Comments for Physicist adrift

Comment on The rich fabric of inspiration by Marc Godfrey

Marc Godfrey — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 14:03:30 +0000

What a lovely read! A very pleased you still have your Garfield diary! He was pivotal to my childhood inspiration xx

Comment on The rich fabric of inspiration by Lucy WH

Lucy WH — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 17:34:39 +0000

My parents liked history and news – I thought that was boring. “Why do we always look back? Why don’t we study the future rather than the past?”
– “Well the closest thing to that would be science”

An I thought I was the only one weird enough to have read The Usbourne Dictionary of Science from cover to cover. The beginning of the atlas too had all about the formation of stars and our place in the solar system and the physical mechanisms behind plate tectonics – I used to copy out big colourful diagrams and put them round my room!

And then there was JAWS – with the clever scientist staying alive in the sea, from then on my career aspirations switched onto science.

I really quite liked “the strange case of Mrs Hudson’s Cat”, and Steven Hawking’s books too – I remember being an underage drinker and cornering two of my brothers mates in a bar rambling on about quantum strangeness, completely oblivious to their attempts to change the subject.

Comment on Hungry for Raspberry Pi by Paul Stevenson

Paul Stevenson — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 09:39:08 +0000

I’d like to get hold of a Raspberry Pi, too, and I’ve been following the new quite avidly. I learnt to do some programming on the Spectrum, though eventually I would spend more time playing games on it than doing anything else. I used to draw out 8×8 grids and shade in monsters and aliens to make user-defined characters, and learned about binary along the way. Now I patiently teach second year students that there is such a thing as binary and how to move between it and base 10.

The Respberry Pi looks great, though I worry that unless an environment other than an X11-based distribution of linux is available, it won’t force anyone using it to write programs, but hopefully people will start selling good SD card distributions of cool stuff that’ll get kids hooked on programming. I might get one for my daughter, and see how it competes with the Wii. Maybe a logo-based turtle graphics thing is the place to start…

Comment on Hungry for Raspberry Pi by Tristan

Tristan — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 17:23:42 +0000

Ah, the gold old days of Fortran 90! That was the first programming I’d ever done. I never got to have a Spectrum or anything like that. My first computer was an Atari ST but that was only so I could use Cubase.

I’m planning on buying a couple of Raspberry Pi’s too. One for me and one for my 10 year old nephew. He visited a video games company here in Guildford a couple of years ago and loved it. That could give him the motivation to start playing around with programming.

Comment on Hungry for Raspberry Pi by Kate Adamson

Kate Adamson — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 08:59:39 +0000

I feel very nostalgic about BASIC and those BASIC books out of the library! Although I wrote loads of FORTRAN for my PhD, I’ve never been a real coder, more a tinkerer with code. I’m sure that skill comes directly from modifying BASIC programs as a kid.
As you say, once you learn one language you’ve got a head start on others, and sometimes the principles are just about all you need. There’s nothing so satisfying as reading a program in a language you don’t really know and figuring out which bit makes the necessary change!

Comment on Hungry for Raspberry Pi by Bern

Bern — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:01:34 +0000

Even the best drugs (so I’m told) can’t replicate the high you feel at 3.30 in the morning when “Error: Floating point exception” is finally replaced by a beautiful new line containing just a guillemet and a cursor.

Comment on Hungry for Raspberry Pi by Ben Pine

Ben Pine — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 12:31:34 +0000

Good post Kate. I got my school BBC computer to play the Top Gun theme tune age 12, programming in BASIC. I now write simulation codes for particle accelerators. I suspect there is a strong correlation between these two things.

Comment on Hungry for Raspberry Pi by drkatypoo

drkatypoo — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 12:04:56 +0000

Good points made there. I think would say I had “choices removed” as opposed to forced. In a world full of different languages someone else who knows more than you making the decision helps in many ways. I think half the battle of learning how to program is the constructs and concepts as opposed to syntax i.e. what is a loop, what is a subroutine, what is an array etc. I think this is why learning the real number cruncher languages like C and FORTRAN are still relevant for that type of thing. I find once I had learned one language it became less onerous to learn others.
I guess I can see Raspberry Pi being lovely for I/O stuff, running devices and whatnot.

Comment on Hungry for Raspberry Pi by wjt

wjt — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:46:33 +0000

I think it’s notable that your introductions to programming didn’t start by making you choose a development environment. BBC Micro just dumped you at a BASIC prompt; and FORTRAN was forced upon you. Occasionally younger relatives and family friends ask me where they should start programming, and I find it very hard to give a useful answer which allows them to get from nothing to asterisks racing each other around the screen without having to understand the intricacies of windowing systems, HTML5 canvases, or what have you.

(Of course, I’m probably overestimating how much of a problem this choice might be for an inquisitive type with a Raspberry Pi in front of them…)

Comment on Why I left research by Matt Hill

Matt Hill — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 23:13:29 +0000

Always interesting to hear how the ‘fashions’ of research impact people, and really glad you didn’t let this latest swing in what’s hot or not derail what was, and still is, an obviously high profile and successful career. Your particular two-body solution does indeed have the air of fate about it, but to some extent you make your own luck – your commitment to staying true to your principles stopped you from getting stuck in a rut and avoid the ‘badge of honour’ you mentioned as well. I wish you all the best in your new role – I’m sure you’ll make it your own just as you did at RAL!