We learn by making mistakes. As one of my yoga teachers repeatedly reminds her classes – when do we ever get anything right the first time? We are in good company. Even Albert Einstein, responsible for some of the most radical twentieth-century advances in Physics, has been described as making a “tangle of mistakes” in an unforgiving article in Physics Today. If Einstein could blunder that badly while achieving so much and succeeding so well, there is surely hope for the rest of us.

Nothing makes a person feel old like remembering a time before the students just arriving were born… or indeed before the internet. Even if you are just joining us, many of these things became obsolete in your lifetime. Prepare to feel very old suddenly as you watch this video about things that became obsolete since 2000!

Modern music is pretty much all synthesised, or at least comprises digital reproductions of recordings of acoustic sounds and yet this development was very much a twentieth-century phenomenon. This post comprises a whistlestop tour from early electric light bulbs through vacuum tubes to modern electronic circuitry, Oscar, Sala, Brian Eno, the too often overlooked Wendy Carlos, and on to the modern day with many a window shopping stop along the way.

Interested in getting up to speed with engineering research?  Try the Engineering Academic Challenge: an immersive interdisciplinary problem-set based competition built around 5 trans-disciplinary themes including the future of energy, manufacture and medicine.  The first problem-set will go live in two weeks …

Lay the foundations for your career in Engineering Read more »

The making of Avatar by Jody Duncan & Lisa Fitzpatrick This week’s Book of the Week is about one of the most famous films of the past few years.  In 1995, James Cameron began working on a story that would, …

Creative Arts Book of the Week 07/12/15 Read more »

Artificial Neural Networks use well known mathematical methods to help computers learn to recognise and interpret patterns from experience, allowing them to classify images and recognise speech.  Layers of decision making ask what structure something has and then assesses it in more …

Art, artificial networks, and the construction of reality Read more »