About this blog

Not sure why I suddenly started blogging after all this time. What can I say? I didn't feel the desire before. Lately I've been wanting to write longer tweets and, well, express my opinions more thoroughly. Maybe nobody else cares to read them, but the writing might be fun.

Since I'm new to the game I might make errors in blogiquette. Apologies, and feel free to 'educate' me on that.

What are you likely to be finding in this blog?

Given my interests in academia I expect to be posting mainly on those topics. I find myself thinking a lot about why people behave the way they do. Questions like;

• What makes some people more collegiate than others; is it different morals or a different game plan?
• Is it wrong to encourage good students into academia given the crazy competition for jobs?

I'm also a very keen amateur programmer and big advocate of the Python programming language (I'll try not to go on too much about its superiority over Matlab, but no promises!). I spend a lot of my time developing the PsychoPy stimulus presentation package. That raises its own questions:

• Should I be wasting time on software development when I could be running experiments, or writing about them?
• Can the open-source model really compete with commercial products?
• Why should all scientists have at least a rudimentary programming ability?

My own research is in visual neuroscience, how the brain uses the information from the eyes, but I don't expect to talk about that here.

Of course, these are guesses. Maybe I'll end up talking about why the sky is blue.