A review of “Firewatch” — Feelings of vulnerability, both to the elements and to other people, are perhaps the central theme of Firewatch, the recently released debut game by young studio Campo Santo. No doubt we’ve all felt that way at various points in our lives: walking home late at night; being lost in an…

Analytics have revolutionized sports. Here’s one approach to better quantify Formula One driving performance. — Performance statistics are everywhere in modern sport, and Formula One is no exception. Lap records, number of wins in a season, the youngest world champion, the longest run of results without a podium finish: these and myriad other figures are always at commentators’ fingertips during a race.

Image by Elizabeth Lies. This article originally appeared as an invited post on the LSE Impact Blog. Grading the quality of academic research is hard. That is why last year’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) assessment was complex and lengthy. Preparation for the REF started long before 2014, on all sides…

With the UK’s general election imminent, we, the electorate, have been treated to weeks of horse-trading between politicians on how much each party will or won’t spend on this or that if they get into power. £8bn more for the NHS here, £2.5bn extra for education there. Who would cut…

Why competitive funding is bad for science — This year sees the English higher education sector writhing in the throes of a huge academic quality-assessment exercise. Known by the suitably bureaucratic-sounding title of “Research Excellence Framework” (REF), the process involves most researchers from publicly-funded universities submitting their best work to be pored over and evaluated by a large…

A review of “Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure” — Screenshots by Big Finish Games The full-motion video (FMV) games of the 1990s occupied an interesting niche in the history of computer gaming. Solid storytelling in games had been established by a procession of text adventures released during the late 70s and 80s, but graphical engines were very basic and…

A review of “The God Delusion” — Interior details, Catedral Vieja de Salamanca (taken by the author) At the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, I was on holiday in Greece. Although I can transliterate the Greek alphabet (eventually), I do not speak nor read the language, and the increasingly inexplicable scenes which…

An experiment with random numbers — “Lucky 2" by Steve A. Johnson (adapted) Randomness is an awkward concept. Most people have some intuitive idea of what it is supposed to mean, but it’s too intangible for us to feel comfortable with. Worse, randomness is often conflated with arbitrariness, a distasteful and unsettling quality which we usually…

New methods for predicting treatment outcome in arthritis — http://nos.twnsnd.co This article was originally written as my entry to the 2014 “Access to Understanding” science writing competition. It outlines the context and findings of one of ten scientific papers chosen by the competition organisers. Arthritis is estimated to affect some 10 million people in the UK alone. Although often…