BBC News reports:

Train punctuality 'is improving'

The firm which operates Britain's rail network has beaten its punctuality targets for the first time.

Network Rail has this year cut delays on its services by 16%, the equivalent to 2.2 million passenger minutes.

It said 83.5% of trains arrived within five minutes of their due time – beating the Rail Regulator's target of 82.8% of trains. [...]

Sounds promising, yes? However, later on today I read but she's a girl's latest post about her visit to Japan:

[...] As we left the station, I looked at my watch and commented with mock horror that we were a minute late leaving. In fact, it turned out that my watch was a minute fast, and we left precisely on time.

It’s almost incomprehensible for someone used to the British rail system, but the average delay for the shinkansen over a year is less than one minute. Unbelievably, that also includes times when the service has been stopped for an hour or more because of a typhoon or earthquake. It’s like another world. [...]

It doesn't bear thinking what the Network Rail statistics would look like if they had to cope with typhoons and earthquakes on top of the wrong sort of snow etc.

Go and play Notepad Invaders. You won't regret it, I promise.

[Via Tom Hume]

The ticker on the BBC News site is reporting that Christopher Eccleston has quit the role of Doctor Who, despite today's announcement that a second season has been commissioned.

(I can't link to a story about Eccleston's departure at the moment: at the time of writing all that's showing is a one-line entry in the ticker on the front page of the BBC News site with a "more soon" tag at the end.)

[Updated to add: in the absence of a story to link to, here's a screendump of the relevant portion of the BBC News front page.]

Time magazine's Jeffrey Kluger has written a fascinating article about attempts by scientists to unravel the causes of shyness:

[...] Few things say "forget I'm here" quite so eloquently as the pose of the shy — the averted gaze, the hunched shoulders, the body pivoted away from the crowd. Shyness is a state that can be painful to watch, worse to experience and, in survival terms at least, awfully hard to explain. In a species as hungry for social interaction as ours, a trait that causes some individuals to shrink from the group ought to have been snuffed out pretty early on. Yet shyness is commonplace. "I think of shyness as one end of the normal range of human temperament," says professor of pediatrics William Gardner of Ohio State University.

But normal for the scientist feels decidedly less so for the painfully shy struggling merely to get by, and that's got a lot of researchers looking into the phenomenon. What determines who's going to be shy and who's not? What can be done to treat the problem? Just as important, is it a problem at all? [...]

[Via rebecca's pocket]

Be nice to your photocopier next time it suffers a paper jam. Or else.

[Via not you, the other one]

Courtesy of Kristen: why cyclists wear black shorts.

I need Clocky very, very much:

Clocky is, quite simply, for people who have trouble waking up.

When the alarm clock goes off and the snooze button is pressed, Clocky will roll off the bedside table and wheel away, bumping mindlessly into objects on the floor until it eventually finds a spot to rest. Minutes later, when the alarm sounds again, the sleeper must get up out of bed and search for Clocky. This ensures that the person is fully awake before turning it off. Small wheels that are concealed by Clocky's shag enable it to move and reposition itself, and an internal processor helps it find a new hiding spot every day.

[...]

If there's any justice in this world Clocky's inventor, Gauri Nanda, will end up richer than Bill Gates.

Some people have creatures called "cats" that can do all this and more; for those of us who aren't ready to sign up to a life of servitude just yet, Clocky will do nicely. And will probably be more reliable.

[Via MetaFilter]

When I linked to the Cloud Appreciation Society's web site the other week I somehow failed to spot that the society's founder was the man who made a series of short films for Channel 4 about his trip to Australia to see the rare – not to say downright spectacular – Morning Glory cloud formation. Now that a few weeks have passed, the CAS web site plays host to a 10.7MB Quicktime movie of the first film, with the others to follow over the next few weeks.

Incidentally, while you're at the site you really should read The Cloud of Costs, a "scientifically accurate" diagram showing where your £1.92 membership fee goes. How perfectly English is that?

Or, if you prefer:

• Macedonian: "O, Gospodi! Imam sekira vo glavata."
• Tagalog: "Ay Dios ko! May palakol sa ulo ko!"
• Danish: "Ã…h Gud! Jeg har en økse i hovedet."

The web would be poorer without sites like How to say "Oh my god! There's an axe in my head," in various languages – The Web's #1 Axe In My Head Page. I mean, where else would you find this sort of vital information?

[Via Making Light (Particles)]

The Real Live Preacher took a trip to Starbucks the other day:

My oldest daughter doesn’t believe in God anymore, so she says. She told me this recently at Starbucks.

Starbucks is the place we go to talk. The house is the place where we do the daddy/daughter thing. I enforce tough boundaries, which is my job, and she pushes hard against them, which is hers. Sometimes we get into passionate arguments about this, which can be a strain. But when I take her to Starbucks, it’s like we become two different people. We sit down and she starts talking. She talks to me about everything at Starbucks.

[...]

Read on for a lovely, thoughtful story of parenting done right. In a climate where religious voices sometimes seem to be getting shriller with every passing month, it's worth reminding ourselves that there are sane, reasonable people of faith out there too.

You might remember The Credit Card Prank from a couple of years ago; one man's attempt to illustrate just how bad shops are at checking your signature against your credit card.

Now we have Part II. Our intrepid correspondent did finally manage to get someone to check his signature, but it took quite some doing.

[Via MetaFilter]

I've just made a couple of small amendments to my site's .htaccess file to stop users on other sites from embedding images on this site in their web pages. I know I don't often post images here, but even so a few of the images I have mirrored here (specifically, an image of the poster for X-Men 2, a screencap of Jennifer Connelly from Dark City and the fake Watchmen poster) seem to attract an awful lot of hits from people who post them to bulletin boards or incorporate them into their own sites. I've no objection to anyone copying the images for re-use on their own sites – it's not as if they're my own original work anyway – but it's reached the point where the X-Men 2 poster alone accounted for just over 17% of yesterday's bandwidth usage for this site. I had to take the Watchmen poster down the other week because serving it to forums discussing the forthcoming film adaptation was accounting for some 25% of my bandwidth usage. Enough, as the saying goes, is enough.

The changes I've made shouldn't prevent users from viewing the images when they're following links from pages on this site. If anyone does find that they can't view an image on this site, they should of course go ahead and email me or post a comment here and I'll see what I can do to fix the problem.

The shortlists for this year's Hugo awards are out, featuring what I'm guessing must be the first all-British shortlist for Best Novel. I haven't read any of this year's fiction nominees at all, which is a bit startling: clearly I've been slacking this past year. (I do have one of them in my queue – Lois Bujold's novella Winterfair Gifts – but it's been sitting there for months as I've been concentrating on non-fiction and graphic novels lately. No doubt I'll pick up the Banks and Stross novels when they show up in a UK paperback edition.)

Equally surprisingly, for once I've actually seen all the Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) nominees. I'd give it to The Incredibles, but I wouldn't be heartbroken to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind win.

A Letter to Skeletor:

Sent: 27th July 2004
To: Skeletor, Snake Mountain, Eternia
Subject: Advice from a Casual Observer

Dear Skeletor,

First of all, many thanks for taking time to read this letter. I appreciate that your schedule is pretty packed with evil and evil related activities and that your time is precious. I'll try not to take up too much of it, but I really do think you need to hear what I have to say.

I, like a large number of other people on the planet Earth, have watched with amusement for the past twenty years as you have repeatedly tried and failed to infiltrate and conquer Castle Grayskull and gain access to it's legendary "secrets".

Yes, you read that correctly Skeletor: "Amusement".

Because while I appreciate the thought, effort and sheer dogged enthusiasm which go into your takeover bids, your apparent inability to spot the numerous and often gaping flaws in each and every one of them is laughable. I'm sorry, but it had to be said.

Take, for example, Fakir. You remember Fakir, don't you Skeletor? The clone you made of He-Man? On the face of it, the plan was brilliant. Flawless. You managed to create an exact duplicate of He-Man using just the power of your Ram's Head Staff, who could just walk up to Grayskull, knock on the drawbridge and gain entry. Victory was assured!

Or at least it would have been had you not given Fakir blue skin and orange eyes. I mean – what were you thinking there? I can only assume this was a frankly astonishing oversight on your behalf. The real He-Man doesn't have blue skin or orange eyes, Skeletor, so in order to be truly effective, nor should an evil double. An identical duplicate should be identical to the thing it's a duplicate of. The clue's in the name. It's just common sense.

[...]

As we all know, Skeletor need to consult the Evil Overlord List.

[Via Thanatos, posting to uk.media.tv.misc]

My first impression of the new Doctor Who: a promising start.

The first storyline was a bit thin, as you'd expect of any episode that has to expend a chunk of running time (re)introducing the concept and central character. The Autons may not have been one of the more memorable adversaries the Doctor faced over the years, but they worked well enough in this episode and allowed the episode to use a present-day setting, saving the writers five or ten minutes of explanatory dialogue. The customary cheap-and-cheerful props and special effects work were all present and correct – including one utterly terrible fighting-with-a-disconnected-Auton-arm scene – which gave the show a distinctly British feel. (I didn't mind the infamous wheelie bin so much: I mean, surely you can only criticise that effect as unrealistic if you've actually seen what a wheelie bin looks like when it grabs you and won't let go.)

The main thing, however, is the casting and writing. Christopher Eccleston is clearly going to be a memorable Doctor if he's given any remotely decent storylines to work with. Presumably recently-regenerated (see his comment on his ears when he catches sight of himself in a mirror) , Ecclestone's Doctor is confident and full of beans, but can do serious when the need arises. I wasn't bowled over by Billie Piper's performance, but then it usually took time to get used to a new companion; I'll be interested to see how her character copes with next week's far-future storyline. The important point is that the show was clearly written by someone with a love of the show and a knowledge of what made it work. I assume from what we've seen so far that the shows are going to tell self-contained 45-minute stories instead of spreading a story arc over half a dozen episodes. I don't quite know how that'll work for me considering that my fond memories of the Troughton/Pertwee/Tom Baker years are so tied up with the notion of an end-of-episode cliffhanger leaving me wanting more, but I'm more than happy to spend the next few weeks finding out.

To round off my geek's TV evening I watched The Incredibles on DVD. The only thing wrong with that film is that whenever I see a new big-screen adaptation of a superhero comic part of my mind will be wondering why they didn't do it properly as an animated project so they could make the use of superpowers look suitably effortless and realistic.

The transparent screens meme is spreading.

At last, the true story of the Negro American Space Society of Astronauts can be told.

[Via MetaFilter]

I had no idea that Jamie 'Tank Girl/Gorillaz' Hewlett had produced a cartoon to accompany the Best Single on the 1990s, Pulp's Common People.

[Via Blog of a Bookslut]

Transparent screens. Very nicely done.

[Via Davenetics]

Emily Yoffe lives in a three-species household:

For months after we brought home our beagle, Sasha, to our two previously installed cats, I would look at the photos on the Internet of cats and beagles snoozing together or grooming each other and conclude these images were either computer-generated or posed with animals freshly returned from the taxidermist.

Things couldn't have been going worse. Who knew our obese, somnolent cats could have been instructors for Delta Force? They stalked Sasha in tandem, and when she tried to flee, the cats flanked her, maneuvered her into a corner, and slashed at her ears. Sasha, not a strategic thinker, would then wait until they were asleep and rush at them barking. The aroused cats then slashed some more.

This resulted in a three-species epidemic of stress-induced colitis. I found an over-the-counter treatment for myself, but my veterinarian got out the pad and gave me a prescription for liquid Prozac for Sasha, Biscuit, and Goldie. [...]