Keith Wilson’s Blog

A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that, had the results of last Thursday’s election been counted under a purely proportional system, the Conservatives would have taken just 235 seats (71 less than under the existing First Past The Post system, and well short of a parliamentary majority)

Since the advent of Scottish devolution over ten years ago, I have been a keen observer of the debate over Scottish independence. Although I consider myself to be a Scot (I grew up in Fife and West Lothian), I have lived most of my adult life south of the border and so am in the interesting position

The much hyped Earth Summit in Copenhagen last December was a major disappointment in terms of delivering comprehensive and binding commitments for tackling climate change—a problem that is one of the most serious (and quite possibly the most serious) issues that humanity has ever had to face. In th

I wrote in a previous blog entry that my landlord had kindly agreed to let myself and Heike out of our six month contract due to problems with the flat that eventually led to us moving out. Whilst this is true, it seems that there was rather less kindness involved than we had imagined, since no soon

Instead of buying each another Christmas presents this year, Heike and I decided to spend a few days in Prague for the New Year. You can see some of the pictures we took here.We arrived in Prague by train from Leipzig in Germany, where we had been staying with Heike’s parents over Christmas. The ama

As you probably know, Heike and I moved away from St Andrews to Leamington Spa in Warwickshire some months ago, where I’m now studying for a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Warwick. (Strangely enough, the university itself isn’t in Warwick at all, but on the outskirts of Coventry, hence the

Did anyone else notice that Bill Clinton’s supposedly ringing endorsement of Barack Obama as the Democratic party’s candidate for President of the United States contained (at least) two carefully worded phrases that, with the benefit of hindsight, might later be construed as being somewhat less than

Apologies to anyone who has been trying to access my web site, blog or RSS feeds over the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately, the site was off-line for a few days due hosting problems connected with Apple’s transition from its old .Mac service (pronounced ‘dot-mac’) to MobileMe, a new suite of web

Just after the end of my exams (well, theoretically, anyway — the actual end wasn’t until the following Monday after we ended up sitting one of the exams for a second time to answer additional questions were left out the original exam due to a departmental mess-up), Heike and I decided to head up to

Having reached the advanced age of 37 just over a month ago (yes, really!), I thought that I might jump-start my somewhat forlorn blog page with a few semi-humorous reflections on the effects of ageing. Those of you lucky enough to have already reached a similar or even more advanced level of decrep