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An unholy Frankensteinian fusion

We're about to witness a monstrous event here on Scienceblogs. Omnibrain: weird neuroscience from an inveterate smart-ass. Retrospectacle: Parrots and hair cells with Shelley passing out the cookies. Both are young graduate students in neuroscience, and both have decided to shut down their blogs…and restart them as one freaky hybrid. They aren't going away, they're anastomosing. There is one obstacle. They don't know what to call this brand new twisted experiment in blogging, so they're running a contest to name the new blog (they don't mention it, but they're also going to need a redesigned…

The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor - Chapter 10

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 9 Table of Contents Chapter 11 Chapter 10 Robert Fontaine, July 18, 2055 I was heading for the library when I got a phone call from Bessie Waters, a neighbour who visited with dad occasionally. She was worried. "I knocked on the door and there was no answer," she said. "I think you should check on him." I was supposed to give a lecture late that afternoon. I called my old faculty advisor, Dr. Yablonski, to arrange a substitute and headed home. Bessie was not around. The kitchen was as I had left it. The house was dark and quiet. For a second…

David Bronstein, 1924-2006

Chess Life is reporting that David Bronstein has died of unknown cuases at the age of 82. Bronstein resides on a short list of players, along with Paul Keres and Viktor Korchnoi, who can vie for the title of Greatest Player Never to Win the World Championship. His peak came in the late forties and early fifties, when his tactical brilliance and his advocacy of then offbeat opening like The King's Gambit and The King's Indian Defense propelled him to the upper tier of professional players. With regard to that latter opening, he was truly ahead of his time ; the King's Indian later became a…

Flag Burning Amendment Fails By One Vote

The latest attempt to pass a constitutional amendment allowing Congress to pass laws against flag “desecration” failed by one vote in the Senate. It had already passed the House. Had it passed the Senate, it would surely have gotten the approval of the necessary three-fourths of the states. Here's a brief article from the New York Times summarizing the vote. One vote, folks. That's how stupid and right-wing this country has gotten. People who support flag-burning amendments are the sort of people who like their patriotism cheap, empty and emotional. No serious person could possibly think…

Kids Update, Programming Note

I've skipped a few weeks of cute-kid updates, largely because I was at DAMOP for a week, and then catching on stuff I missed while I was at DAMOP for a week. The principal activity during this stretch has been SteelyKid's softball, with a mad flurry of games at the end of the season to make up for all the rained-out games. This has been sort of stressful, but it also led to the greatest Google Photos animation ever, so... Anyway, softball was fun, providing the opportunity for me to take no end of photos with my telephoto lens, some of which are pretty good. SteelyKid was way into running the…

251-256/366: The Week in Photos

Getting caught up to today, a bunch of pictures from the past week (250/366 was the photo of Emmy's memorial shrub): 251/366: Wagons Ho! SteelyKid and The Pip taking turns pulling each other in their wagon. Last weekend we had gorgeous spring weather, so the kids were playing outside a bunch. They ended up getting out the wooden wagon SteelyKid got for her birthday some years back, and giving each other rides. This inevitably resulted in me being asked to tow them around the neighborhood, but they did return the favor... SteelyKid and The Pip pulling me on a wagon. (Photo by Kate.) They…

May 2015 Global Surface Temperatures Break Record

NOAA has released the data for average global surface temperature for the month of May. The number is 0.87 degrees C (1.57 degrees F) above the 20th century average for their data set. This is the highest value seen for the month of May since 1880, which is the earliest year in the database. The previous record value for may was last year. This year's May value is 0.08 degrees C (0.14 degrees F) higher than that. According to NOAA: The May globally-averaged land surface temperature was 2.30°F (1.28°C) above the 20th century average. This tied with 2012 as the highest for May in the 1880–…

Tropical Cyclone Chapala: Historic Storm

Update: Saturday Morning The storm is likely to start affecting land Sunday, and to make landfall late Sunday or some time Monday, probably as a Category I equivalent. Meanwhile this is the first tropical storm I've ever seen associated on the Internet with sites that seem to want to plant viruses on your computer. Stick with trusted sources, like the Wonder Blog or Yours Truly. Update Friday AM: TC Chapala is expected to be the strongest cyclone ever recorded in this part of the Indian Ocean basin. At present the storm is strengthening and is just under Category 5 strength (it will…

Different Views of our Closest Neighbor

"The distance is nothing; it is only the first step that is difficult." -Madame Marie du Deffand If you've got some solidly dark skies, you might notice -- in addition to the great field of thousands of stars -- a few faint, fuzzy objects. Visible with the naked eye (and captured with only a digital camera), this is the Andromeda Galaxy, as seen from Earth. At a "mere" 2.4 million light years from us, it is the closest large galaxy to us, by far. As far as our best telescopes can show us, Andromeda looks like this. Image credit: Mosaic by astropix.nl. And you don't want to use something…

Who will win the presidential race?

I've made my first stab at a prediction for the electoral college outcome for the US Presidential race, 2016. I use a roughly similar methodology as I did to accurately predict most of the Democratic primaries. However, since primaries are different from a general, the methodology had to be adapted. For the primaries, I eventually used this methodology. I used results form prior primaries to predict voter behavior by ethnicity, in order to predict final behavior. That worked because primaries are done a few states at a time, and because all the people being modeled were Democrats. It turns…

A Black Hole without a Singularity

All that matters, in the real world, is that something is both massive and compact enough so that, within a certain radius, light cannot escape from it. That is the astrophysical definition of a black hole. -me We've been talking about black holes a lot recently, and with good reason. They're fun to think about. These objects that collect matter, energy, light, and anything else that dares to cross its event horizon. It's only natural to ask what might lie beneath that dark area that no light ever escapes from. Image credit: mondolithic.com. In 1916, everyone assumed that whatever happened…

Hell Yeah, Hubble!

It wasn't all that long ago that I wrote a five-part series on Hubble's old camera, WFPC2. I call it "The Camera that Changed the Universe." Part 1 focused on Hubble showing us just how deep, rich, and full of wonder our Universe is. Let's remember how this happened. The first thing we did was take a patch of sky that was relatively empty. No bright stars, no large galaxies or clusters, no planetary nebulae, just a little tiny patch of black, empty sky. And then we point Hubble at it. And what do we do? We sit there. And wait. Collecting tiny, miniscule amounts of light. First, for minutes…

How stable are skyscrapers?

Or, to put it as one of my readers/questioners did, Why doesn't the Space Needle, a top-heavy skyscraper, ever tip over and fall? This is reasonable, and there's precedent for this. After all, the Leaning Tower of Pisa was falling over, and needed significant foundation-work just to keep it upright. Now, when you take something like the Space Needle, it looks like most of the weight is in the top: And it looks even more significant if you stand at the bottom and look up: Yet, in actuality, the Space Needle is one of the most stable structures ever, and will be one of the last buildings…

Big News about Black Holes!

This has been all over my inbox since the press release came out yesterday; it's been on slashdot (thanks Brian), it's been at space.com, and there's a mediocre writeup on Universe Today. What's the big news? Black Holes don't destroy information after all! What is this whole information thing, anyway? Take a look at all the normal stuff in the Universe: photons, protons, neutrons, and electrons, for example. They have lots of different properties each. They move around one another, they get bound and unbound from one another, they exert forces on one another, etc. They're aware of one…

How Come We Have A Moon?

But I didn't want one! Stop your whining, Earthlings. We have a serious question to answer, courtesy of Tamara: What’s the moon like below its surface, moving into the interior? And what’s the current thought on its formation? Well, we do know a lot about the Moon's insides the same way we know about the Earth's; just like the Earth has earthquakes, the Moon has moonquakes. These tell us about the Moon's interior. From back when we landed on the Moon, we planted the Apollo seismic experiments and saw 28 moonquakes. From these, we learned that the Moon has a crust about 60 km deep, a deep…

April Foo — oh, you were serious?

There was a paper posted today that I thought was an April Fools' Day joke, entitled Was There a Big Bang? Ha ha, thought I, of course there was; I just wrote all about it two weeks ago. But no, this is a legitimate paper, or at least is attempting to be. (There was even a brief write-up on Universe Today.) First off, let me tell you who the authors are: two retired scientists who used to work on space missions back in the 1970's. They were instrument guys, taking data and making sure the spacecraft ran. But as they got closer to retirement, they started proposing explanations for cosmology…

Death of Henry Morris

As many of you no doubt know by now, Henry Morris, founder of the Institute for Creation Research and the man most responsible for the revival of creationism in America, has died at age 87. By all accounts of those who met him, he was a gentleman of unfailing civility and good will. Sadly, he was also the purveyor of a great many lies and distortions foisted on a credulous group of followers. It was Morris who popularized such ridiculous claims as the famous "moon dust" argument, the Paluxy "man tracks" and much more. Perhaps more than any other, he mastered the art of the deceitful out of…

Gay Actors Playing Christians!

One of the great delights in reading the WorldNutDaily is watching them try to hype up completely pointless little teapot tempests into major controversies. Here's a perfect example from this morning's edition, complete with flashing graphic saying "Breaking News" and declaring it a "WND Exclusive" (which, as usual, means the article is so stupid that they're the only ones who would carry it, hence the exclusivity): Furor erupts as 'gay' plays Christian missionary in film (personally, I would have said "Fuhrer erupts", but that's just my twisted sense of humor). It seems that Chad Allen, an…

Mel Gibson on Evolution

Jim Lippard has some amusing excerpts from a Playboy interview (though I have it on good authority that Jim reads it only for the articles) with Mel Gibson. It's an interview that leaves you wondering why on earth someone would put such stupidity on display in public. To wit: PLAYBOY: So you can't accept that we descended from monkeys and apes? GIBSON: No, I think it's bullshit. If it isn't, why are they still around? How come apes aren't people yet? It's a nice theory, but I can't swallow it. There's a big credibility gap. The carbon dating thing that tells you how long something's been…

ID and SETI

One of the standard arguments we hear from ID proponents is the analogy between SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and ID. Their argument is that SETI researchers use the same basic premises and inferences that ID does in the search for radio signals from alien civilizations. It's an argument with a superficial appeal to it. After all, SETI researchers have to have some means of distinguishing between signals that are a result of natural processes (pulsars, for example) and signals that are the result of intelligence. The reality, though, is that the means of searching for…

The Importance of Family

My oldest and dearest friend, Rick, recently got the most unexpected news. Rick has never really had a family like the rest of us have. His biological father left his mother when she was pregnant with him and he has never met him (they now live in the same city and Rick knows where he lives, but has no interest in seeing him. I can't blame him.) and his mother died when he was only 4. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, who he grew up calling mom and dad. His grandma/mom died when he was around 11 or 12 and his grandfather was in poor health. He went to live with an aunt and moved to…

Bizarre Reasoning on Another Blog

The Great Separation recently posted an article with the headline "A New Hero Emerges and Plants Another 10 Commandments Monument". It then links to a Worldnetdaily article about Vernon Robinson, the Winston-Salem city council member who placed a 2000 pound monument with the Ten Commandments on it in front of city hall on Monday while it was closed for the Martin Luther King holiday. The monument was removed the next day at the city's expense because, obviously, Robinson didn't have the authority to put it there in the first place. And here's the part that really amuses me...it turns out…

Meet Lonesome George

I'm sure you already know the story of Lonesome George: And now, you can see "him" (as it were) at the American Museum of Natural History. From a press release: Lonesome George Will Be on View at American Museum of Natural History Museum will Oversee Preservation and Taxidermy of Famous Tortoise Lonesome George, the 100-year-old (estimated) Pinta Island tortoise (Chelonoidis abingdoni)—the last of his kind—who died in June 2012, will be preserved for posterity by the same expert taxidermy and conservation team that worked on the acclaimed renovation of the Jill and Lewis Bernard Family Hall…

Secular Woman Statement on Ron Lindsay's WIS-2 Comments

Secular Woman is an organization I'm proud to be a member of. SW has released a statement responding to the latest dust up in the Secular-Atheist-Skeptical Community in which CFI leader Ron Lindsay somehow got assigned the job of giving the welcoming/opening talk to the second Women in Secularism Conference, and made a big mess of it. Here's the first part of the statement, click through to read the rest: The Secular Woman Board of Directors, in consultation with our most active members and supporters, regrets having to express our organization’s deep concern over recent public statements…

Does sitting = death?

There is a study that shows that people who sit more per day die sooner, despite other factors such as overall health. It is reported in The Atlantic and written up here. From the study: Prolonged sitting is considered detrimental to health, but evidence regarding the independent relationship of total sitting time with all-cause mortality is limited. This study aimed to determine the independent relationship of sitting time with all-cause mortality. ... We linked prospective questionnaire data from 222 497 individuals 45 years or older ... to mortality data ... During 621 695 person-years…

Faith Healing Deaths in Oregon: New Law will Lift Protection of Religious Child Abusers

A child who is killed by an abusive parent is, in a sense, avenged by the law which seeks to identify, charge, try, convict, sentence and punish such a parent. Abuse might include something obvious like striking a child with a weapon, but it can also include starving the child to death or other forms of neglect, or failing to provide life-saving medical treatment. In other words, if your child is deathly ill and you don't take him or her to a medical facility or otherwise seek treatment, and the child dies, you are at fault. Unless, of course, you are all religious and shit. If your…

You can't trust anything anybody writes today!

You never can tell with Jonah Goldberg — everything he writes tends to be so stupid you're left thinking that he must be joking. He's just finished watching that new propaganda movie, Fitna, which portrays some of the worst atrocities of Islam — beheadings and terrorism and rioting and fatwas, etc. — and what does this bring to his feeble mind? Those awful, evil, odious atheists who put Darwin fish on their cars. After all, chopping heads off people is exactly equivalent to putting a bumper sticker on your Volvo. I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there's the smugness. The undeniable…

Danish Castle Road Trip

I spent last week in Denmark at a friendly, informative and rather unusual conference. The thirteenth Castella Maris Baltici conference (“castles of the Baltic Sea”) was a moveable feast. In five days we slept in three different towns on Zealand and Funen and spent a sum of only two days presenting our research indoors. The rest of the time we rode a bus around the area and looked at castle sites and at fortifications, secular buildings, churches and a monastery in four towns. Our Danish hosts had planned all of this so well that the schedule never broke down. Add to this that the food and…

July Pieces Of My Mind #2

I wonder how many head shops worldwide are called The Joint Venture. When friends of my kids cycle to our house, they always leave with their saddles yanked up a good bit. Because apparently other parents don't notice when the kids grow too tall for their bike saddle setting. Finally figured out how the fuck I can accordion sheets while sleeping. I sweat a lot. The sheet gets glued to me. When I turn over, I'm like a big roller moving the sheet to one side and bunching it up next to me. After rolling over I often end up on top of the damp warm wad of layered fabric, steam ironing it with my…

Principles Of Wall Erosion, And Our Pulley

Medieval walls are usually shell walls, where you construct an inner and outer shell of finely fitted masonry while filling the space between them with a jumble of smaller stones and mortar. Usually the facing stones don't project much into the core. When the wall is allowed to erode, once the cap stones have fallen off, the facing starts to peel from the core one ashlar or brick at a time from the top down. Before the resulting rubble layer's top (rising) reaches the level of the wall's eroding top (descending), halting erosion, you'll see a ruinous wall that is thick and smooth-faced in its…

The vegans arent going to kill us! Thanks to a GMO virus ;)

Crazy random happenstance considering the post earlier this week on 'religious' vegans refusing the influenza vaccine in hospitals: Flublok, a Flu Vaccine, Wins F.D.A. Approval The vaccine, developed by a small company called Protein Sciences, is made with a process that does not require the virus to be grown in chicken eggs, as is now generally done. I had no idea this was in the works-- No insider info, just great news, for vegans, people with egg allergies, and YOU! Some folks figured out a way to make The Flu Vaccine (a mix of three different influenza variants) in an insect cell line.…

OKC Atheists on CBS Sunday Morning News

We were all so excited for this opportunity, but it wasnt supposed to be like this. It wasnt supposed to be a piece on atheists, sandwiched between images of people mourning over slaughtered children and school officials. But thats what it is. And its fine-- CBS didnt do a hack piece on us or anything... It was just supposed to be a happy "YAY! GO US **HIGH-FIVE**" moment, not a 'Well I stopped crying because I quit watching TV, Facebook, Twitter, Newsfeeds, and now Im crying again' moment. Murdered people, devastated communities, were not supposed to be our 'in' to talking about atheism.…

Another HIV Denier dead

Via jonnyneviripine: Maria Papagiannidou died last Sunday. Another very public and active denialist has kicked the bucket; sad but predictable. Her face and "story" is all over the internet. You can read more about her there. I know she contacted some people I know about starting HAART but presumably she left it a bit late. She and her husband did everything within their considerable powers to rubbish HIV science, question the medicine and scare people away from treatment: for that she's now paid the ultimate price. Maria Papagiannidou (or ÎαÏία ΠαÏαγιαννίδοÏ, if youre Greek),…

Links for 2012-01-19

What I Wish Wikipedia and Others Were Saying About SOPA/PIPA The blackout and other protests today are the result of a long, sustained, full-court press against legislation that's being pushed through despite widespread opposition. Yet, Lamar Smith and many other members of the U.S. House and Senate have been plowing ahead full-steam. Why? Yes, in part because they're well-funded by the entertainment industry, and it wants the bill passed, but also because they think they can. The dirty little secret of SOPA is not that the entertainment industry has far more influence than it ought to have…

Links for 2012-01-11

Confessions of a Community College Dean: What If Colleges Ran Attack Ads? The rise of Super PACs and the glorious display of democracy that is the Republican primary season got me thinking about attack ads in other contexts. What if colleges ran attack ads? How Many Stephen Colberts Are There? - NYTimes.com he new Colbert has crossed the line that separates a TV stunt from reality and a parody from what is being parodied. In June, after petitioning the Federal Election Commission, he started his own super PAC -- a real one, with real money. He has run TV ads, endorsed (sort of) the…

The Born Equivocation

Last week's post about the Many-Worlds variant in "Divided by Infinity" prompted the usual vigorous discussion about the merits of the Many-Worlds Interpretation. This included the common objection that we don't know how to obtain the probability of measurement outcomes in the Many-Worlds Interpretation. This is one of those Deep Questions that lots of people expend lots of time talking about, and I can never quite understand what the problem is. How do we obtain the probability of events in the Many-Worlds Interpretation? Using the Born rule, of course: the probability of a particular…

Links for 2011-05-06

Memoirs from Africa: Paring Down a List « Easily Distracted "In selecting works, I've decided to go for the widest stylistic range I can think of and the widest range of settings, interests and authors. [...] It also provides a surplus of certain kinds of books that I find tedious because they follow such a strong template and are so driven by market fads: memoirs of white women who grew up on African farms that followed on Alexandra Fuller's great memoir of life in Rhodesia and now memoirs of child soldiers and survivors of Darfur. But I think that's an interesting kind of reading in its…

Fieldwork in Tingstad and Östra Husby

Frag of a lion-shaped badge with a rivet used to fix it to some surface. Photograph Tobias Bondesson. Another day of fruitful fieldwork, with friendly landowners and pretty good weather. We started out with 20 man-hours in the fields around a fortified hilltop settlement in Tingstad parish. The hillfort was trial-trenched in 1903, yielding the richest finds known to date from a 3rd and 4th century settlement in Ãstergötland. I was hoping that we might run into something interesting of 5th century date. No such luck: our oldest datable find all day was a piece of a 9th century copper-alloy…

Children of the Posthole

Up until a thousand years ago, almost all buildings in Scandinavia through the ages had roof-supporting posts dug into the ground. Postholes are lovely things: they're deep enough for at least the bottom end to survive heavy ploughing, they trap a lot of interesting stuff while a house is being built - lived in - torn down, and their layout across the site lets you reconstruct the building in great detail. When you machine off the ploughsoil from a site and find a posthole building foundation, it is common to mark the postholes with coloured sticks, paper plates or shaving foam and…

Uppland, Sweden, 2350 BC

My buddy Niklas Ytterberg recently sent me an impressive excavation report in Swedish. Constrained by the field-archaeological paradox, he dug a really nondescript Neolithic settlement site at Djurstugan near Tierp, Uppland in 2003. Then he somehow found funding to subject the measly finds to a battery of innovative scientific analyses, extracting loads of interesting information. For one thing, Niklas got the province's earliest ever radiocarbon dates for grain: 2400-2200 cal BC (barley) and 2470-2340 cal BC (wheat). The Funnel Beaker ("TRB") culture, known for its farming, arrives in…

Beelzebufo: best frog name ever

It means "devil toad," and it was a 10 pound monster that lived 70 million years ago, in what is now Madagascar. It's huge, and judging by its living cousins, was a voracious predator. If it were alive today, it would probably be eating your cats and puppies. In other words, this was an awesome toad, and I wish I had one for a pet. Here's what it looks like, with some very large extant toads for comparison. Beelzebufo ampinga, Late Cretaceous of Madagascar. (A) Skull reconstruction showing parts preserved (white areas, Left) and distribution of pit-and-ridge ornament (stippling, Right). (B…

An Interesting Error In Timmy's analysis of Equilar's Calculations Of CEO Pay

Well, interesting to me anyway. As to whether it is an error or not, I'll let you judge. Please do attempt to judge. Comments saying "I hate Timmy" are about as much use as "Al Gore is fat". The story so far: Timmy says Contrary To AP/Equilar's Research The Top US CEOs Did Not Average $11.5 Million Last Year and his reason for saying that is accounting for stock options. For example The top-paid CEO last year was Thomas Rutledge of Charter Communications, at $98 million. The vast majority of that came from stock and option awards included as part of a new five-year employment agreement, and…

More hot bumping action

Lents again; here's a link to 2016 if you want to re-live the past. It was a great week, full of thrills and excitement. Caius weren't up to it (as prefigured by Mays) and were caught by Downing on the first day; Maggie patiently bumped Pembroke then Caius to get their shot at Downing on day 3. Regrettably, Downing's rudder strings broke at the top of the reach1, so we didn't get a clean kill; but LMBC were clearly faster (see for example this). Jesus rowed over as women's head; Clare rose to second. These are my videos, mostly here for my reference. But first, a nice pic of the top crews…

Proving Bethe Wrong: On Theory Inspiring Experiment

As research for the work-in-progress, I recently read Luis Alvarez's autobiography, Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist, which contains a passage that I was reminded of last night while reading another book, that seems like an amusing follow-up to yesterday's rant about theory and experiment. This is from the end of the chapter where he joined Ernest Lawrence's Radiation Lab at Berkeley, and found he needed to get up to speed on a lot of physics he'd missed learning at the University of Chicago: The other important component to my self-help program was a detailed study of three articles that…

Links for 2012-06-04

In which we look at a prize for science blogging, a new book club, and the unhappy situation of associate professors. ------------ 3quarksdaily: Sean Carroll to Judge 4th Annual 3QD Science Prize As usual, this is the way it will work: the nominating period is now open, and will end at 11:59 pm EST on June 9, 2012. There will then be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra…

Outland It's Not: Billionaires Plan Asteroid Mining

I'm about a week late talking about this, but I've mostly resigned myself to not doing really topical blogging these days. Anyway, there was a lot of excitement last week over the announcement that an all-star team of nerd billionaires is planning to do commercial asteroid mining. (The post title is a reference to the Sean Connery movie, not the post-Bloom County comic.) I find it kind of amusing that this made the news while I'm doing retrospective blog posts (the next of which is coming), which have turned up a bunch of old posts where I say skeptical things about space in general. So I…

What Am I Doing Here?

Yesterday's paper sessions offered eleven presentations. I almost fell asleep several times. This was not mainly because four of the papers were in German and French which I have a hard time understanding when spoken quickly. The main reason was that few of my colleagues know how to perform an engaging presentation. Yes, you need to perform it. So here are a few suggestions. Never ever read a prepared text out loud. Speak from brief notes or a slide show. It is better to have five lines of summary text in ball-point pen on the back of your hand than a manuscript. Do you have reason to…

Axes and Grain for the Neolithic Gods

Sven Gunnar Broström, known as Stone Gunnar. In June of last year I reported on my visit to a small research excavation directed by my Fornvännen boss Lars Larsson at Botkyrka golf club south of Stockholm. The Stensborg site is highly unusual by the standards of this part of the country: a place near the sea shore where some of the region's first farmers congregated almost 6000 years ago and did some really weird shit. Sven Gunnar Broström, PhD h.c., one of Sweden's most active and respected self-taught archaeologists, discovered it in the late 60s. Simply through fieldwalking he and…

New watch, old watch, not the same

A break from The Deep. In New watch, old watch, still the same I described the truely fascinating tale of me buying a replacement Garmin Forerunner 110. A few weeks ago I was faced with the replacement having the strap broken in a second place, and the glass having cracked when I incautiously thrutched a chimney having tied the watch to the back of my harness. I put sellotape across the crack, but it was ugly and it clearly wasn't going to stay waterproof on a long term basis. I very nearly reflexively bought my fourth 110 (a bargain at about £80-90 now) but paused long enough to think of its…

Ukraine: Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation

Um, so. Exciting times in the Ukraine seems to have got even more exciting. Is it possible to hope for a Happy Ending? If people will Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation then yes [*]. The Prez is fled, and the Beeb says Ukraine crisis: Crowds descend on Yanukovych house where they find the usual opulence; somewhat reminiscent of Gaddafi; I was cautiously hopeful then but I'll hope the Ukrainians manage better. Lenin statues toppled in protest Aunty continues, which has ominous echoes of the disaster area that we made of Iraq; not that the statue-toppling was the problem…