Month: March 2009

  • Video games good for your eyes

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    Sam
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    Isn’t that the opposite of what your mother always said? A study published in Nature Neuroscience found that playing action video games improved contrast sensitivity. Players were able to better discern very small changes in shades of grey as a result of playing games “where they had to be constantly ready to react to unpredictable…

  • Next phase

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    Sam
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    I finished my low mileage transition month with my last run today. I was worried that I was getting a little too comfortable with these easy weeks, given that some of my training weeks have been as tough as hell and for some reason I’ve scheduled worse ones in the near future. Also, when you…

  • New shoes

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    Sam
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    I’ve said it before, but is there anything better than new shoes? Annabel got her first pair of proper walking shoes (and I got new running shoes). When your mileage goes up you really start getting through shoes. I need to buy another couple of pairs too.

  • Trooper

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    Sam
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    Jack bought me a badge for my birthday. Watch out for it in meetings.

  • Spiderman to the rescue

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    Sam
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    BBC News report that a fireman dressed up as Spiderman to coax an eight-year-old boy from a third-floor window ledge. Not only is that in itself awesome, but the fireman keeps the costume in his locker. Read the article – bbc.co.uk.

  • Boys win yet again

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    Sam
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    The boys have won the third embryology lecture quiz in a row, Jo Bishop tells me. That’s a fantastic run, but will the girls deal the killer blow in the next one? There are two lectures & two quizzes to go.

  • Boys win again

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    Sam
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    The boys won the quiz at the end of the embryology of the endocrine system lecture, and by quite a large margin. The score is now 5:2 to the girls, with (I think) 3 to play.

  • Week 127 – the structures inside the kidney

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    Sam
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    Hey! I hadn’t taught for a while so it was good to start again, in hopefully a helpfully interactive way as we all looked at sliced and whole kidneys. In the session we talked about the cortex and the medulla, pointing out that while the cortex is outermost it also surrounds medullary (or renal) pyramids…

  • Goals

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    Sam
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    This was a screenshot of my Mac’s desktop last week. The desktop’s wallpaper’s numbers are my half-marathon goal (time & distance). I found it useful to remind myself of what I was aiming for when getting into a fatigued, JFT mode whenever I cleared my display. I smashed that number (and I thought I was…

  • ‘iTunes university’ better than the real thing

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    Sam
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    Jess Griffiths, our Learning Technologist pointed out an interesting publication suggesting that students do better using podcasts than learning from lectures. It’s an unexpected result from my position as both a lecturer and a podcaster and very interesting. The researchers set a lecture for a group of students purely for testing this, with half of…