Category Archives: Uncategorized

The BBC have shown themselves up again. The time has come to strip the BBC of its status as a public service broadcaster, according to the independent think-tank Civitas. A programme broadcast on 5 October 2005 called ‘Little Kinsey’ manifested such a distortion of its source material that we can no longer depend upon the […]

Today I was musing about the recent TV series, “Lost,” which was produced in America and shown on Channel 4. I was slightly irked by the adverts on Lost, which were always placed in silly places. Each episode would start with a summary of previous ones, and the broadcaster would often follow this up with […]

With the growing controversy in America, I thought I ought to say something. But Dr. Crippen seems able to say it much better than I ever could: We can all surely agree to try to reduce the abortion rate. And the best way to do that is to improve education about sex and contraception and […]

Well it can’t really. Not at all. (Unless you’ve installed it incorrectly of course). Driving a car is probably the single most dangerous thing that any of us do in life. Riding in a car bears a similar risk. Seatbelts have been found to greatly reduce the risk and severity of injuries in road accidents. […]

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s good enough to discuss again. Some websites, such as those operated by newspapers or scientific journals (among many others), are perfectly happy to give you lots of information for free. Annoyingly though, they want you to sign up first, providing them an email address and […]

…who reads this in a feed aggregator. I’ve just republished the previous two posts about twenty times trying to get the paragraph spacing right. I think we’re there now.

From Nick Cohen writing in the Evening Standard (via Norm): What percentage of Saddam Hussein’s weapons came from Britain and America? I askbecause on the rare occasions the BBC mentions Saddam’s genocidal crimes italways says he was ‘armed by the West.’I bet you can’t guess the answer.According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a […]

Here on the BBC website: Chelsea and Southampton legend Peter Osgood has died at the age of 59.Osgood collapsed while attending a family funeral service on Wednesday atSlough crematorium. It’s been said that at least you get to be centre of attention at your own funeral. That’s a bit less effective if somebody goes and […]

Harry’s Place has turned up this article on the BBC website. In most countries, more people think removing Saddam Hussein was a mistake thanthink it was the right decision. However, let’s not forget: Iraqis are the most convinced that the removal of Saddam Hussein was right, with74% agreeing with the move. Hmm. There’s also a […]

The achievement of a team is a function of the efforts and abilities of its members. I’m not going to clarify this; I use the term “function” quite loosely. Clearly it is possible to define activities which can be pulled along by the ability of one very good member, and also to define activities where […]

This week, I shall be mostly playing “Bach” (apologies to those unfortunate enough to have never seen “The Fast Show.” It’s a bit confusing, really, one minute I thought I’d have a look through some old Preludes and Fugues, and the next I found myself sight-reading through the whole book trying to find some different […]

This post reminded me of two famous psychology experiments. The Milgram experiment concerns how humans respond to authority, and the Stanford Prison Experiment simulates the psychology of prison life. Both of these experiments are horrifying in their logical conclusion. The prison experiment website goes some way towards trying to explain the treatment of prisoners at […]

Everybody should read this: The interesting thing about the Tamiflu vaccine for bird flu that everybody keeps going on about, is this: it’s not a vaccine. The manufacturers even spell that out in their factsheet. It’s a drug, an antibiotic for viruses.But you wouldn’t know that if you read Paul Routledge in the Mirror, Alan […]

While trying to install the new version of Macromedia’s Flash Player (now known as the Shockwave Player for some reason), I was asked if I might like to install the Yahoo! toolbar. The option was “yes” by default. While I use Yahoo! a lot, this does not make me happy. Foistware, spyware, or any software […]

Infinitives Unsplit has given a link to a song called “It’s In The Koran.” Recommended listening / reading (read the comments as well). Intriguingly, Infinitives Unsplit is written by a chap styling himself “The Pedant-General,” although I don’t think he means this in the way Oliver does.

Another good read here. The article discusses the latest idea by Technorati to list blogs by “authority,” measured by the number of incoming links to a blog. “So, I am going to argue that links – be they Google or Technorati – have turned the entire concept of authority into something rather trivial – popularity. […]

This is quite a good read: “The silence was deafening and the seats were empty. The western press was nowhere to be found. The location was Baghdad and the event was a February 10th, 2006 press conference announcing the final verification of December’s election results. Although the final allocation of parliamentary seats did not change […]

I don’t usually quote The Register, but this seemed interesting.

… is not what it was. In Today’s copy of Varsity, the Cambridge Student Newspaper is a large front-page article about room rents in college. You start with a screaming headline: Are rents fair? £337 – £913 A room at Peterhouse, the college with the lowest average rent A room at St John’s, the college […]

Apologies if these posts seem a little confused. I’m using Firefox on a Linux machine at the Engineering Dept., and it’s proving a little unwieldy.