Yearly Archives: 2005

Mail science

Posted on May 17, 2005 by acb

Some readers may have been puzzled by the <mailscience> tags I put on the previous entry. I hope the picture below, from Monday’s Daily Mail, will spare me typing a longer explanation. Continue reading →

Posted in Journalism | 1 Comment

The formula for everything

Posted on May 16, 2005 by acb

Some wonderful properties have been discovered in the eye of a small and poisonous jellyfish, and you want the straight version, PZ Myers has it. But what struck me first was a description of the jellyfish from the lead researcher, … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Blather | Comments Off on The formula for everything

worse than Biggles

Posted on May 14, 2005 by acb

Anyone who cares about Christianity and literature should be following Fred Clark’s weekly deconstruction of the Left Behind novels, and this week’s entry is a classic. Left Behind is filled with moments of accidental honesty in which L&J admit that … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in God | Comments Off on worse than Biggles

Good God, Biggles!

Posted on May 14, 2005 by acb

From page 247 of Biggles in the South Seas comes an unforgettable image … Those of you reading this on an aggregator are just going to have to guess. Continue reading →

Posted in Blather | 2 Comments

Local services

Posted on May 13, 2005 by acb

John Naughton follows up this Register story and discovers that Google Maps lists four brothels in Cambridge: the Medical Research Council, BBC Radio Cambridge, one pub and one publisher. Inspired by this research, I tried checking for brothels in Saffron … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Net stories | 4 Comments

Pigs kill more people than sharks

Posted on May 12, 2005 by acb

A great quote from Bruce Schneier: One of the things I routinely tell people is that if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. By definition, ‘news’ means that it hardly ever happens. If a risk is in the … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Journalism | 13 Comments

A new scam

Posted on May 12, 2005 by acb

This phishing technique is new to me. Nowadays you get lots of scams in which they appear to have printed the URL in plain text, but hovering the mouse over it shows that it goes to a completely different URL. … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in nördig | 3 Comments

Not quite “but for the grace of God”

Posted on May 11, 2005 by acb

When first I read that Michelle Delio, a prolific freelance for Wired News, had been caught making up sources, I felt a twinge of sympathy, as anyone would who has had stories fact-checked and legalled to death. But the report … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Journalism | 3 Comments

the Cream reunion

Posted on May 10, 2005 by acb

Crossroads was the first music that I remember paralysing me with joy and the simultaneous knowledge that this joy was inextricably sad. Until then I had listened to music largely as a tribal thing. At my then school I was … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Blather | 2 Comments

Apologies for Absence

Posted on May 10, 2005 by acb

I went over to Stockholm for the weekend, and was effectively offline, since the hotel had no wifi, only a public terminal. It was extremely disconcerting to see how much more standard European the city had become. I found the … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Travel notes | 2 Comments