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Browse through my articles on miscellaneous topics
CEOs of Financial Institutions Should Now Light Their Pants on Fire
Behind the Headlines: Game Theory in the News Blog, 19 December 2008
Can game theory help us in the current financial mess? According to some skeptics, the answer is no, because they believe that game theory can be manipulated to explain anything.
“Kitchen Mysteries” by Hervé This
Book Review, Times Higher Education Supplement, November 2007
Hervé This’s new book is an exuberant paean for the role of science in cooking…
Bringing Archimedes to Light - Deciphering the Archimedes Palimpsest
Cosmos, September 2005
Pre-mediaeval writers had a hard time of it. It wasn't that there was nothing exciting to write about – the problem was finding something durable to write it on. The best material was parchment made from animal skins, which was chosen by a tenth-century Constantinople scribe when he copied a seminal work by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes entitled "Methods of Mechanical Theorems". Ten centuries on, it would be the only surviving copy, and would have experienced so much damage during its chequered history that the full armoury of twenty-first century science would be needed to decipher its contents...
Waiting for Godot
Times Higher Education Supplement, September 2005
A good belly laugh was the last thing that I expected when I settled down in my seat at Bath's Theatre Royal to watch Sir Peter Hall's fiftieth anniversary production of Waiting for Godot. A conversation between two tramps struggling to come to terms with the repetitious boredom of their existence doesn't seem like much of a subject for humour. Vladimir and Estragon's crisp one-liners, though, touched and tickled at the nerve ends of my own experience, provoking everything from appreciative giggles to outright hoots of laughter in a way that was obviously being shared by the packed audience around me...
Holiday Memories
Bristol Evening Post, April 2003
I have been asked to write a short, humorous piece about a memorable holiday experience in England, but there is nothing funny about my holidays. I remember one where the landlady of seaside boarding house refused to let my wife and me take breakfast in the bow window overlooking the beach because "people might see you from the road". Another landlady, whose establishment in no way resembled the description in the brochure, threatened to report us to the holiday company for daring to complain...
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