Quentin Stafford-Fraser's blog
One should always have something sensational to read on the net...
Well, it should be, certainly for all science journalists, and probably for all science undergrads too. Ben Goldacre's Bad Science is an enjoyable but very well-informed rant about how the media gets science stories wrong, and how to look for the real facts behind the reports.
Ben has a few chips on his shoulder - perhaps a few too many - but that doesn't stop this from being a very important book. Recommended.
From yesterday’s walk…
Most of the paths I walked on obviously had more quadrapedal than bipedal traffic:
Do you think this notice shows concern about the mortal well-being of the animals, or is it a subtle threat?
...to discover that the Childwickbury goats' cheese made by my step-sister Elizabeth was served as the vegetarian starter for the G20 leaders last night.
Glad to know Jamie approves of it...
On the Today program this morning, someone was saying that ISPs should be held partly responsible for movie and music piracy by their users, in the same way that a house owner should be responsible if the house was being used as a drug den.
But surely that's the wrong analogy. People don't in general upload the pirated material to the ISPs' servers - they have it on their own PCs. Holding the ISP responsible is like blaming the local council because their roads were used to transport the drugs. Why not blame the electricity company that powers the PC?
The culpable ones, if any, are those who share material from their PCs. The media industries can't sue all of them, though, so they have to find another scapegoat.
Last week a British vehicle set a new land speed record for wind-powered vehicles. 126.1mph.
Not the easiest thing to park at Waitrose, perhaps, but very pretty.
From the RosenblumTV blog:
Media Life reports this week that the average American now spends 8.5 hours a day staring at some kind of screen, whether its television, computer or cellphone. ... This means that screenwatching has now become the number one human activity, surpassing even sleep. We will spend more of our lives staring at screens than doing anything else. Screenwatching has become the seminal and defining act of our culture.
I'm a huge fan of Google docs - especially where several people need to collaborate on a document. But sometimes the formatting capabilities can be a little restricting - margins, line spacing, etc - you have little control over those.
Or so I thought, until this morning I discovered the 'Edit CSS' menu option:
With a little bit of CSS you can change the appearance in all sorts of ways. My needs are mostly simple, though.
Similarly, you can edit the HTML in various ways. I needed a line break as opposed to a paragraph break. Right click and you can Insert HTML at Selection. Type <br /> and you're done.
I hope they teach raw HTML and CSS in schools these days. It's the punctuation of the future. Not that they teach punctuation any more...
I had a delightful paddle down the River Nene this afternoon.
"I would show you this on my laptop", said a visitor to our company recently, "but it would take forever to boot up".
And I realised how long I'd been living in a Mac world: for the last eight or nine years I've had a laptop where you open the lid and start typing pretty much immediately. (Camvine is an all-Mac shop except for the servers, which are Linux, and stay on all the time anyway.)
The slow start-up (and even rather painful resume-from-suspend) that people in the Windows world often experience has led to some modern machines having a minimal Linux installed alongside Windows, so you don't have to wait for your entire world to load if you just want to check something quick on the web. Chris Nuttall, writing in the FT techblog, seems to be quite impressed with Presto.