BBC Radio 4 have a programme called the Moral Maze in which a small team of people question expert witnesses and discuss the moral aspects of a particular topical issue. I don’t usually listen because it typically produces ‘more heat than light’ with people shouting things like ‘It is me…
Category: Misc
The ‘other’ always needed in any classification.
My Spelling ‘Issues’
Someone just handed me a photocopy with this poem on. It hits the nail on the head as far as my English is concerned. Spelling “Eye halve a spelling chequer It came with my pea sea It plainly marquees four my revue Miss steaks eye kin Knot Sea Eye strike…
Wikipedia – Donate Now
Wikipedia is running its annual fund raising campaign. If you rely on Wikipedia to make you look cleverer than you really are (like I do) then it is time to flex your plastic friend and give it some dosh.
Nice Take On Drugs
I used to be ambivalent about drug legalisation then I heard this great polemic from Ed Vulliamy (author of Amexica: War Along the Borderline) on Start the Week on BBC Radio 4. I set off vaguely with this idea that is prevalent in liberal circles, you know, just add instant legalisation and the…
Which is the biggest word?
Look at the Wordle above. It was produced from Tweets of all the Greater Manchester Police incidents over a 24 hour period. I pinched it from this BBC new article. What is remarkable is that the article does not mention the biggest word in the Wordle. It looks to me that…
Pension Pondering
I came home the other day to a letter informing me that my pensions appeal had not succeeded. It is a long and boring story. I have a ‘Classic’ civil service pension that I am not allowed to pay into even though I am currently in a pensionable civil service…
Is it worth developing Smart Phone Web Apps?
This quote “‘Expect to see smart phones accounting for a growing proportion of the wider mobile phone market as they become increasingly affordable to more customers,’ said Canalys Senior Analyst, Pete Cunningham. ‘By 2013, smart phones will grow to represent over 27% of shipments worldwide, with the proportion in some…
The Nuts Are Off!
I have decided to close down comments on the pine nut blog post. I have been meaning to do this for some time but people seemed to find it very useful, or even therapeutic, to be able to express their feelings and I figured I was providing something of a service…
More Relations
These are some of my blood relations in 1906. The two guys on the right hand end of the second row down are Chadwicks and the first guy on the front row is a Nicklin.
Why We Need Proportional Representation
This is the graph you will not see presented often in the media – I had to make it up myself. It shows the proportion of the vote and the proportion of seats in the House of Commons both plotted together from the results of the May 2010 election (649…
On reaching 1,000 Comments.
My blog post “Bitter taste after eating for days – caused by pine nuts?” has just past the 1,000 comments mark. Today’s count is 1,013. I have been thinking of trying to get funding to research a DNA barcoding system for pine nuts. I am sitting here surrounded by people…
Fish Oils Contradictions
This page on the NHS England website claims that eating fish oils (long chain Omega-3 I assume rather than any Omega-3) help prevent depression. It says: Omega-3 fatty acid Research has shown a link between the amount of a fish people in different countries eat and the level of depression….
What do genus names mean to us?
Just doing some SQL against the Catalogue of Life ’09 database and came up with some figures unrelated to what I set out to do. I can’t decide if they are useful or not so they are going here. Species % of species Genera % of genera Species in monotypic…
Identifiers, Identity and Me
The nice thing about blogging is that you get to mix-n-match your thoughts together in a way that you couldn’t do in the constituant parts of your life. This post brings together the notion of Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs) from my world of work and Buddhist notions of identity. It…
Mukking Marvelous
My Mukka coffee maker just arrived. It is great! It is like a regular stove top espresso maker but you put milk in the top and it has a clever-valve-thing that froths the milk as it makes the espresso thus creating a cappuccino. Bit tricky to get used to at…
My Maternal Grandparents Wedding
My maternal grandparents were in the Salvation Army. This is their wedding in 1928. It is worth clicking on the image and having a closer look. It is one of those photographs where you feel you can connect with the people in it. I wonder why it has that feel…
Now PESI Project Officer
Today I start a new job at the Natural History Museum London. For the next two years I’ll be working on Pan European Species Infrastructure as the project officer for Work Package 4 – which is all about standards for exchange of taxonomic data between databases in Europe. I’ll still…
John Simpson: Not Quite Arrogant
When I was impressionable and even more naive than now I was warned not to trust anyone who started a story with “When I was in …”. This was tremendously good advice. For some reason the society I swim in rates travel above all else and fails to see it…
St Andrew’s Day Poem
Joscelyn (8 years old) came home with an assignment to write a poem about Scotland because it was near St Andrew’s day. The instructions on what was required were a bit confusing. She has a piece of paper with SCOTLAND written vertically down the edge so each line began with…
An evening with Jo Barker’s Tapestries
I spent a fun evening recently helping Jo Barker photograph her tapestries for an upcoming catalogue and exhibition. Her work is amazing. This one is my favourite of the session. Jo’s exhibition is at the Scottish Gallery and opens on 7th January.
View From Scott Monument Zoomified
I wonder if it is more satisfying to zoomify this kind of image rather than have it as a panorama.
Nuts sent off
The nice people at Julian Graves wrote straight back to my email and sent me a post paid envelope so that I could send the nuts back to them for analysis. Lets wait and see what they say. BTW Julian Graves has be bought by Holland and Barrett. The bitter…
More Nuts
The bitter taste in my mouth continues so my investigation goes on. The suspect ‘baby pine nuts’ came from Julian Graves store in Livingston a couple of weeks ago. I remember they had both regular and small pine nuts and we bought the small but as I quickly discarded the…
Bitter taste after eating for days – caused by pine nuts?
I started to get a bitter taste in my mouth after eating. At first I thought I was going to die so I Googled on it – how many people a minute go through that process! My scatter gun approach to diagnosis came up with a series of suggestions. I…
Another bleeding lefty
Well I got a link to a US political on line test and I am just another bleeding lefty – ah well no great surprise there then though I would describe myself as a liberal… Take the test if you like. Link at the bottom. You are a Social Liberal…