Just a quick post (made via a BT phone kiosk) to say that due to the effects of a power surge which took out (among other things) my iMac and my DSL modem/router it will be some time before I can post here again, or even have convenient access to the internet to read comments or anyone else’s site.
I’ll see you all when I see you.
The 2005 Ig® Nobel Prize winners are as much fun as ever. Expecially the Peace Prize laureates, who just happen to have conducted their prize-winning research right up the road from here:
PEACE: Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University, in the U.K., for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie “Star Wars.”
REFERENCE: “Orthopteran DCMD Neuron: A Reevaluation of Responses to Moving Objects. I. Selective Responses to Approaching Objects,” F.C. Rind and P.J. Simmons, Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 68, no. 5, November 1992, pp. 1654-66.
I think Suw Charman had a bad day’s commute:
What the tannoy should have said
We regret to inform you that, due to years of chronic underfunding and shameful mismanagement, there will be significant delays on your journey home this evening. When the train does finally turn up it will be overcrowded and hot, and you may well feel ill within moments of boarding. If you do faint, don’t worry as you will be so tightly wedged in that you’ll be unable to actually hit the floor. London Underground Limited has absolutely no regrets about this whatsoever as we’ve been creaming off the profits for years now and have a nice little villa out on St Lucia to which we’ll be taking early retirement and our golden handshake very soon.
Normal service will not be resumed at any point in your lifetime or ours, as the system is in such a state of terminal collapse that nothing short of a miracle can save it. And we don’t mean the sort of ‘miracle’ that any mere mortal transport ‘czar’ can achieve, but a full-on deity-driven bells, whistles and chorus of angels miracle. We think you’ll agree that that is unlikely to occur. […]
This video of unusually attentive flora and fauna (NB: 40MB Quicktime movie) is quite hypnotic.
[Via GromBlog]
Last week’s UK box office Top 5:
- Serenity
- Pride and Prejudice
- Oliver Twist
- A History of Violence
- Kinky Boots
Considering that Firefly never showed up on terrestrial TV over here, that’s pretty good going for Cap’n Tightpants & co.
Bryan Burrough really hated Simon Winchester’s latest book, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906:
WHAT does it mean to write popular history? Must the author spend long years sifting through libraries and obscure collections to unearth new and tantalizing facts about his subject? Do readers in search of an absorbing yarn really care what information is new or where the book’s information comes from? And what role should the author play? Humorless academic? Simple reporter? Or modish raconteur?
[…]
This is history as it might be written by Austin Powers. “Crack” is a book that bears the faint whiff of smoking jacket and brandy, as if the author had curled up in some leatherbound study with a few dozen previous books and his memories and banged out this one between puffs of pipe smoke. It appears to be partly the product of a residency Winchester accepted at San Jose State University, a period that seems to have given him plenty of time to sample sublime pinot noir and thumb through earthquake books. Among the sources thanked in the acknowledgments is a history-savvy waiter at a restaurant on Nob Hill. To be fair, Winchester did do independent travel for his research; in Alaska, he finds not only fault lines and caribous but Champagne, “a long bath,” Halibut Bay oysters, freshly caught salmon, wine “crisp and cold” and a barmate smoking Gitanes. “It seemed like heaven,” he says.
[…]
To be fair, Burrough does admit later in his review that his beef with Winchester’s book may derive in part from that subtitle: judging by Burrough’s account, Winchester’s book is more concerned with the effects of the quake on the local geology than on the political economy of the State, let alone the Union. That obviously wasn’t what this particular reviewer wanted from Winchester’s book, though I think it’s also safe to say that Burrough just took exception to Winchester’s authorial voice.
I quite enjoyed Winchester’s last book, Krakatoa, another summary in layman’s terms of what happened when nature did something spectacular and destructive, leavened with a smattering of social history but making no real attempt to bring the historical characters to life. I don’t think I’ll rush out to read this latest book but I might just give it a look when it appears in paperback.
From 75° South, a post about a nine day sledge trip.
The photographs of a crevasse as seen from the inside are particularly nice.
I want a squid bear sculpture. Very much.
[Via Dave Langford, commenting at Making Light]
Esquire journalist A J Jacobs was assigned the job of explaining Wikipedia to the magazine’s readers. What better approach than to put up a draft of the article on Wikipedia and invite the community to have at it?
I wouldn’t say that the edited article reads better, but then Wikipedia isn’t meant to be a tool for producing journalism. I do think it’s a shame that the editing process ditched the mention of the need to freeze the Bush and Kerry-related pages in 2004, because I think that incident makes a rather important point about the limitations of Wikipedia.
[Via Many 2 Many]
CHUD has posted an image of Peter Jackson’s take on the most famous ape in movie history.
I think it’s safe to say that we’ll all be seeing quite a bit of this picture over the next two months or so.
This Google Advanced Operators Cheat Sheet is tremendously handy.
I already knew quite a lot of the ways to restrict/qualify your search listed in the cheat sheet, but I usually have to employ them by going to the Advanced Search screen because I can’t remember the syntax for the various advanced search parameters.
[Via Guardian Onlineblog]
Alligators in the Florida Everglades have a new rival at the top of the food chain. In recent years pet owners have abandoned their pet pythons in the area, and those bitty little snakes are all grown up now.
(Snopes has a larger version of the same picture shown in the CNN article.)
[CNN article via Peace Dividend]
This New York Times article describes the state of the culture wars in the United States very nicely. Not by talking about who’s trying to ban which books from libraries, or by talk of the latest attempt to shoehorn Intelligent Design into science classes, but by discussing a trip down a river:
GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Ariz. - Tom Vail, who has been leading rafting trips down the Colorado River here for 23 years, corralled his charges under a rocky outcrop at Carbon Creek and pointed out the remarkable 90-degree folds in the cliff overhead.
Geologists date this sandstone to 550 million years ago and explain the folding as a result of pressure from shifting faults underneath. But to Mr. Vail, the folds suggest the Grand Canyon was carved 4,500 years ago by the great global flood described in Genesis as God’s punishment for humanity’s sin.
“You see any cracks in that?” he asked. “Instead of bending like that, it should have cracked.” The material “had to be soft” to bend, Mr. Vail said, imagining its formation in the flood. When somebody suggested that pressure over time could create plasticity in the rocks, Mr. Vail said, “That’s just a theory.”
“It’s all theory, right?” asked Jack Aiken, 63, an Assemblies of God minister in Alaska who has a master’s degree in geology. “Except what’s in the Good Book.”
For Mr. Vail and 29 guests on his Canyon Ministries trip, this was vacation as religious pilgrimage, an expedition in search of evidence that God created the earth in six days 6,000 years ago, just as Scripture says.
That same week, a few miles upriver, a decidedly different group of 24 rafters surveyed the same rock formations - but through the lens of science rather than what Mr. Vail calls “biblical glasses.” Sponsored by the National Center for Science Education, the chief challenger to creationists’ influence in public schools, this trip was a floating geology seminar, charting the canyon’s evolution through eons of erosion.
“Look at the weathering, look at the size of the pieces,” Eugenie C. Scott, the center director, said of markings in Black Tail Canyon. “To a standard geologist, to somebody who actually studies geology, this just shouts out at you: This is really old; this is really gradual.”
Two groups examining the same evidence. Traveling nearly identical itineraries, snoozing under the same stars and bathing in the same chocolate-colored river. Yet, standing at opposite ends of the growing creation-evolution debate, they seemed to speak in different tongues. […]
“It’s all theory, right?” Fabulous.