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Category: World News

Entries concerning news from around the world, not directly affecting myself.


We interrupt the tales from Jiuhua Shan to bring you this annoying piece of news from Flickr:

Users in China can’t see images

Since around 12:30pm (Beijing time) on June 7th, users in China have been unable to view images on flickr.com.

Our technical staff have looked into this and determined that it’s not a technical issue from our end. Evidence suggests that our image servers are being blocked for many users in China.

Fingers crossed it’s just a temporary measure. Coincidentally—or perhaps not—Blogger-hosted weblogs have also just become unavailable again.

In: WWW & World News

2007 / 06 / 08 – 21:50  | Comment [4]Top


Okay, I know they don’t really want people to access certain websites, but really: causing an undersea-earthquake to sever fibre-optic cables that deliver non-China-based sites is a bit much.

Internet access has been mind-crushingly slow—think pre-28.8bps-modem days, if you can imagine such speeds. It’d have been quicker for someone abroad to print out the pages and then hand-deliver them by bicycle. Thankfully, because so many big businesses were affected, repairs have been given the utmost urgency, and things are getting back to normal after initial worries that repairs “could take months”.

Interestingly, I’ve searched a few news sources from the UK and haven’t found much fuss being made about it from abroad. Did it make the front pages anywhere?

In: WWW & World News

2006 / 12 / 31 – 09:23  | Comment [3]Top


The sad news of Linda Smith’s passing has reached me. If you can catch it before Friday, have a listen to the News Quiz tribute for a reminder of her fantastic comedy insights.

In: World News

2006 / 03 / 06 – 22:38 Top


The first night at Crisis was fantastic: lovely volunteer people, and genuinely grateful [for the most part] guests. I was really nervous to begin with, and for extra fun my first task [with my fun new pal Sarah—you’re always with at least one other volunteer on any given duty] was to shut down the TV area nearest the sleeping tents, pulling the plug on the telly and asking people if they wouldn’t mind awfully moving to the other side of the arena. As you might expect, and they had my sympathies entirely, this was met with a few protests, but eventually everyone complied.

Other duties throughout the night: being a “runner” for the toilet/shower areas, fetching supplies from the store cupboard [nice and relaxed: they hardly needed anything, so I spent most of the time folding clean towels into bags with the lovely Kelly]; guarding the volunteers’ entrance/exit [a bit cold but kept warm with foot-stamping and chatting to a very sweet girl called Gemma who was very pleased to have finally turned eighteen and been allowed to volunteer]; and finally, a general clean-up of the sleeping area: folding blankets, stacking beds etc.

Everyone was really friendly and, as we were told at the debriefing, the night passed without any major incidents—a few of the guests’ tempers got a bit frayed but I’m hoping that was just first-night jitters. I didn’t feel as tired as I thought I might do—plenty of tea at every given opportunity certainly helped that. In fact, the only low point was when I bit into a small pie thinking it was going to be a mince pie, only to discover it was apple. Very disappointing!

If I was ever in any doubt that the efforts of Crisis are futile, those were surely blown away by the guest who strolled up to me and two other volunteers, took our hands in turn and thanked us all for giving up our Christmases for him. Warm fuzzy feelings aplenty!

[Aside: plural of Christmas, anyone? Christmases? Christmasses? Christmi?]

I’ve had a bit of a sleep today, and am feeling okay for another night, but I’ve a feeling this one may be a bit longer than the first. And there’s the added of fun of no public transport tomorrow morning!

Merry Christmas everybody.

In: Local News / Crisis Open Christmas 2005 & Indexed & World News

2005 / 12 / 24 – 17:26  | Comment [5] | Trackback [1]Top


It’s been quite a week for Really Quite Interesting Discoveries About Animals. In case you’ve missed them:

  • Bees cook invading wasps to death by surrounding them in a heat-generating ball.

    To see what margin of safety the bees have, Tan and his research colleagues presented tethered wasps to six colonies each of native Asian bees and European bees. At each nest, worker bees engulfed the wasp immediately. Within 5 minutes, the center of a typical bee ball had reached 45°C.

    [via Gordon]

  • Images of a live adult giant squid have been recorded for the first time at its natural hunting depth.

  • Gorillas use sticks to test the depth of the water in a pool before crossing it.

    In the first case, we had a female crossing a pool; and this female has crossed this pool by using a detached stick and testing the water depth, and trying to use it as a walking stick.

    The second case saw another female gorilla pick up the trunk of a dead shrub and use it to lean on while dredging for food in a swamp. She then placed the trunk down on the swampy ground and used it as a bridge.

Kind of puts that whole us-going-to-the-moon thing into perspective, eh fellow humans?

In: World News

2005 / 10 / 01 – 10:55  | Comment [4]Top


An out-of-the-ordinary message was forwarded to the members of the maths department today; rather than being the usual notice about some seminar or other, this was from a London-based PR company, with a proposal.

Apparently, this Christmas Amazon want to run a marketing campaign based around a “formula for how to wrap the perfect Christmas present”. Since I would think it’d be much more newsworthy them having knowledge of what the perfect Christmas present is—the one gift that no-one has but everybody wants—I’m sure they don’t mean what they’ve said, but in fact want a formula for the best way of wrapping a Christmas present [most efficient use of paper, or something]. So they want to pay a mathematician, or mathematicians, to come up with a plausible equation—that is, something that actually works.

In the message the company admit that they’re not after serious research, but just want to use it as a marketing device, and already a couple of members of the department have voiced their opinions on what a waste of time this type of thing generally is. Every time the media report on things like the equation for happiness or solving the formula to find the most stressful Christmas shopping day [last year’s Amazon-commissioned project], there’s a collective shrug of indifference from the vast majority of people, as yet another attempt to demonstrate how amazing maths can be at solving real-world problems gets lost because the reports always have to put the equation front and centre—the obscure; complex-looking; impenetrable equation—rather than make a decent attempt to explain the concept without resorting to symbols.

Maths seems to be the exception that proves the rule of the wider problem of how the media generally fails to report scientific stories in any kind of sensible way; they focus on what they think will grab the reader’s attention, but refuse to go any deeper.

Why? Because papers think you won’t understand the “science bit”, all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them - that is, the people who know a bit about science. Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. Imagine the fuss if I tried to stick the word “biophoton” on a science page without explaining what it meant. I can tell you, it would never get past the subs or the section editor. But use it on a complementary medicine page, incorrectly, and it sails through.

But maths stories are dumbed-down by making things appear more complicated than they truly are, by starting with the equation and working backwards to explain what each part means, turning off the reader from the very beginning. If anyone does end up taking on the challenge, this will be another one of these cases: everyone will look at the equation, writ large in the headline if Amazon’s plan has gone ahead, and think, “How the hell does that tell me how to wrap a pot plant?”

[To which the answer is, obviously, p - α/γ ≤ W(p) ≤ γp2 - α.]

In: World News

2005 / 09 / 21 – 19:20  | Comment [4]Top


It’s the city in which I was born, I grew up, and where I still regularly visit a large number of my friends and family, but I never knew how proud I was of being a Londoner until I saw the way people dealt with Thursday’s events.

I can’t possibly add to the thousands of reactions that have already been written, and I refuse to waste time speculating on the motives of whoever was responsible, and whether we brought this on ourselves or not.

By coincidence I watched an early 1990s Eddie Izzard video that evening, in which he talked about how Londoners were dealing with bomb threats—what seemed at the time like an almost everyday occurrance.

“What, this station’s closed? Right, let’s see, so I can go up the Piccadilly Line and cut across on the Metropolitan, no problem.”

“Oh, this whole street is closed off is it? Okay … now there’s another Boots the Chemist on Tottenham Court Rd…”

I think it’s fantastic that everything goes to buggery as soon as we get a reasonably heavy snowful, but set off four bombs in an attempt to cripple our transport system and induce panic, and we just get on with it. We might be rubbish, but we’re also stubborn. As noted by Tom Coates, the response of The London News Review says it best.

We’re better than you. Everyone is better than you. Our city works. We rather like it. And we’re going to go about our lives. We’re going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we’re going to work. And we’re going down the pub.

In: World News

2005 / 07 / 09 – 09:59  | Comment [1]Top


At the risk of making a fool of myself in front of the slowly-growing band of physicists that occasionally read this weblog [I think we’re up to four now], I’m going to pick a hole in this new theory about time travel. Or rather, in the way that the BBC has reported it.

The main headache [with usual notion of time travel] stems from the idea that if you went back in time you could, theoretically, do something to change the present; and that possibility messes up the whole theory of time travel.

Clearly, the present never is changed by mischievous time-travellers: people don’t suddenly fade into the ether because a rerun of events has prevented their births—that much is obvious.

I’m disputing this “obvious” claim. What’s happened to the idea of parallel universes? Has that been empirically disproved? I thought the theory was, if you do somehow go back in time, say precisely 10 years, and change an event that had occurred in your past, this instantaneously creates an alternative universe in which you now live. So if you go forward in time 10 years from this point, you don’t land back where you left, but instead are 10 years hence in this new universe. [Have these people never seen Back to the Future Part III?] It seems to me that, if parallel universes exist, they eliminate the possibility of people disappearing “into the ether”, because in one universe someone can live to a ripe old age, whereas in another the “same” person might die younger.

[This is all nonsense of course. I’m pretty sure that I believe in neither time travel nor parallel universes. If I get drunk enough I might write about my theory about how waiting for a bus disproves that time travel will never be discovered by humans…]

In: World News

2005 / 06 / 18 – 10:46  | Comment [2]Top


From Bob Geldof’s outbursts, he is seemingly blind to the notion that some people might want to attend one of the Live8 concerts primarily because they will feature some fantastic bands, and not because they want to show their support for the cause. For all the good intentions behind it, and the emphasis on raising awareness rather than donations, it really is just a show. If he’s going to kick up a stink because those people are willing to pay over the odds for tickets, then he needs to quiz each and every person who comes through the gates on their reasons for being there. If he thinks that everyone is there solely to show a united front to the governments of the world, I think he’s mistaken.

A friend of mine was lucky enough to win two tickets. She’s excited about going, and not because she’s going to be taught all about how she can “make a difference”. The media attention surrounding the concerts and the G8 summit itself has been more than enough to raise awareness; a concert isn’t going to make much more of an impact in that respect. And whilst I’m sure she’d love to see all of the bands playing, she might also appreciate a bit of a personal windfall—a lot of us would, whether we’d admit to it or not. So if I offered my friend £1,000 for her ticket, would any of us judge her for accepting? If you had a ticket, is there no price you’d accept in place of attending the concert yourself? What’s the difference between that scenario and offering up tickets for auction on eBay? It was incredibly naive not to predict that possibility.

If somebody wanted to win tickets solely for the purpose of selling them on, and did so, would Sir Bob not prefer to have an attendee who was willing to pay [at an unarguably extortionate price] to come along and see the show, as they perhaps might be a little more receptive to the issues about which he is attempting to educate the world?

eBay were right with their initial stance to not block the auctioning of these tickets, and it is a failing of the concert organisers that they did not make any attempts to do this futile [e.g. print the name of the winner on the ticket?]. That eBay caved in and decided to block the auctions after all was disappointing. I’m also supportive of their decision to ban any vigilante user who, at Geldof’s urging, attempted to sabotage the auctions with excessive bids, and agree with Damon Albarn that it would have been a good idea to charge the bands themselves to take part. If Geldof is going to lash out at anyone, perhaps it should be his fellow organisers for not thinking things through as much as they could have done, and for not listening more closely to their critics.

In: World News

2005 / 06 / 16 – 15:58  | Comment [4]Top


The news of the death of Bob Hunter, co-founder of Greenpeace, has gotten me thinking back to my days as a Greenpeace canvasser in Toronto, in the summer of 1996. If you’ve know me for more than ten minutes then chances are I’ve already told you all about this, so you can go and make a cup of tea or something whilst I tell the others.

The job of the canvasser is, as you might expect, to go door-to-door trying to rally up support for the organisation they represent. Now I know that, at least in the UK, in terms of how welcome a visitor to ones door they are, door-to-door solicitors for pressure groups are generally on a par with bailiffs and pitchfork-wielding lynch mobs, but in Canada I found it to be a different story. On the whole, people were receptive and those that didn’t want to support Greenpeace for whatever reason at least gave me either a friendly, “Not interested,” before I said much, or listened to what I had to say before nicely saying no. My task was not simply to ask for monetary donations to swell Greenpeace’s coffers, but to get people to become card-carrying members—a pressure group relies on the size of its membership to put the weight of public opinion behind its causes.

The canvassing staff are divided up into groups of five or six and given a part of town to work on; each team has a field manager who assigns sub-sections of the area to each canvasser. After a couple of days of shadowing more established canvassers, learning about the issues in general and the specifics of Greenpeace’s work, I was trusted with my own turf each afternoon in which to sign up as many members as I could.

I was rubbish.

In: Local News & Work Work & World News

2005 / 05 / 03 – 20:04 Top


Sad news of the death of Dave Allen. I remember enjoying his comedy when I was growing up, although I’m sure I didn’t appreciate it as fully as I did upon hearing it again as an adult. There’s one sketch I remember in particular, a long story [they were all long stories!] about trying to teach a child how to tell the time.

The first hand, the shortest one, that’s the hour hand. No, not “our hand”, the hour hand. Then the second hand is the minute hand, and the third hand is the second hand. No, it’s not a minute hand as well. The second hand is the minute hand. But the third is the second.

And so on, only funnier. It’s perhaps a testament as to how protective he was over his material that I can’t find a transciption of the sketch anywhere.

It also struck me how rare it is [or it seems to be, at any rate] these days to hear news of people simply dying in their sleep. No “long battle against” nor “sudden illness”. It was just his time. However the hell you tell it.

In: World News

2005 / 03 / 11 – 23:23  | Comment [3]Top


Red Nose Day 2005

Comic Relief, registered charity 326568

Today is RND‘05. Following on from the raging success of two years ago, where this site raised a stonking £8.40, I shall be again donating-per-comment, but this year I’m pledging to donate a whopping 50p per comment. So come on people, get yakking in the space below.

And of course, you can always donate yourself if you feel so inclined—although I’m fairly sure they’d prefer you to donate money instead of donating yourself. [See what I did there?]

In: World News

2005 / 03 / 11 – 08:25  | Comment [105] | Trackback [1]Top


The Register points out that quite a large number of MPs could be technically breaking electoral rules once the General Election is on, due to the use of “mp” in the URL of their web presence—during the election process their membership of Parliament is up for grabs, so they are not allowed to advertise themselves as MPs until [if ever] they win back their seat.

The Register seems to suggest that taking the site down for the duration of the election is the best course of action, but there seems to me to be another obvious solution: just alter a few lines of the site’s source code and claim that the “MP” stands for something else.

  • Mural Painter

  • Minty Phallus

  • Mindless Prattle

  • Moot Point

  • Master of Pogo-sticks

They’d probably need to be apt though, so although “Michael Howard, Midnight Prowler” might conjure up the famous description of him having “something of the night” about him, “Ann Widdecombe, Massage Parlour” should be avoided at all costs, in every sense.

In: World News

2005 / 02 / 13 – 13:01  | Comment [1]Top


  • How a Dyson vacuum cleaner works

  • The square root of 2,049

  • The size of the strawberries I got from Tesco the other day [disturbingly large]

  • The length of time between my buying a DVD burner and burning my first DVD [five months: early September–yesterday]

  • The amount of marking I’ve got to do [sixty-three Excel spreadsheets]

  • My costume for a “Through the Ages” fancy dress party in two weeks

  • The average weight of a rabbit

  • Whiskey

  • The ratio of how often I cut my fingernails to how often I cut my toenails [current estimate is 5:1]

  • Mädchen Amick

  • Breaking in my new boots [several days of nerve-tingling pain shooting up through my shins, but they’re loosening up nicely now]

  • Trees

  • The origin of the word “rutting

  • Several others things

  • And many more things besides those other things

  • And everything else on the planet

In: World News

2005 / 02 / 11 – 11:35  | Comment [10]Top


Three oranges, halves, ready for juicing

Scientists have discovered a way of turning orange peel into plastic, using cardon dioxide and a catalyst—they’re optimistically suggesting that this could be a route to reducing CO2 emissions into the atmosphere as well as cutting down on the usage of oil to make plastics. Hopefully they’ll still let me juice the oranges first though.

In: World News

2005 / 01 / 20 – 21:34 Top


Risking a Boris Johnson-style backlash, I’m not going to observe today’s three minute silence. Obviously it’s up to the individual whether they want to partake in a collective silence as a mark of respect, but to stand stock still and say nothing a little over a week after the disaster, when countless survivors are struggling to come to terms with what has happened to their homes, to their families and friends, seems rather pointless to me.

Perhaps I’m grossly misjudging human nature, but I really don’t think the people affected would give a damn whether we fell silent for three minutes as a mark of respect or not, and would much rather we did something a little more pro-active if we wanted to do anything at all.

Aside from all that, my new project is to attempt to figure out, via interpolation, the secret formula they use to determine the lengths of the silences recently observed in the UK. My data points thus far are:

  • Three minutes ten days after the tsunami which has claimed over 150,000 people [and counting]

  • Two minutes every Remembrance Day in honour of the millions of people killed serving their countries in the two great wars of the twentieth century

  • Two minutes allocated one day after the event of Ken Bigley’s murder

  • Three minutes three days after the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 which had a deathtoll of more than 5,000 people

  • Zero minutes silence in respect of the 800 people killed in Bangladesh’s floods last summer

Not sure I’ll have much luck fitting a curve through that lot.

In: World News

2005 / 01 / 05 – 10:15  | Comment [4]Top


If you happen to live in the Lincolnshire area and have a spare hour or so, you could find out where Christopher Pierson lives, go round to his house and call him a tosser.

The court was told Pierson sent up to 35 emails to relatives who had posted their details on the Sky News website.

Olive Assien, prosecuting, said the emails purported to be from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Thailand.

They stated “that the UK Government regretted to inform the victim that the missing person they were inquiring about was confirmed dead”.

I really don’t understand how some people’s minds work.

In: World News

2005 / 01 / 03 – 13:48 Top


  • Wikipedia’s entry is incredibly comprehensive and coherent. [Via Neil’s Smaller World.]

  • Stv and Jo had a very minor interaction with the subsequent tidal wave tsunami [thanks to mrtn for pointing out that there was absolutely nothing tidal about the wave], much to our relief.

  • Alice Miles’s comments in The Times:

    And what of England’s Churches? Oddly, silent too. Their bishops, so often the high priests of portentous blather, appear to have been struck dumb. This even though—or perhaps because—many of their followers, to judge from e-mails reaching The Times, consider the Indian Ocean earthquake to be God’s work: “Why does Lord Rees-Mogg call the earthquake an act of nature, when it is an act of God? Has he forgotten his Bible? Isaiah xi, 7 I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster, I, the LORD, do all these things.” Yes, it is the duty of Christian leaders to try to answer these things.

    Perhaps those are debates for another time—but is there ever a long-enough lull?

  • Oxfam’s donation page. Wikipedia is maintaining a temporary page listing other charitable organisations dealing with the relief and humanitarian effort.

In: World News

2004 / 12 / 29 – 08:25 Top


Field of poppies

In: World News

2004 / 11 / 11 – 11:00  | Comment [1]Top


For various reasons, whilst I live in a three-bedroom house on my own most of the time, sometimes my landlady and her husband will be staying here at weekends, or perhaps for a couple of weeks at a time, over Christmas for example. Due to this new and slightly unusual arrangement, we have agreed that I will continue to pay the same level of rent but from now on, she will pay all the bills instead of me [except for the TV licence and my broadband connection].

The question is this: whilst I am usually of the “put on another jumper” school of keeping-warm-and-saving-money [not to mention being absolutely loathe to use a tumble-drier in any but the most emergent of situations], now that my central-heating usage no longer directly affects my bank balance, is it morally wrong of me to whack up the heating full-blast for ten hours a day?

In: World News

2004 / 11 / 08 – 16:29  | Comment [9]Top


Remember the Genesis probe that was sent out to catch some solar particles? You know the one: on re-entry it was supposed to be caught in mid-air by Hollywood stunt pilots, but they failed to catch it because the probe’s parachutes, designed to slow down its descent, didn’t deploy.

It transpires that the reason the parachutes didn’t deploy was [wait for it] because “‘a design error that involves the orientation’ of the switches meant the sequence failed”. At least, that’s what NASA’s official report says. The New York Times puts it a little more succinctly:

[F]our switches that were to deploy the capsule’s parachutes were installed upside down.

Two-hundred and sixty-four million dollars. Oops.

In: World News

2004 / 11 / 05 – 15:55  | Comment [2] | Trackback [1]Top


John Peel

1939–2004

John Peel was responsible for most of the music I listened to as a teenager, filtered down through my brother’s selective taping of his Radio 1 show, bands like The Fall and The Orb interspersed with his instantly-recognisable voice. I remember once he played all forty-odd minutes of The Blue Room single without interruption—no one else could have got away with that.

I was in San Francisco about three years ago where, in an upstairs backroom of a fairly grotty bar called The Edinburgh Castle, along with nine or ten other people, I saw a great band called Potion perform a tiny gig. I went up to them afterwards, bought their CD and chatted for a while. As soon as they heard my accent they talked about wanting to come over the England to play a few gigs, and I asked if they had done anything about getting known over here. They said they had asked around, and everyone had told them the same thing: send your tape to John Peel.

He was a great champion of unknown bands, and is truly irreplaceable.

In: World News

2004 / 10 / 26 – 15:34  | Comment [4]Top


It’s not often I feel moved to comment on politics or current affairs, but I have to say that the furor over the editorial in The Spectator has gotten completely out of hand. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, you can read the editorial on The Spectator’s website, but that requires registration, or at least use of BugMeNot, so I’m going to reproduce it here.

In: World News

2004 / 10 / 19 – 23:46  | Comment [3]Top


I did write a new entry.

It was about the fact that the village of Lost in Scotland have get a new, thief-proof sign, because people kept nicking the old one.

Except it was rubbish.

The entry. Not the sign, I’d imagine the sign is pretty good, being thief-proof and all. No, the entry was rubbish.

Still, thought I’d link to the story anyway.

In: World News

2004 / 10 / 07 – 18:27  | Comment [1]Top


About eighteen months ago I went to a promotional night for the Ig Nobel awards, and I didn’t think much of them—I thought them a bit too silly. This year’s awards have just been announced, and these seem much more along the lines I was hoping for: research that sounds like it was fun or a bit weird to carry out, but still with a valid point.

  • In the psychology category, the award went to collaborative work between Harvard and the University of Illinois in which a number of subjects were asked to watch a video of people throwing a couple of basketballs around, counting the number of times the balls were thrown, and then asked if they noticed the man in a gorilla suit who walked straight through the picture, pausing to beat his chest. A significant proportion did not.

  • The prize for medicine went to the researches who showed an apparent correllation between suicide rates and the amount of country music played on local radio. I particularly liked their acceptance speech:

    [If] you play country records backwards, your dog and estranged spouse come home and you get your job back.

A series of six figures showing the technique for a successful combover for classic male pattern baldness

Special mention was made of US patent 4,022,227, filed in 1975, patenting the combover: a “method of concealing partial baldness”, which includes [if you jump through a few hoops and get the right plugin to allow you to view them] instructional images, demonstrating the technique.

A method of styling hair to cover partial baldness using only the hair on a person’s head. The hair styling requires dividing a person’s hair into three sections and carefully folding one section over another.

The world's greatest combover

I wonder if our old friend in the States knows that he owes Messers Smith and Smith some royalties?

In: World News

2004 / 10 / 01 – 17:18  | Comment [1]Top


Talking to a couple of friends earlier this week about the solely marketing-based invention of DVD region codes, and I was slightly astounded to be told that not only do we have the R1–R5 global regions designated, but there are…

Read the rest of “Regionalism”…

2004 / 09 / 29 – 11:38 | Comment [4]Top


In the pub last night I was trying to recall the name and number of the service where you hold your phone up to the speaker and moments later they send you a text message with the name of the…

Read the rest of “Extra sensory detection”…

2004 / 07 / 31 – 22:34 Top


A little article in the Irish edition of today’s Times is one of those “File Under Obvious” stories: Bulk-buying … in Ireland can cost you dearly, an investigation by a consumer group has found. A 454g tub of Dairygold costs…

Read the rest of “Slow news day”…

2004 / 06 / 20 – 20:56 | Comment [3]Top


Yesterday was the 50th Bloomsday, a celebration in honour of James Joyce, and in particular his novel Ulysses, which follows Leopold Bloom and the events of which all take place on one day: June 16 1904 [so in fact yesterday…

Read the rest of “Bloomsday”…

2004 / 06 / 17 – 08:47 | Comment [6]Top


I was slightly surprised when my postal ballot form arrived the other day—mainly because I had no idea we were having European Elections so soon, let alone that I’m living in one of the regions where they’re trialling an all-postal…

Read the rest of “European Elections”…

2004 / 06 / 06 – 14:20 | Comment [8]Top


Geological time gets a new period: Geologists have added a new period to their official calendar of Earth’s history - the first in 120 years. The Ediacaran Period covers some 50 million years of ancient time on our planet from…

Read the rest of “I’d hate to see them order from the menu”…

2004 / 05 / 20 – 12:15 | Comment [4]Top


From my mate Reg: A Chinese man has paid the equivalent of $1.1m for a mobile phone number. The unnamed buyer shelled out a whopping nine million yuan for 135 8585 8585, which is apparently pronounced as “let me be…

Read the rest of “135,8585,8585—Lucky for some?”…

2004 / 04 / 14 – 15:57 Top


Eggs injected with dye produce baby chicks in a variety of colours. Bizarre. [via Lisa] Happy Easter everyone….

Read the rest of “Multi-coloured chicks”…

2004 / 04 / 11 – 13:28 Top


18 billion earthworms are being put to work converting organic waste into fertilizer, so my Auntie tells me, and also links to an earthworm factfile, which contains the revelation that if you chop a worm in half, you don’t, in…

Read the rest of “Another myth shattered”…

2004 / 04 / 10 – 22:58 | Comment [2]Top


“Firefighters cool movie project”: A group of US and Canadian firefighters have stopped a film being made about an inferno which killed six firefighters in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1999. […] Frank Raffa, president of the Worcester Firefighters Local 1009 union,…

Read the rest of “Selective censorship”…

2004 / 04 / 07 – 12:41 Top


It’s quite an interesting time to be in Éire: from midnight tonight, smoking tobacco is outlawed in all places of work. Just like that: no phasing-in or pilot schemes—an outright ban on smoking, the first national smoking ban in the…

Read the rest of “Ireland bans smoking”…

2004 / 03 / 28 – 17:36 | Comment [19]Top


A formerly-healthy chap eats nothing but McDonalds meals, three times a day, for thirty days, in the name of documentary-making. Within a few days of beginning his drive-through diet, Spurlock, 33, was vomiting out the window of his car, and…

Read the rest of “A month under the Golden Arches”…

2004 / 01 / 26 – 18:34 Top


There’s a bit of a hoohah at the moment over the change to the name of East Midlands Airport to Nottingham East Midlands Airport. The airport’s reasoning is that people from overseas generally haven’t heard of the Midlands region, let…

Read the rest of “A lot’s in a name, for some”…

2004 / 01 / 23 – 12:01 | Comment [12]Top


I’ve just received an email from those fine purveyors of cheap CDs, CD-WOW!: The UK Major record companies through their mouth piece the BPI have unfortunately restricted the UK and Irish consumers right to enjoy the freedom of the World…

Read the rest of “CD-WOE”…

2004 / 01 / 21 – 21:12 | Comment [2] | Trackback [2]Top


In the UK, when a film is advertised with starting time 2pm, it usually means that’s when they start showing the adverts before the previews before the film itself, so you have a little grace period if you’re running late….

Read the rest of “Useful tip”…

2004 / 01 / 09 – 21:56 | Comment [4]Top


the bbc is collecting votes for the top ten most embarrassing political moments which, if nothing else, is a great opportunity to cringe at some powerful people getting humiliated in front of hundreds or millions of people. included are tony…

Read the rest of “can i name the general? yes, his name is ‘general’”…

2003 / 12 / 05 – 10:47 | Comment [10]Top


it had to happen one day. reported by what appears to be a college newspaper’s online equivalent: pitt junior brandon smith wanted a tattoo that proclaimed his manliness, so he decided to get the chinese characters for “strength” and “honor”…

Read the rest of “tatty too”…

2003 / 11 / 27 – 14:14 | Comment [1]Top


a collective ‘awww’ for the world’s smallest hamster….

Read the rest of “all together now”…

2003 / 10 / 29 – 16:54 | Comment [5]Top


via elsie\eloon comes the story of the great blaine flashmob, which i don’t actually care about in any way — all i want to know is if the organiser peter bowles is the same peter bowles from ‘to the manor…

Read the rest of “irritated by bowles syndrome”…

2003 / 10 / 14 – 13:59 Top


posts have been rather self-centric of late, so here are some things i’ve noticed happening in the world. chap being sued for cracking cd protection. if he had made a concerted effort to, say, write a hack that gets round…

Read the rest of “in other news”…

2003 / 10 / 10 – 15:13 | Comment [2]Top


a friend of mine lives in bridgend in south wales — i must ring him and see if he also saw the trail of fire. that’s one heck of an impressive photo — good enough for nasa’s astronomy picture of…

Read the rest of “snap a falling star”…

2003 / 10 / 03 – 10:36 | Comment [4]Top


legal issues aplenty today: firstly, the consequences of the threat of libel action over the many emails office workers have been sending discussing the possible identities of eight high-profile footballers alleged to have taken part in the gang rape of…

Read the rest of “payback”…

2003 / 10 / 02 – 23:01 | Comment [3]Top


every now and then i like to wade way out of my depth. galileo has been deliberately burnt up in the atmosphere of jupiter, in order to ensure that any microbes from earth that might be hitching a ride are…

Read the rest of “life on, and off, earth”…

2003 / 09 / 27 – 15:54 | Comment [3]Top


words, eh? tricky little buggers. a second edition of the new oxford dictionary of english [node] was announced last week, and much has been made of a few controversial or interesting new entries, such as the following: blog n. a…

Read the rest of “node or oed?”…

2003 / 08 / 25 – 00:48 | Comment [2]Top


thanks to fellow left-hander lyle for reminding me it’s left-hander’s day today. left-handers are supposed to more creative and artistic, but that’s no excuse for the designer of the official site: those floating balloons and virtual fireworks are maddening. lyle’s…

Read the rest of “right on, lefties”…

2003 / 08 / 13 – 18:23 | Comment [10]Top


the full moon and city light pollution are against me, but i’m still going to risk a cricked neck when i attempt to spot a meteor or two tonight, as the earth rips through the trail of particles left by…

Read the rest of “the glorious twelfth”…

2003 / 08 / 12 – 16:50 Top


two stories about the power of the human brain today: a device that trains the brain to think more purely creative thoughts — previously used to treat epilepsy, alcoholism, attention deficit and post-traumatic stress disorders, it is now being used…

Read the rest of “brainpower”…

2003 / 07 / 24 – 12:56 | Comment [5]Top


the white house has upgraded its email system. previously — and amazingly — an email to president@whitehouse.gov was all that was needed to send bush a message. in a bid to reduce the number of emails he receives, anyone wishing…

Read the rest of “dear george”…

2003 / 07 / 19 – 11:29 | Comment [6]Top


when the guardian announced it was to begin charging for its daily news emails, i didn’t think much of it — i like the format of their emails but i’m not going to pay for them. the bbc offers as…

Read the rest of “no news is bad news”…

2003 / 07 / 18 – 12:49 | Comment [2]Top


full marks to the journalist who wrote the bbc’s story on the plans to clone a mammoth from 300,000 year-old dna — they managed to not once mention jurassic park. the guardian’s tim radford was not able to restrain himself…

Read the rest of “don’t mention it”…

2003 / 07 / 18 – 11:07 | Comment [1]Top


what’s happened to all the crazy rock stars who used to trash their instruments at the end of gigs, use hotel windows as target practise for the sport of television-throwing, and flip the bird to the establishment for being too…

Read the rest of “rock me amadeus”…

2003 / 07 / 05 – 00:44 | Comment [7]Top


the ocean depths are a veritable mine of weird and wonderful creatures. via random jess’s mental milkcrate, i found out about a recent expedition in the tasman sea between australia and new zealand that has revealed hitherto unknown species of…

Read the rest of “creature feature”…

2003 / 07 / 04 – 16:46 Top


it seems people would rather quit their jobs than tell somebody about their annoying habits. how terribly british — completely reaffirmed by all the anonymous comments by people complaining about their colleagues that accompany the article. i particularly like the…

Read the rest of “quitting the habit”…

2003 / 07 / 04 – 13:13 | Comment [1]Top


through a sleepy haze last night, i caught an item on the local news about a behavioural experiment that had recently been conducted in, i think, birmingham. a wallet had been left in a prominant place in the busy city…

Read the rest of “don’t lose your wallet in the midlands”…

2003 / 06 / 24 – 15:14 | Comment [4]Top


stealing an ice-cream van in order to sell the contents, and possibly the van itself: surely there are more lucrative, and faster to pull off, crimes one can commit? ‘Detectives want to speak to anyone who may have seen the…

Read the rest of “would you like a flake in that?”…

2003 / 06 / 23 – 17:37 Top


i had a very enjoyable evening on friday seeing my friend lynette shake her booty with some impressive dance routines for her role in ‘the east end of chicago’ — highly recommended. i really had no idea lynnie was such…

Read the rest of “the long journey home”…

2003 / 06 / 22 – 20:49 Top


i went to see identity on saturday, which i quite enjoyed and wasted an hour and a half [and twenty quid for two of us — bloody leicester square prices!]. before the previews there were a few commercials, the last…

Read the rest of “there’s no frizziness in show business”…

2003 / 06 / 22 – 17:12 | Comment [2]Top


i arrived in town early, about ten minutes before my appointment for a haircut, and the shop — situated within the shires shopping centre — was not even open yet. nor were any other shops nearby, so i just sat…

Read the rest of “leaping to conclusions”…

2003 / 06 / 20 – 10:24 Top


with the news that complaints about text message scams have octupled in the last year, i’m very pleased i’ve managed to keep my own number out of the databases of these scammers. i receive very little text message spam —…

Read the rest of “the war against spam”…

2003 / 06 / 11 – 12:09 Top


w. h. auden’s ‘the night mail’: This is the Night Mail crossing the border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order, Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, The shop at the corner and the girl next door. Pulling…

Read the rest of “end of the line”…

2003 / 06 / 06 – 13:39 | Comment [1]Top


a very clever application of the heisenberg uncertainty principle makes sending encrypted messages over short distances impossible to intercept without detection. heisenberg himself summed up the uncertainty principle in this way: ‘the more precisely the position is determined, the less…

Read the rest of “quantum mechanics at work”…

2003 / 06 / 05 – 13:20 Top


a survey has determined that more women than men use text messaging by asking ‘have you used text messaging in the last two minutes?’ it seems to me that such a small period of time would depend heavily on what…

Read the rest of “text appeal”…

2003 / 05 / 20 – 13:13 | Comment [11]Top


the following things really aren’t funny: scared people, attacks by wild animals, skin grafts, putting animals down. however, put them all together and make the animal in question a badger, and you have a news story that i couldn’t help…

Read the rest of “human baiting”…

2003 / 05 / 14 – 11:41 | Comment [2]Top


it’s been a while since i linked to any news stories, and i’m starting to get withdrawal symptoms, so here are my two favourite stories from the last couple of days: i love it when old, thought-lost, recordings are found,…

Read the rest of “extra! extra! blog all about it!”…

2003 / 05 / 08 – 21:54 Top


i’m currently ploughing through the daily news emails i received whilst i was away [one from channel 4 news, and one from the guardian], and noticed this little item tagged on the end of one: old-style ten pound notes featuring…

Read the rest of “noted”…

2003 / 05 / 06 – 14:32 | Comment [7]Top


spookily following on from a post over at nicely toasted’s ‘burnt toast’ blog [or more specifically, some of the ensuing comments] is this amazing story of a will to survive: a climber, whose right arm was hopelessly trapped under a…

Read the rest of “a braver man than i”…

2003 / 05 / 03 – 14:31 Top


hmm, flying out to mexico via miami on monday. i wonder if our pilot will be packin’? doesn’t two days seem an awfully short time to gain the judgement required to decide whether a situation should be best dealt with…

Read the rest of “on a wing and a prayer”…

2003 / 04 / 19 – 22:24 | Comment [4]Top


i had coffee [actually, a hot chocolate but same difference] with a french friend earlier today, and we were discussing the news that she’s bought a house along with her parents in the south of france, with a view to…

Read the rest of “trust mr brown”…

2003 / 04 / 09 – 16:14 | Comment [6]Top


who’d have thought it eh? two of the three people charged with cheating on ‘who wants to be a millionaire?’ have been found guilty — and we’re still waiting on the third verdict. now they have been judged to have…

Read the rest of “who wants to be on ‘millionaire’?”…

2003 / 04 / 07 – 15:08 Top


i almost forgot to mention it, but the third world water forum finished over a week ago — i brought it to the world’s attention when it was first starting so i thought i’d do a follow-up post. a quick…

Read the rest of “fundamental needs [part 2]”…

2003 / 04 / 01 – 17:22 Top


following up on my earlier post about the hilarious trial of the men accused of cheating on the tv gameshow ‘who wants to be a millionaire?’ through the medium of strategic coughing, events have taken an even funnier turn: the…

Read the rest of “it’s contagious”…

2003 / 03 / 31 – 17:36 | Comment [1]Top


what a difference a week makes eh? the immediacy of blogging makes it all seem rather academic to post about the idiocy of this war, since unfortunately it must be admitted we are at the ‘no turning back’ stage. however,…

Read the rest of “belated linkage”…

2003 / 03 / 25 – 13:54 Top


a recent post over at nicely toasted reminded me of the furor about a year ago, over the teaching of creationism in british secondary schools….

Read the rest of “evolving opinions”…

2003 / 03 / 18 – 00:44 | Comment [3]Top


it’s official: i am not linked with inflation. the office for national statistics has announced a new ‘shopping basket’ on which the rate of inflation is based. it uses the high-street prices of these apparently everyday items in order to…

Read the rest of “i’m no gas-bag”…

2003 / 03 / 17 – 15:16 | Comment [3]Top


with virtually all media attention focusing on the middle east, it would be quite easy for the conference on the future of the world’s fresh water supply in japan to go ignored. this forum is bringing together delegates from 150…

Read the rest of “fundamental needs”…

2003 / 03 / 17 – 11:24 Top


i went to check out that latest goings-on over at pink shirt, yellow tie, only to find the following page instead: obviously this is quite a worry, and reminds me that i need to remember to backup my blog regularly…

Read the rest of “dob [denial of blogging] attack”…

2003 / 03 / 16 – 14:54 | Comment [1]Top


in case you were thinking that comic relief has had its day, that the celebs should think of some other way to satisfy their altruistic tendancies, and the public are tiring of being asked to give away their hard-earned cash:…

Read the rest of “justification”…

2003 / 03 / 15 – 11:36 Top


if you live in britain, then calling the speaking clock [123] for the correct time will sound slightly different over the next couple of weeks. from the tenth until the twenty-third of march, lenny henry will be the voice of…

Read the rest of “at the third stroke…”…

2003 / 03 / 12 – 00:22 | Comment [8]Top


has anyone been following the hilarious trial of the man accused of cheating on ‘who wants to be a millionaire?’? it all began in september 2001, when this chap ingram successfully answered all the questions correctly, winning a cool one…

Read the rest of “who wants to be on trial?”…

2003 / 03 / 07 – 13:11 | Comment [3]Top


if i was a political cartoonist for a broadsheet newspaper, after reading about donald rumsfeld’s current views i’d draw him, surrounded by advisors, with his fingers in his ears shouting, “la la la i’m not listening la la la.”…

Read the rest of “first task in a new career”…

2003 / 03 / 04 – 13:21 Top


if this story wasn’t so worrying, it’d be incredibly funny: a journalist was able to track down four people on interpol’s most wanted list in less than an hour and a half. however, doesn’t an annual budget of ?30 million…

Read the rest of “more interpolation”…

2003 / 03 / 03 – 22:41 | Comment [2]Top


george clooney fancies carol vorderman. wtf? [via nicelytoasted.net, who appears to agree with my views on the new-look bbc news online.]…

Read the rest of “bet he’ll have two from the top and pwoar from anywhere else”…

2003 / 02 / 19 – 15:25 Top


i don’t like the redesignage of the bbc news online website — i think it looks too cluttered. they’ve made the page wider and moved more of the important info into the top part of the page, but i think…

Read the rest of “auntie’s new look”…

2003 / 02 / 19 – 14:49 Top


no sooner had movable type version 2.6 been released, than bugfix versions 2.61 and 2.62 were produced. seems like 2.62 is quite an important security fix — dangerously close to the microsoft school of programming eh?…

Read the rest of “keep on moving”…

2003 / 02 / 18 – 10:49 Top


being a londoner born-and-bred [and now regular visitor although not resident], and also a non-driver reliant on public transport, i have high hopes for the impending introduction of congestion charges. i’m really interested to see if this makes a significant…

Read the rest of “menthol, vapourising, action”…

2003 / 02 / 16 – 15:14 | Comment [5]Top


dolly the sheep, the world’s first cloned mammal, has died — or more accurately, been put down. not sure if i agree with the term ‘euthanase’ that’s used in this article: surely these days we use that word to describe…

Read the rest of “goodbye dolly”…

2003 / 02 / 14 – 19:07 Top


there’s been a 14% increase in the number of people applying for maths courses at university. why? because maths rocks!…

Read the rest of “simple logic”…

2003 / 02 / 14 – 12:59 Top


oh no! psyt is closed! i hope it’s only temporary — perhaps the unveiling of a new look or summink? what’s going down, mrtn?…

Read the rest of “shut up shop”…

2003 / 02 / 13 – 12:17 Top


i was hoping to attend the world’s longest music performance, but i hate missing the start of performances, so i won’t bother going….

Read the rest of “uncommon time”…

2003 / 02 / 12 – 17:46 Top


garry kasparov and the chess computer deep junior have ended their six game match in a draw, auntie beeb’s roving news-eye tells us, which begs the question: why didn’t they play an odd number of games?…

Read the rest of “and the winner is…no-one”…

2003 / 02 / 08 – 18:27 | Comment [2]Top


why-o-why are we so utterly crap at dealing with anything except the norm? [i’m probably referring to this, but it’s a statement that’s got so many interpretations, personal or otherwise, i’ll leave it up to you to decide how to…

Read the rest of “sloblock”…

2003 / 01 / 31 – 14:27 Top


are you one of the forty million americans officially classed as obese? then you need george w. bush’s ‘state of the union’ workout. simply bung the tape into your vcr and follow the actions of the audience. if the address…

Read the rest of “keep fit with george dubya”…

2003 / 01 / 29 – 03:21 | Comment [2]Top


can anyone explain the connection? as reported in this story about the rise and rise of linux: ‘stars from hit tv show the sopranos will attend a party to celebrate [hewlett-packard’s] success with linux.’ oh wait…yes. tv show about the…

Read the rest of “missing link”…

2003 / 01 / 22 – 12:15 | Comment [1]Top


this is good. this is bad. [in my opinion.]…

Read the rest of “no grey area”…

2003 / 01 / 22 – 09:49 Top


this is the situation, as i understand it. there was a private company called the ethiopian livestock development company (elidco), which the then-government [military run] of ethiopia decided to nationalise in 1975 — meaning the company went from private to…

Read the rest of “nestlé vs. rest of the world”…

2003 / 01 / 13 – 19:55 Top


i’ve always had this strange ambition to become a presenter on tomorrow’s world, which probably comes from the fact that it’s about the only show dedicated to demonstrating and reporting on new technology. unfortunately that last statement must now become…

Read the rest of “no more tomorrow’s”…

2003 / 01 / 04 – 09:16 Top