Car Crash

A bad, bad interview that you can listen to embedded on my site. Fancy eh?



More information on this here.

The Crunch

This is the first feature I have read that has really hit home just how hard average people are being affected by the credit crunch.

Oh, so close

Taken from this: 'Alonso clocked one minute 45.654 seconds to edge Hamilton by just 0.098secs, despite the Englishman leading for most of the session. The day's first session saw Hamilton narrowly beat title rival Felipe Massa by just 0.080secs.'

Are the words, 'just' and 'edge' and 'narrowly' really necessary? All F1 seems to come down to impossibly small margins in time so it seems pointless to continually emphasis the differences as if they are somehow significant. Yes it's literally true he narrowly beat him, but it's always narrow, isn't it?

Tasteless

The ad tagline here is tasteless anyway, but the placing it here in Stockwell is particularly poor.

Credit to thelondonunderground blog for publishing this first - a very interesting blog for anyone based in the Londoninium area, or Londo, if Boris gets his way, apparently.

Clowns

Blooming 'elf and safety. Huh, wass the world comin' to eh? Can't even let some f-ing clowns blow their friggen trumpets. It's political correctness gone mad. New Labour? These circus clowns will never outdo their counterparts in Whitehall. They're the real clowns!

Oh sorry don't know what came over me. Although it is a bit of a rum do when clowns can't blow some trumpets because it's classed a live musical performance and therefore requires a different licence.

Tie game

In the words of Homer Simpson: 'Democracy doesn't work'. Very intriguing article about the potential political mess that could result from a 269-269 tie in the presedential elections.

The case for...

Interesting article here on why books will never die out, even with the invention of fancy book readers, that has a lot of similarities with some of the arguments used to claim why newspapers and magazines will never die out. Probably.

Tasty

I wish this happened when I nip out to buy bread.

Great ad.

Facelift

So Facebook is enforcing the new style / layout on everyone regardless of feedback. Interesting development but one that is perhaps not that unsurprising.

The BBC's new layout and design is a massive improvement on their old one - whenever you click on an old story the lack of white space and 'squashed' feel is immediate - yet on its release I remember lots of people complaining it was rubbish and so on. It's just change. Facebook's new layout is actually much better, or at least, not any worse. It only takes a few hours on the site to get used to it, and it's not like people don't spend that kind of time on the site.

All these people setting up 'protest' groups against the new Facebook design are never going to stop the evolution of a site where, as the news story says, 30 million people from around 40 million users have switched to the new style without any fuss.

Last on the subject

As you can tell from my last two posts I am quite fascinated by the Cern stuff. So much so I've written another Guardian Blog on the topic. You can read it here.

Topical

A great Google variation.

Fast

Tomorrow the world may end, probably not, but it might. CERN will be sending the first ‘beam’ through the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). You can find out more about what this actually means elsewhere. The interesting point is that the particles will be sent at such a speed around the ring, which is 27km (17M) in length, they will complete that distance in 90 microseconds. It could do 11,000 revolutions of that distance in one second. Put another way it will be traveling at 187,000 miles per second.

It’s amazing that humans have developed to such a degree we can achieve such feats of engineering, in an incredibly short space of time. The technological revolution started in the 1950s, perhaps sporadically since the 1900s, and while we’ve always been inventing and evolving to improve our lives (mostly) – stone age to iron age, agricultural to industrial – this specific advancement in technology is probably the fastest yet known and is increasing at a speed that is almost exponential. Where will it lead?


Image: the location of the 'tunnel' through which the particles are sent.

Aaaaaaa

Great review.

Just browsing

Google launched its brand new web browser today, called Chrome. On the main page to 'sign up' it demonstrates one of its shiny features, the saving of your favourite web pages in mini-window tabs. What's odd is that, as you can make out (just), their favourite 'example windows' are Google maps, Blogger (owned by Google), Google, iGoogle, Google Mail, Welcome to Google front page, Youtube (owned by Google), Orkut (social networking site run by, you've guessed it, Google) and the top middle one is called 'Sally's Recipes'. Which just seems a little out of context compared with the others.

Melttiinnngggg

The new BBC 'Breaking News' image is a bit odd. It seems as if it's rising up out of the mists of news, a mythical beast of some great importance.

Practice what you preach

Straying into the American presidential elections is hardly necessary, it’s been covered to oblivion since February but the news that Sarah Palin’s, McCain's running mate (how nice he has someone to go jogging with), daughter is pregnant has that classic smack of political hypocrisy, on many levels.

McCain’s campaign has said, according to the BBC story, "Senator McCain's view is this is a private family matter” – spokesman for John McCain, Steve Schmidt. Barack Obama said, "I think people's families are off-limits, and people's children are especially off-limits.”

But apparently Sarah Palin has been bringing her children on stage at election rallies – no doubt to promote a ‘healthy, American family’ to the voters. So if she can use them for positives, why can’t they be criticised? It’s not the children’s fault of course – they may well have no wish to go on stage, but it’s naïve and hypocritical for the politicians to urge the media away from focusing on the children when a negative story comes along concerning them, which obviously reflects on the parents in some way, if at the same time they are being used to promote a certain image of positivity.

The second problem is the pregnancy itself. Palin is a well known, or ‘rabid’ as some have been terming it, anti-abortionist. This means her daughter will be having the baby, at 17 – but this is okay because the Palins are a loving family you see. "Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realise very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family."

I doubt the daughter and ‘the young man’ want to get married, but are merely doing so to make the pregnancy a little bit less embarrasing. If Palin were such a great mother perhaps she would have explained to her daughter the dangers of getting pregnant at 17 to a 'young man'. You’d expect that as a matter of course from any ‘normal’ parent but for the governor of Alaska, who is now involved in the presidential elections – where much preaching about morals will be handed out – to be in this predicament doesn’t come across very well.