Monthly Archives: April 2006

Young people today

For a really jarring post-modern experience, you want to read this while listening to this. They are both improbable translations of the same song. If you click on the second link in an open-plan office, you will probably lose your … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Blather | Comments Off on Young people today

Plagiarism

I was impressed by the arguments put forward on Language Log that the Harvard student whose novel with a silly name has been withdrawn may well be as innocent as she claims. The longest consecutive stretch of plagiarised words from … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Journalism | 2 Comments

Unbudget flights

It’s been years since I flew a full-price airline anywhere in Europe. This is partly because i live only about fifteen miles from Stansted, Ryanair’s hub airport; partly because the cheap airlines are so very much cheaper if they are … Continue reading Continue reading

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In Praise of OUP

The news that OUP have done a deal with British libraries1 to make their online reference works available made me rummage around for a piece I wrote in 1996 for British Wired,  when Oliver Morton and Sean Geer were running … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Net stories | 2 Comments

A better vat for the brain in your life

An astonishing story from the New Scientist: an engineer at the University of Illinois has built a prototype retinal cell out of silicon. The idea is to replace damaged cells in human retinae with something that is a lot better … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Science without worms | 1 Comment

Ongoing improvements

Jeremy Henty asked in comments what was the God and Darwin conference. It’s at the British Academy, on Friday this week, and it is sold out. In fact, it was someone in the comments here who told me about it, … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Blather | 1 Comment

Test …

this should be an entry on the sqlite backend. Ha ha! Movable sodding type: consider yourself pwnzed. I strangle Mena Trott in the intestines of Larry Wall and I dance! Continue reading

Posted in nördig | 3 Comments

Some short silly links

The man whose idea of fun is picking through slug shit to find what they’ve been eating. With his son. The Peter McKay column in the Mail claims — I can’t find this anywhere online — that the in-house beauticians … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Blather | 2 Comments

small spam tweak

It occurs to me that there is one very simple adjustment could be made to any spam filter: if a message contains “u” and “ur” as separate words, it’s not from anyone I know or want to know. How to … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in nördig | 8 Comments

Final note on SQlite and MT

They are two wholly loathsome bits of software. I’m sure it’s possible to run a Movable Type blog on sqlite if you start from scratch, but once you have a couple of thousand entries, it’s impossible to copy everything over. … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in nördig | Comments Off on Final note on SQlite and MT