Keys Corner

We’ve added an extra page with a list of hotels that we have visited and enjoyed in the last few years. I’m still playing around with the page – it is built from a mySQL database which also contains photos of the hotels, but right now, I haven’t suceeded in reading the pictures out without damaging them – they display as ASCII text strings! If we add many more hotels to the page, I will also have to add selection by country, so that the list displayed doesn’t get too long.

Update:
I’ve solved the problem of storing the pictures, so we are adding some thumbnails to the list.

The following are real words, but when do you use which one?

affect/effect
compliment/complement
loose/lose
principal/principle
reign/rein

Well, if you’re not sure, you’re in good company according to the Guardian!

In the UK, frequent traffic jams on motorways are causing the Government to consider implementing the American idea of having dedicated lanes for cars carrying two or more persons (with fines for lone drivers caught in the wrong lane). Friends of the Earth is concerned that the scheme will be used as a reason to widen roads to create the new lanes.

There is an alternative, being tried in a country, which on occassion has seen traffic come to a grinding halt on motorway stretches up to 100 km long in the summer vacations. And where traffic jams on the motorways in the heavily populated parts of the country are common.

In Germany, a pilot traffic-forecasting scheme sponsored by the EU in Nordrhein-Westfalen, (covering 2250 km of Autobahn in the area roughly surrounding the line connecting Köln (Cologne), Essen and Bielefeld), offers 30 minute and 60 minute forecasts on the web of where traffic jams are going to occur.

It has been so successful, that some 300 000 people per day use it to plan their trips, which in turn has been enough, to make the forecasts measurably less reliable. The operators, worried that 3G mobile phones will mean even more people using the service and lowering its accuracy further, are now considering making less detailed information available on their web site, to force drivers to use more varied strategies for avoiding the jams.

A new nuclear reactor in a Sydney suburb, which will be commisioned in 2006, is to get a steel safety-net to stop small aircraft being crashed into the reactor.

The net has been criticized by Green Peace, because it is only able to stop a plane the size of Cessna, and not a Jumbo jet. In response, Craig Pearce, from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), has said that based on scientific tests it is unlikely a large aircraft could achieve such an angle to hit the reactor.

Sounds a bit like a spin-control attempt to blind the listener with science doesn’t it? If a terrorist wants to release contaminents from a reactor, he’s going to put the plane at any angle he wants, to hit near enough to the reactor to damage it. He doesn’t even need a direct hit on the reactor itself. On the other hand, at least the Aussies are thinking about the possible impact of terrorism on nuclear installations – Europe is crammed full of elderly nuclear reactors built long before the Al Qaida terrorists were born, and there seems to be precious little being done to protect them against attack.