Monthly Archives: August 2007

Brief Lit Crit

I’m seventy pages into Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun but that’s all right because I only started last night and I am writing at the breakfast table. It’s very good indeed. Go out and buy it if you have any … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Literature | Comments Off on Brief Lit Crit

It’s a miracle, not a pension

The Times of India had the excellent idea of finding out what happened to the woman who was meant to have been miraculously cured by a miracle blessed by Mother Teresa. There are, or course, disputes about the cure. Medical … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in God | 5 Comments

Bundle of stuff

Connotea — a sort of deli.cio.us for scientists, which picks up bibliographic information from sites like pubmed when it stores bookmarks therefrom. If you are doing something else while running a registry optimiser, you, too, can set all your personal … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Blather, nördig | 8 Comments

Reading Jared Diamond makes me hopeless

I’ve been wanting to read Collapse for ages. It’s perhaps a quarter too long, where he tries to be encyclopaedic; but it has some really first-class, thought-provoking parts, at the end of which I am even more pessimistic than before. … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Blather | Comments Off on Reading Jared Diamond makes me hopeless

Low Score in TCR defender

The rules of Tottenham Court Road Defender are simple: you start somewhere near Leicester Square,and walk up Charing Cross Road, then Tottenham Court Road, between the book shops, the camera shops, the musical instrument shops, and the emporia of electronic … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Travel notes | Comments Off on Low Score in TCR defender

The RA Summer Exhibition

Went into town yesterday to see the RA summer exhibition: there is an entire wall of David Hockney, quite shockingly bad. Other bad things include a set of three small sculptures showing Jesus crucified on a wooden aeroplane instead of … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Blather | 1 Comment

I hate software (rollup post)

I was trying to install the Flickr plugin for MT and got a message about being out of disk space. It turns out that in two months, 220 MB of spam had silted up in the inbox where I kept … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Software | Comments Off on I hate software (rollup post)

A bunch of stuff

I have fiddled a little with the front page, after Tim Bray complained that he could not find a feed on it. I think this should work; there are also some photos down the right hand side to brighten things … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Housekeeping | Comments Off on A bunch of stuff

Gloriously batty

piece by Freeman Dyson, which I found when catching up with the NYRB: he foresees personal biotech kits, analogous to personal computers. The first step in this direction was already taken recently, when genetically modified tropical fish with new and … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Science without worms | 3 Comments

Hello Monday!

Should I put a flickr widget here instead of the archives? It seems to make sense to me. Continue reading

Posted in Pictures | 4 Comments