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My personal pages include my family history, which has a few snippets of information of interest to students of Scottish history and culture.
Scottish connections, aside from my immediate family, are mainly literary or historical; for example the author Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the poet Tom Buchan, and the Scoraig community.
The professional pages concern my academic research career, publications, and so on.
Nuclear waste disposal concerns mainly the failure of successive UK governments to solve the problem. Documents from the Sellafield Public Planning Inquiry of 1995-96 are available, together with more recent scientific studies. These demonstrate that, irrespective of the wishes of the local population, West Cumbria can never become a scientifically valid candidate site.
The 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear accident has shown that the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) is not fit for purpose. I have replaced it by a new Nuclear Accident Magnitude Scale (NAMS), which has been published online in Physics Today. I have reproduced the article here, and non-technical explanations and diagrams for the lay person are here.
The Climate page does not offer any new research, but simply reproduces interesting French articles, mainly from Le Monde, the excellent daily which puts most other serious world newspapers to shame. I have translated these articles into English, because the French media debate about le réchauffement climatique (global warming) is far more grown-up than the trivialised news and comment that passes for debate in the British broadsheets.
The Rezillos were Scotland's leading new wave band between 1976 and 1978. These pages recount how the band was formed, with myself as their original bass player.
The Art song pages will eventually offer a compilation of vocal duets suitable for soprano and tenor; sound samples of these seldom-performed gems; my translations of song texts into English or French; copies, including key-transpositions, of a few hard to obtain pieces which are out of copyright; and a discussion of copyright issues in musical scores.
Lastly, a link to our home in the Languedoc, La Fontenille.
Contact:
Scottish
Professional
