A wave to all my lecturers at the Higher School who made us cram Excel

A wave to all my lecturers at the Higher School who made us cram Excel. Some 20% of the genetic studies published in leading scientific journals contain errors caused by the autoformatting settings in Microsoft Excel. You have surely run into it yourselves, when the programme swaps the data you type in for some alternative values, such as calendar dates or days of the week. Geneticists suffered precisely because the names of genes in those enormous spreadsheets were autocorrected into dates, and the whole subsequent algorithm duly fell over. Set the cell type correctly, the scientists advise. As for me, I am once again convinced that one cannot rely one hundred per cent on technology and software. Not so plain old bones: they would never have treated you this way. Bones do not lie, they merely sometimes leave things unsaid

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At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free

At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free. So, here is the

Frederic Leighton

Frederic Leighton. “Daedalus and Icarus”, 1869 Daedalus warns his son not to climb too high: the heat of the sun may melt the wax, but Icarus is already gazing into the distance, and the lamentations of a foolish old man interest him not in the least

A wave to all my lecturers at the Higher School who made us cram Excel

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At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free

Frederic Leighton

Attempts to resolve the problems of many years of uncontrolled mass migration

Characters from Gogol's "Petersburg Tales" on the pedestal of the monument to Nikolai Gogol on Nikitsky Boulevard, photograph of the 1960s