James' Empty Blog

So, the Govt has decided to splash £100m of our money on telling us to do what it has signally failed to do for the last 3 years - get r...

So, this is going to be a long and boring post which delves into one of the reasons why we wanted to keep up our permanent residency (thoug...

Jules and I are supposed to be en route for the PAGES Open Science Meeting in Goa, but due to the situation turning out not necessarily to...

Well, I've held on to this prestigious award for long enough, and it's time to pass on the heavy mantle of responsibility to someo...

" I don’t think this government has ever had the same philosophy as the U.S. that administrative functions should be halted if there’...

Politics pushes Japan towards fiscal cliff as money runs out: without fresh borrowing the government will run out of money by October. ...

Hopefully, not too much - since Japan's K (京) computer, named for the Japanese character for 10 16 (flops), had a rather brief stay a...

From Nature News this week: Japan’s ministry of science and education was supposed to be celebrating the 50th anniversary of its first...

Interesting to see the outrage and hostility provoked by this story about an underemployed civil servant in Germany. Over here, it's a ...

Well this is published on 2nd April, but I wonder if it's a late April Fool? New safety standards for radioactive cesium in food product...

Sad but generally unsurprising news from the UK, where it seems that the latest installment of austerity means another round of scientists ...

As a follow-up to the parenthetical comment I made in a previous post , I thought I would consider the question of IPCC citations more thoro...

So as you may have gathered, jules and I have got shiny spanking brand new jobs. From April Fool's Day we will be working in climate cha...

Japanese immigration is not reputed to be the most welcoming and friendly of departments, though we have never had any problems (indeed trav...

Some quango is aiming to triple the number of foreign tourists to 18 million by 2016 . The previous target of 10 million by 2010 was missed ...

So says Nature . Actually, this is one occasion where we actually found out first through internal channels, a couple of weeks ago. It seems...

A bit of a bizarre story has been doing the rounds. Initially on Debito , I assumed it would soon fade, but it was picked up by an Economist...

There's a lovely fusion of mad scientists and bonkers bureaucrats in the Torygraph today: EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydrati...

We are off to Tohoku again shortly for more volunteering with Peaceboat. Partly because we enjoyed it last time and partly with the thought ...

As you may have heard, the Japanese Govt is broke : "We've got our backs against the wall and need to do our best to avoid that sit...