Vivat Libertas

Last Thursday, the UK voted to leave the EU by a perilously narrow margin. The economy utterly tanked, the prime minister resigned, throwing the country into chaos, and now the country is split down the middle with hate and bitterness. I am not confident of being able to do good research in a country whose government has consistently voted to cut science funding, without EU funding and with a lot of barriers to international co-operation. Science is international and so I'm seriously considering doing my PhD and research abroad. Even if I don't do a PhD, I can probably find better jobs out of the UK than I can in it. A tanked economy will do that for you. There has been a lot of crying over the past couple of days about how leaving the country is somehow "weak". I'm not entirely sure I understand this argument. The world is far smaller than it was a century ago. Planes, trains, ships and cars will take you from country to country - and they will do this at r...

Humans are obsessed with the idea of the End Times, the apocalypse, the concept that we are teetering on the edge of a catastrophe. Most major world religions describe some kind of "end time" or debased age, and I'd argue that this has seeped through into modern Western culture; though the specifics change (these days politics, climate change or nuclear weapons herald the end of the world as we know it rather than, say, comets), each generation is always perverting the work of the last and the world as we know it is always definitely on the verge of ending. At the moment, we have two separate Apocalypses of the Month: the US presidential election and the EU referendum. In the US, the two frontrunners are a corrupt neoliberal and a creepy orange fascist. In the EU, the perpetually sulky and disruptive UK is calling a referendum as to whether to stay in an admittedly corrupt and labyrinthine institution with many a failing but lots of positives for education, research and...