In all ages, “philosophers and artists have proposed definitions of Beauty; thanks to their testimonies can thus reconstruct a history of aesthetic ideas over the time. But other things were with the idea of Ugly. Most often, Ugly was defined in opposition to the Beauty, but almost never have been dedicated ample studies, but some hints in parenthesis or some marginal notes” as U. Eco asserts (...

Goldilocks, in the course of her serial porridge-tasting, had a pretty precise concept of which porridge was going to be acceptable to her palate. The criteria were her own, based on her own experience, and which may or may not be straightforwardly communicated and easily comparable to the tastes and needs of other porridge afficionados. Moving to the less fairytale-like world of science, RNA q...

I give a status report on the validity of the so-called “fourth-root trick”, i.e. the procedure of representing the determinant for a single fermion by the fourth root of the staggered fermion determinant. This has been used by the MILC collaboration to create a large ensemble of lattices using which many quantities of physical interest have been and are being calculated. It is also used extens...

The role of competition in healthcare is much debated. Despite a wealth of international experience in relation to competition, evidence is mixed and contested and the debate about the potential role for competition is often polarised. This paper considers briefly some of the reasons for this, focusing on what is meant by "competition in healthcare" and why it is more valuable to think about th...