Via TW (who says Inflation’s a tricky thing you know) this interesting inflation calculator.
From the Torygraph, the Jetlev flyer. A ridiculous boys-toy, but it did cause my daughter to say “I must have one”. Did I mention that reading the Torygraph in the Waitrose cafe is one of my guilty pleasures? Its not quite as good as it looks, because not only do you have a huge hosepipe trailing after you, there is also the jetski-like boat you’re tied to (that’s the Jetlev, not reading the TG).
Also from the TG a delightful story about Empty wine bottles sell for £300 in China because, of course, if you’re cunning you can take an empty Lafite ’82, refill it with merely good wine, and resell it for £2000. Because (again, of course) the people buying them don’t know good from bad: the stuff is a mere status symbol (I suspect this is true the world over and not just in China). But what really made me laugh out loud was a delightful quote from one of the counterfeiters:
“The bottles need to be in the best condition possible,” said another dealer, called Mr Ye, at a Shanghai company. “It is very important. And I only want genuine bottles, no fakes,” he added.
Yes, that is right: he is happy to sell fake wine, but wants to do it in genuine bottles. Which makes sense: it is a lot easier to inspect a bottle to see if the label looks faked than to inspect the wine.
Again from TW, nice to see him standing up for principle. He didn’t add, so I will: terrorism is a trivial threat to this country. We are not justified in using extraordinary measures to fight it. Wake me up again when terrorism deaths/year exceed 10% of those on the roads.
The pic is from xkcd, obviously, though via SE.
And lastly, from the astoundingly, eternally, unbelievably hyperbolic Phil Plait, a video of the solar eclipse seen from satellite. What I thought most interesting about it was how little the sun’s surface changes. because all the sfc features look like fires, I expected them to flicker and burn and so on. But no, they are still. Too big, probably.