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MIT Media Lab Europe: An Obituary 153

Posted by michael from the flew-too-close-to-the-sun dept.
David R writes "Media Lab Europe, offspring of the famous MIT Media Lab, is closing its doors forever, as announced today. The corporate funding strategy hasn't worked out. Strangled by the stopped river of Irish government funding, the lab ceases its operations. Having worked there for quite some time, I can give you the gory details and a lot of background on MLE's closure. It has sure been the fanciest, geekiest and most open work, research and play environment I've seen. The moral? I think it is questionable whether basic or visionary, interdisciplinary (and often badly evaluated) research will be funded by private corporations. But secondly, European companies need a culture of sponsorship, which has existed in America for a long time."
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MIT Media Lab Europe: An Obituary More

MIT Media Lab Europe: An Obituary

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  • Ruined my day (Score:4, Funny)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @02:23PM (#11364640)
    "Strangled by the stopped river of Irish government funding"

    Thanks for putting the image of that damn Riverdance in my brain.

  • I think I know why it closed (Score:5, Funny)

    by krog ( 25663 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @02:24PM (#11364660) Homepage
    Perhaps being right next to the Guinness brewery explains why not much work was done there.

  • Media Lab, RIP already (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 14, 2005 @02:25PM (#11364690)
    I must prefix my bashing with an apology. I have friends at Media Lab Europe and they are nice, smart, and fun people. I hope you all find new jobs.

    The media lab concept is to make a pretty toy with an amusing concept, and call it brilliant (demo or die!). The painful part is that despite looking really cool, many of these toys and instruments are nothing more than that, toys. All of the crap musical instruments, and artistic looking mobiles, as far as I'm concerned are worthless other then kitch value. Most of the concepts are not new and other than eye candy aspects have been done more completely. The end result has been that they have failed to push boundaries, failed to advance the state of the art, and seemingly failed to have any lasting value, other than to inflate the already gigantic ego of the institution.

    I hear your cries already. " But what about this one example yada yada yada..." The fact of the matter is the world doesn't need a bunch of hyped egos running around spending unimaginable sums of money. The research community can do better than the media lab. We are doing better. With less money, less ego, and in the name of science, not profit. I spose we don't all have machined plastic demos with videos of children happily playing across internet 2 in 4 countries.

    Oh well, RIP

    • Re:Media Lab, RIP already (Score:4, Funny)

      by krog ( 25663 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @02:43PM (#11365013) Homepage
      Judging by your post, I have no choice but to assume that you think a laser printer which can toast designs into bread using PostScript is a 'toy'.

      I've got a $45,000 grilled cheese bearing the face of the Blessed Virgin that says you're wrong.
    • That's really too bad. I think that we will all miss the source of insightful, future-looking, new idea-creation factory, much to our long term deficit.

      I remember when I first heard about the MIT Media Lab, it must have been about '90 or '91. I read a research paper that predicted exactly what is going on with cable / satellite, and PVRs right now. Including the network downloading of video content for 'Video On Demand', the DRM issues and a bunch more (I can't remember exactly right now). This was at

      • Re:Media Lab, RIP already (Score:4, Interesting)

        by khallow ( 566160 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @03:06PM (#11365393)
        Consider the global economy competition. US workers are not doing the manufacturing, nor other minimal value added activities. Some supporters of off shoring have said that the US needs to innovate, as this is their place in the global marketplace. So what do we do? Shut down one of the places where were were innovating?

        Innovation's not just discoveries and inventions, but profiting from those discoveries and inventions. MLE failed to do that. Also, reading through some of the stories, I sense that MLE had really poor control of costs. They may also had a less than competent leadership, I don't know the merits of including two members of the band, U2 on the board of directories (Bono at least appears to be a solid businessman and media expert), but having a founder of Wired magazine as Chairman should be a big warning flag.

        • Yea, well some late breaking news. It appears that not only is the corporate R&D funding freezing or declining, the innovation outsourcing is already taking place. Read here for more information: http://www.cio.com/archive/011505/outsourcing.html
          • Hmmm, here's a good quote in one of the comments by "Al Maurer".

            A very thought-provoking article. To take the author's example a little farther, if the whole laptop is outsourced and is never touched by the "OEM," then what do they add to the product besides cost? Why would I buy their brand name instead of the identical "generic?" For their product support? Oops...they outsourced that, too!

      • Okay, that's great, some paper out of the Media lab sucessfully extrapolated the obvious.

        It's sort of like if I had written a paper in '90 or '91 predicting that processors would be running at over 1 GHz in 2000.

        But imagine if that paper from the media lab had never been written, what sort of world would be living in right now? That's right, the same exact world. And processors are running at over 1 GHz even though I didn't write my famous paper in '90 or '91.

        There's a big difference between spending y
        • Well I don't know. Back then it seemed all rather revolutionary and futuristic rather than obvious. I can still remember thinking that the bandwidth constraints would make it difficult to deliver high quality digital video to multiple homes in the same neighborhood at the same time. The same paper predicted MPG encoding, peer to peer file swapping and related legal issues, video on demand, and lots of other related things.
          • Okay, I'll give them peer to peer file swapping. That's pretty insightful.

            By 1990/1991, MPG encoding had already been developed, along with all the technology behind HDTV. These researchers where already connected to ethernet in the lab (with a fiber optic backbone going around MIT). So the paper you're refering to was simply extrapolating the technologies that were already achievable in the lab for home use.

            Why did it take a decade? Moore's law had to catch up. A workstation (and hard drive) to do D
      • "I think that we will all miss the source of insightful, future-looking, new idea-creation factory, much to our long term deficit."

        Don't fool yourself. These guys were not very insightful and the certainly weren't future orientated. Hell they weren't even bright enough to see their own demise staring them in the face.

        They were trying to "rethink" stuff. Most invention and research comes out of hard work and genius. Both of these aspects seemed to be lacking in both MLE and its management.

        "I read a resear
    • I completely agree. I think they might have had some problems with "creativity" and "innovation" if the one of the best examples of their work he could come up with in that writeup is the spinning clock. You can buy gadgets similar to these in every cheap souvenir store so I don't see how someone would have the guts to display this as an example of creative achievement pushing the envelope. Or phones that require a pool to be operated...
    • One might point out the irony, in a purportedly-capitalist country, of the phrase "strangled by the stopped river of Irish government funding". As if public funding is this endless stream of bounty that is free for the wallowing.

      Better to say "died because it really didn't produce anything of value, so people (the gov't) stopped wanting to pay for it."

      Phrased that way, somewhere Darwin is smiling.
      • No purported about it, Ireland is about as capitalist as it gets in Western Europe... not for us the generous safety net of social provision. MLE was told upfront how much it would be given in state funding, and for how long. It was clear from thge beginning that this funding was limited in time and amount.

        Bye bye to MLE, a waste of taxpayer euros.
    • I went to MIT in the mid 90's, and the real Media Lab was considered little more than a dog and pony show for corporate sponsorship. It was actually sort of an embarrassment to those doing real engineering and science at MIT, but it was tolerated because it brought in its own funding.

      I knew people who worked at the Media lab, and I knew about a lot of research projects there. Absolutely none of them were advancing the fields of science or engineering (although I gotta imagine there are a couple of counte
    • Hear, hear! I came to a similar conclusion when I was at SIGGRAPH years ago. I saw the US branch of the MIT Medialab had a booth (I never knew there was European branch until reading this story). The booth was stuck in the basement with all the dregs of the show, doing demos that looked like they were out of the 70s or even earlier. They had this one demo involving "Choco" the parrot, and you had to interact with it somehow. Felt like a 1960s graphics and interactivity demo, seriously. It was disgusting. T

  • Sponsorship (Score:3, Informative)

    by njfuzzy ( 734116 ) <[moc.x-nai] [ta] [nai]> on Friday January 14, 2005 @02:26PM (#11364698) Homepage
    I went to school in the UK for four years, and I didn't see any signs that Europe has less sponsorship by business. Quite a lot of Universities had labs tied to businesses, research students were paid by businesses, and so forth.

    • So are most UK lecturers. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jd ( 1658 )
      They earn vastly more money from industry than they do from their official jobs - just as well, given how much they're paid. The reason Industry does this is that it's still cheaper than hiring the person full-time, especially as they don't know how many times they need that person's skills, there's extra credibility if their products are seen to be associated with a famous University, and there's free advertising through the scientific press.

      Universities wouldn't survive without Industry, but the control

      • It seems to me that the situation you are describing would be a perfect environment where academics could take their discoveries and apply them in business. As you say: "if someone wants such-and-such a product, or needs such-and-such information, then the lecturer will adapt what they are doing to fit". This means that the academics in their ivory towers get plenty of exposure to the real world - I can't believe that in a university, there is no contact between the academics who get funding from business a
  • If a sponsor is offering a funding with no string attached, we welcome it. Otherwise, we'd better not accepting them.

    If a corporate sponsor looks to identify a future employee through their sponsoring researches, I'd think that is fair. But if a corporate looks to identify ideal research outcome through its sponsorship, it's not a good thing for science and engineering.
    • But if a corporate looks to identify ideal research outcome through its sponsorship, it's not a good thing for science and engineering.
      It is a good thing for science and engineering. Corporations have insight into the direction of industry, and sometimes find gaps in what is being done in the university and where things are heading. 100% corporate driven research is not useful because it is too focused on specific issues, while 100% non-corporate research may too spread out to be valuable to help with t
      • I think I made my statement a bit unclear. What I meant to say was that a corporate sponsorship was nice so as long as there was no bias forcibly applied to the research itself, i.e., a major producer of daily products (e.g., milk) sponsors a research at a university to FIND the positive correlation between good health and consumption of daily products. Or something like that.

        There are corporations that may sponsor a research only to find an ideal result for their benefit and publicize loudly as "being fou
  • Universities should not be operating product development labs for corporations.
  • Strangled by the stopped river of Irish government funding [...]

    Maybe "drowned" by? But wait, the funding has stopped. Ooh, "dehydrated to death by"!

  • Private Funding of Research Requires a Monopoly (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fijimf ( 676893 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @02:30PM (#11364771)
    Privately owned companies have a responsibility to deliver to their shareholders. The true test of whether a company is a monopoly or not is whether there is a willingness to fund basic research science without a myopic focus on the bottom line. Monopolies can afford this.

    The evidence supporting is TJ Watson, Bell Labs, and Xerox Parc. Sadly, as the monopoly is eliminated so is the research.

    And while their output hasn't been earth shattering yet, this is further evidence of Microsoft's monopoly.

    • Re:Private Funding of Research Requires a Monopoly (Score:4, Insightful)

      by krbvroc1 ( 725200 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @02:38PM (#11364936)
      Privately owned companies have a responsibility to deliver to their shareholders. The true test of whether a company is a monopoly or not is whether there is a willingness to fund basic research science without a myopic focus on the bottom line. Monopolies can afford this.

      I think you are generalizing. I think what a monopoly does with its power is basically up to its leadership. I know of several monopoly industries who rested on their laurels and didn't innovate at all. Or where their public contribution was simply a very small token meant for public relations.
    • That's why we need public funding of public goods (like research). Creating monopolies in the hopes that they will fund research is not good public policy because the social and economic costs of the monopoly are far higher than if the public just paid for the research themselves.
  • Analyzing this, I believe that Negroponte's vision of conducting research cannot work out in times of short-term revenue expectations.

    Translate this into: Systems based on short-term revenue expectations will ultimately fall back into a state of mediocrity. Germany (where I live) gives good examples.

    CC.
  • Was the "Irish Need Not Apply" sign they hung on the front door.
  • ...and a lot of background on MLE's closure.

    (slashdot-post (make-joke-based-upon (closures 'lisp) ) )

  • If you want me to read your blog, make it readable (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GGardner ( 97375 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @02:37PM (#11364924)
    So, the fine article sounds interesting, but when I click on the link, the article has an annoying alpha-blended background peeking through onto the text. Sure, that's cool in a geeky way, but annoying enough so that I can't even finish reading the text. I wonder if this is a metaphor for the Media Lab in general -- stuff that's geeky for the sake of being cool, but kind of a flop when it hits the real world.

  • Obviously... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ZiZ ( 564727 ) * on Friday January 14, 2005 @02:41PM (#11364979) Homepage
    What they need to do is fund it by first producing a massively popular search engine [google.com], then encourage its engineers to spend one day a week working on personal projects on company time.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @02:48PM (#11365076)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I gather that you are refering to how the US government misappropriates the earnings of its citizens to pay for research that many don't care about, fewer would support given the option they are rightfully due, and many find morally objectionable. No, I don't think it's a good idea to go down that road in Europe, too. Let the market determine the nature of research funding, and let individuals decide how to allocate their scarce resources themselves.

    • NO (Score:3, Insightful)

      by geekoid ( 135745 )
      he was referring to sponsership from companies.

      Get off your high horse and pay attention.

      Also, much of the research is needed, and leads to scientific break throughs. I, for one, support government research.

      eith your plan, nothing would ever get done.
      • The original post refers to the fact that private companies do not generally fund research into so-called "pure science", i.e. science with no apparent economic/technological benefit to the company. This is true in the US, where all such research tends to be government funded. Since he refers to the "culture of sponsorship that has been present in America", and research of no economic interrest is funded by the government, it is quite reasonable to suppose that he is refering, not to privately funded rese

  • Expensive (Score:3, Informative)

    by drwho ( 4190 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @03:04PM (#11365365) Homepage Journal
    The problem is that it's just too expensive. MIT ex-president Vest had a very dot-com attitude towards spending, having investing a lot of the Universities money in very questionable companies with a lot of prestige, and many projects of quaint but questionable utility. Anyone who knows the story of the Stata building (a.k.a. the Gates building), that expensive, ugly, leaking monstrosity, can tell you MIT has made mistakes.

    My feeling is the MLE was one of them. Dublin has become a VERY expensive place to live and do business. This is especially true if your capital pool is is dollars. Cambridge (Massachusetts, home of MIT) is expensive too, but not as expensive as Dublin.

    Back in the 1960s, the Media Lab was a place of innovation because of the people involved, not the amount of money thrown at it. Since then, there have been a number of prima donnas who want the newest, best stuff. The formerly very drrop pockets of MIT made them used to getting what they demanded. But the pockets are light now. It's no surprise that the most remote wings of the organization will be the first to get clipped.

    If I were running an organization such as the Media Lab, what I would do is NOT to try to shift focus on more commercially viable projects. There's enough commercial labs out there, doing a good job on this. What I would do is find a way run it on a shoestring budget. For instance, just up the street from that horrible Stata building are the old, empty and decaying Polaroid buildings. Those could have been bought and made useable for a fraction of the money it took to build Stata (yes, I know, State is an endowed building. Still, they could have done it). Instead of picking Dublin for RLE, pick a cheaper part of Europe that is less likely to skyrocket in costs because of its small size. But a country that is stable and has a good infrastructure. Someplace like the eastern part of Germany where you can buy land really cheap, and the government has a very long-term view towards helping the economy.

    And trim down those salaries! There's no need to be demanding $130k/year when you can buy a nice house for $80k.

    To summarize: cheaper area, less glitz, lower salaries, but still a playground for the mind.

    • Re:Expensive (Score:3, Informative)

      by Bozdune ( 68800 )
      As an MIT alum, I can assure you that there was no "Media Lab" in 1979, so there almost assuredly was no "Media Lab" in the 60's.

      Your cost point is valid, except that the buildings replaced by the Stata Center were in pretty rough shape themselves. The old Building 20, which I remember well, was a series of three-story wooden structures built as "temporary lab space" in the war years (WW II). It had to be replaced with SOMETHING. You can love Stata or hate it, but if you're going to have an Architecture

    • Re:Expensive (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There are a number of mistakes in this post.

      1. The Media Lab was founded in 1980 (not the 60s).
      2. The average price of a house in Dublin, to the best of my knowledge, is 250,000 euros. This is equivalent to $300,000. For $300,000 in Cambridge, you might be able to get a 1 or 2 bedroom condo. Most houses here cost in excess of $600,000.
      3. [Note really a mistake, but...] The Stata Center does not house the Media Lab. The Wiesner building and Cambridge Center house the Media Lab. The Stata Center is CSAIL (Co
    • Back in the 1960s, the Media Lab was a place of innovation because of the people involved, not the amount of money thrown at it.

      Back in the 1960's, MIT had the Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Laboratory for Computer Science. Those are the labs that brought you a lot of breakthroughs in the 1960s (and onwards), not the media lab.

      The Media Lab was founded in 1985. It's a completely separate institution.

      Nevertheless, all MIT labs at one point or another received lots of funding. Some of them used th
      • Media Lab founding: you're right, it wasn't founded in the 1960s. I started one sentence and finished another. I meant to say how a lot of hacking (as in, learning and creating for the sheer fun of it) was deeply rooted at MIT in the 1960s.

        Regarding Stata Centre: Oops, my bad. I thought they had been shoehorned in their along with CSAIL. I wonder how I thought that.

        Regarding State Centre being beautiful: well, I think it's not quite as bad as Boston City Hall or the Science Center at Harvard, and it's c
    • Dublin is indeed one of the most expensive places in Europe. And you pay much more for a decent house near Dublin City Centre than those EUR 250.000 posted by somebody in reply to your post. To say it all, even if you just bought a sandwhich a few meters away from where MLE was, you got ripped off by the take-away.

      However, Ireland happened to be willing to sponsor MLE back then. And that's a good reason to go there, and not to a cheaper country such as Spain or Portugual.

  • Good, now close the OTHER lab... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @03:26PM (#11365649) Journal
    ...and put the money to far more useful IT teaching and research.

    The media lab concept was born of the 90's "ooh aah!" fascination with the Internet. It was a way to try and continue the glory of MIT's Project Athena days in the 80's (which DID produce brilliant, useful work that we all benefit from to this day), but it was poorly concieved, yielded little real benefit, and wasted a lot of money. It should have been strangled in it's crib, but dot com dollars kept it afloat while MIT polished it's reputation as a hip place to go to school. In stark contrast to the serious work at MIT and Berkeley in the 80's, the Media Lab took on more of a chic aura, kind of a Studio 54 for geeks.

    Thankfully, like disco itself, these kinds of places are dying out. It's just a shame that individuals, families, and corporations that shelled out millions of dollars have watched it all dissapear into a black hole, into what was essentially a university sponsored dot com scheme.
    • The Media Lab was an amalgamation of the MIT Architecture studios and the Computer Science Lab. Both places had used the "playpen" environments since the 1960s. The architecture labs inter-penetrated the top floor of Building 7 Borg infiltrating the Enterprise. People built interconnected, multi-level cubby holes and common areas for their art studios and classrooms.

      Many dot.coms adopted this style of goofy shared spaces. You still see this at Google, Pixar, etc.

      This atmosphere has recently extend
    • The media lab concept was born of the 90's "ooh aah!" fascination with the Internet.

      How can it have been born out of the 90's "ooh aah!" fascination with the Internet with the Internet if the concept was developed in 1980 and it was founded in 1985? In the early 1980's, there was anything but exhuberance about high tech, in particular in Massachusetts.

      but dot com dollars kept it afloat while MIT polished it's reputation as a hip place to go to school

      MIT has had no need to "polish its reputation" for
      • "...if the concept was developed in 1980 and it was founded in 1985?"

        Touche; I got a date wrong, but the Lab's heyday was undoubtedly the Go-Go Internet 90's. That's when the Lab as we know it got it's reputation.

        "MIT has had no need to "polish its reputation" for anything..."

        Of course they do. They, like all universities, are in constant competition for students and dollars. If you're not in the front of the curve, you'll be left behind. They're CONSTANTLY polishing their reputation, as are Cal Tech, D
        • "MIT doesn't need publicity stunts either". That's news to other MIT professors, who have long criticized the Media Lab as a trendy research lightweight that thrives on farfetched projects

          The Media Lab isn't MIT. The Media Lab needs publicity stunts because they need to attract corporate funding. MIT doesn't.

          "MIT has had no need to "polish its reputation" for anything..." Of course they do. They, like all universities, are in constant competition for students and dollars. If you're not in the front o

  • This [greenspun.com] says most of what you need to know about the Media Lab, I suspect.

    Last week I was off the coast of Greece on my yacht ``Nippo-bux'' (I put the ``raft'' in ``graft,'' as I always say) with my close personal friend Al (``Al'') Gore. He asked me ``Nick--er, Hunter, how do you do it? You maintain a research staff of, in the words of Albert Meyer [an underfunded Course VI professor], `Science Fiction Charlatans,' yet you never fail to rake in monster sponsor bucks? I could fund Hillary's socialized med

  • Huh (Score:4, Funny)

    by Skim123 ( 3322 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @03:29PM (#11365689) Homepage
    You mean no companies want to pay for this valuable research [medialabeurope.org]? I am shocked. Shocked!
    • Sadly, you could substitute almost any of their projects [medialabeurope.org] and make the same joke.
    • At least it got a an Honorary Mention in the "Interactive Art" category of the Prix Ars Electronica 2004. That's a big thing to get in the world of art&technology.

      I wouldn't call it 'research' though. Neither do the inventors.
  • I've been following http://opengov.media.mit.edu/ [mit.edu] for a year or more, and it was a brilliant initiative, and pretty smart way to go about things. Sadly updates weren't coming much lately, then the website slowed/disappeared, now I see " opengov is not currently maintained." .. Bummer, I wish this project would be done elsewhere.
  • [DavidR]
    Besides MLE, MIT Media Lab has created another research lab: Media Lab Asia. This attempt failed as well - the river of funding Indian government went dry. MLA has a different model now, without MIT.
    [/DavidR]

    Asia lab was scrapped not because of funding issue. It was due to failure to produce any significant results. Govt had pumped close to $20m in the project. Consider the fact that Media Lab asked a sum of $5m just to use the name "Media Lab". That was exhorbitant by for a country like India
    • Let's say there is stuff I won't talk about in public. But whenever you say something failed because of funding issues, that always means that somebody didn't want to fund it for some reason. And that reason may as well have been the scientific output. If Media Lab received $5m from MLA / the Indian government, then that wasn't just for the name, but also for a transfer of know-how. Whether this transfer actually took place in the end, is another question.
  • Once again, the Irish Goverment proves that they don't have a clue!!

    Was listening to RTE new on the way home this evening, and it
    seems that the Irish Goverment wanted it to be self-financing and expected it to work on more "commerical" research to fund its self!
    They don't seem to understand the whole consept of long term R+D.
    Sad day for Ireland :-(
  • No obit of the MLE is complete without reference to this [tripod.com]. Sadly, I can find no online reference to an older, even more hilarious piece, which I remember being titled "Fear and Loathing in the Big Idea Lab" or something similar.

    On the other hand, I remember fondly being there (the regular non-MLE MeejaLab) when the early ideas for what became both social filtering and "dance dance revolution" (among a number of other things) were created.

    gnet

  • No, it's the other way round: European countries have to go back to statal founding, because we always want to make it the American Way(tm), forgetting that what works in the USA doesn't always work in the Old Continent.

    If you say that European countries need a culture of private sponsorship, it means that you haven't lived in Europe long enough. Private founding works for some time, but it will always concentrate where the flow cash come.
    America follows this profit-tied system, and it's okay, since we (Eu
  • Much as I was underwhelmed by the Meeja Lab's output (see the parody of it from a friend of mine at http://meejalab.tripod.com/ [tripod.com]), I was surprised they pulled the plug on it so ignomiously. Our Prime Minster Bertie has already seen one beloved project, a huge unwanted sports stadium/complex cancelled, so I assumed he could pull strings to keep the lab going.

    A side impact of this will probably be a reevaluation of the so-called Digital Hub in the St Jame's Gate area of Dublin, where the Lab was located. Apa

  • I've been reading that hoary old Bubble classic, _Being Digital_, by past Wired lastword columnist and ex-director of the (Boston) MIT Media Lab Nicholas Negroponte. I remember reading his column in the 1990s, wondering how long his sham of "revolutionary", and practically always exactly wrong, punditry could last. But I always thought that maybe I just didn't get the longrange implications of the digital revolution, though I was building it every day. HA! His childishly naive assumptions have grown crusty
  • As another ex-MLE'er, I'm hardly surprised that the lab closed and I haven't shed any tears for it. I honestly hope that a more commercially-focused lab finds a home in Ireland but hopefully not in Dublin (yes, that's right folks, there's more to Ireland than Dublin!).

    I won't waffle any more here as I've rambled on enough about it on my blog. [ideasasylum.com]

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