journal - so subscription fees to get these journals, and therefore the latest information on physics, is very expensive.

Which is where open access comes in. This is a method being proposed by many physisists, and a resaercher at CERN wrote a few pages on it in Physics World. It involves having work reviewed by other scientists, and then being published on the internet. The money for this comes from the author. The problem with this model is that only well financed researchers can publish their work. The big advantage of the open access model is being able to put up your raw data, lab notes, etc - there just isnt space for all that on paper !

Which is where my idea comes in. Open source.

Alot of papers and material is already available online, and theyre are also alot of blogs and pre-release (papers that have not undergone peer review) websites kicking about.

My idea is to have a website, (some sort of technorati, facebook, blog mashup), that takes full advantage of blogging. You have a blog for different journals (aka catagories), and each post is a paper. A PDF is available for download so you can download a post, or entire blog etc. Each post (aka paper) is tagged with relevant topics that it adresses. The technorati part of the system would keep track of these tags, allowing you to easilly search for relevant articles, or follow up referances.

Using the facebook part of the system, you can look at the publisher, have a discussion, or share relevant work with them. By using the facebook idea of only accepting people with certain email adresses (and email confirmation), you prevent people taking advantage of the system for advertising or spamming.

And of course, like the open access model you can put extra files up.

Peer review can still take place. There would be an isolated section for submitting non-reviewed work, where it would be emailed / RSS to relevant people to check over it. You could even have an option when completing the facebook-style section asking if the person signing up wants to do peer review (again, limited to active physisists by filtering email adresses).

That my two pence.

Technorati: physics open-access iop