Why He Became Darth Vader.

Seems reasonable to me…

Courtesy of Emily Lakdawalla, a gorgeous Hubble image of a quadruple transit of Saturn.

After two so-so big screen takes on the Alien versus Predator concept, perhaps it's time to reboot the franchise.

[Via Ghost in the Machine]

Craig Charles on what happened after Red Dwarf went off the air:

"All of a sudden there's no bloody film, and we've all got these new teeth."

A handy bookmarklet to display all feed links on the current web page.¹

1. Safari does feed autodiscovery just fine, but for some reason it gets into an infinite loop when it tries to pass a feed URL to my Fluid-based Google Reader SSB. This bookmarklet lets me select a feed and copy-and-paste the URL to Google Reader. [By the way, remind me some day to write a post about how wonderful Fluid is.] ↩

In preparing for the 2011 census, the Office of National Statistics is going to invest £12 million in creating a postcode database. Sounds reasonable enough, you might think.¹

Sad to say, there's a catch:

Unfortunately, Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey make good money from selling the postcode databases to other organisations. These datasets are very valuable: you've probably made use of them whenever you've put your postcode into a website. Royal Mail and Ordnance survey did not – apparently – like the idea of ONS making another postcode database with which they'd presumably have to compete. So, rather than take that nice dataset and do useful things with it – like giving it back to us taxpayers – the ONS have pledged to build the database, use it for the census, and then destroy it.

I'm sure that this seems like good sense to the Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey; especially in the current financial climate, protecting their annual income from selling postcode data is always going to seem like the right move. Ministers should know better.

[Via Qwghlm]

1. Apparently the existing Royal Mail postcode database is inadequate to the needs of the ONS. Unfortunate, but in the end if existing data sets don't meet the ONS's needs then it's not unreasonable for them to do something about it. ↩

I've had a Mac on my desktop at home for six years now but I had no idea you could do this:

[Imagine that...] you're editing in TextEdit. Command-click on the title of the current window to see the pop-up menu attached to the title. From there, open the folder containing the file; this will open a Finder window showing that folder. In the opened folder, rename the file and close the window. When you go back to the TextEdit document, you'll see in the title bar that the filename now reflects the renamed file.

Neat.

The Hindu festival of Holi (a.k.a. The Festival of Colours) prompted an exceptionally vivid Big Picture post.

Neil Tennant sums up The Pet Shop Boys' approach to their career in a single sentence:

The Pet Shop Boys don't talk loudly on our telephones on the bus.

Asked for a challenge by a balloon artist, Maggie Philbin asked for a radio telescope.

[Via Qwghlm]

The BBC have confirmed rumours that The Wire is coming to BBC Two:

BBC Two announced today that it will screen the entire five seasons (60 episodes) of one of television's most critically acclaimed series, The Wire.

It will be the first time it has ever aired on terrestrial television in the UK and the series will be stripped across the week, transmission dates to be announced soon. [...]
[Emphasis added.]

And in one sentence they've ensured that I won't be watching. Stripping the show across the week is a surefire way to kill my interest: I just don't have room to fit in another five hours a week¹ of television.

If they showed an episode a week I might manage to keep up, but I just know that I'll end up three and a bit weeks down the line with fifteen episodes eating up space on my DVR before I decide to delete the entire season unwatched. Better not to start.

1. OK, probably more like four-and-a-bit hours given the lack of adverts on the BBC, but the general point stands. ↩

Schulz City: That Yellow Shirted Such-and-Such. So good.

[Via Oliver Willis]

Heartbreaking.

[Via Gerry Canavan, via Progressive Gold]

Christopher Hitchens remembers John Mortimer:

On the bleak January day that John Mortimer died, at the age of 85, I was trying to think of an American "parallel" to his personality and position. Is there, in other words, anyone we can name who combines the qualities of a Dickensian or Shakespearean character with the grit and brio of a Clarence Darrow–style defense attorney (the above blend served slightly chilled with a definite hint of Kafka and perhaps a smidgen of Evelyn Waugh)? Well, no, there isn't, and there never was such an American. But don't feel bad about that: instead, feel worse because now there isn't such an Englishman either. True immortality doesn't depend on national considerations: it is given to very few people to create one imperishable fictional person, and then to see that very person take on life and flesh as if animated by Pygmalion. In the name and figure of Horace Rumpole, old rogue and old hero of the Old Bailey, as impersonated – no, incarnated – by Leo McKern, we have someone for the ages, someone who will be available at need to our inner eye and ear every time it is demonstrated once again that the law is a ass. [...]

Another week, another selection:

• Open University
• Moon, Mercury, Jupiter, Mars
• SEAS Project
• Fused
• Under the Moonlight
• Unusual Red Glow Over Minnesota

Like I don't have enough of a backlog on TV to watch on my DVR:

[From...] the week beginning March 28, The Wire is starting from the beginning on BBC2.

Only a lack of disk space on my DVR will save me…

Montreal: (my city is more goth than yours).

[Via Jejune.net]

Donna Bowman on her worst moviegoing experience:

To this day, I still haven't seen As Good As It Gets all the way through, no small feat given how universally that film was beloved of my middlebrow coworkers in 1997. I'm in no hurry to replace the perfectly mangled movie of my memory with a film that makes some kind of pedestrian "sense."

[Via Feeling Listless]

"I have nightmares about Cars."

[Via MetaFilter]

Gymnarchus niloticus is awesome!