The environmental lobby often laments mankind’s unfortunate obsession with the short term. People, by and large, don’t tend to think ahead (two-thirds of Britons lack wills, for example, leaving them unprepared for one of life’s few real certainties). Politicians, with one eye always fixed on surviving the next election, are particularly guilty of short-termism. That [...]
Elephants are in the news at the moment:
Elephants can differentiate between different tribes and different types of humansBees repel elephantsElephants seem to like revenge
The run up to Christmas seems to start earlier each year. One way to tell it’s Christmas in Germany is when everyone starts eating Lebkuchen (gingerbread), which comes in many different forms, but the most common is as round pieces of gingerbread baked on a thin wafer of white oblate, like in the picture above. [...]
Would you attempt this in a Lada 4×4?
(Via DarkRoastedBlend)
PDP-8 front panel
No, I didn’t own a DEC PDP-8, but when I studied Engineering at university, this was the first computer I ever wrote a program for. The PDP-8 was one of the first mini-computers produced (from 1965 onwards); it had 4096 12-bit words of main memory. And with a list price of $18000 in [...]
Russia and the USA have the world’s highest populations of prisoners [PDF from the British Government, 116 KB size]. Russia has 685 per 100,000 people of the national population locked away, followed by the USA, which has 645 prisoners per 100,000. Those figures are around 6 times the rates for most countries in Europe, by [...]
When Palm announced the Centro smart phone recently, I was skeptical about whether it would be any good – the phone has a full keyboard (good) but the keys are even smaller than those of the Treo (bad?) which I use today. I would like to replace my Treo 650 because it is quite bulky [...]
Did we throw away the best weapon against malaria in the mid-1960’s? The New Scientist has an article on how, having nearly eradicated malaria betweeb 1958 and 1963, funds for the eradication were stopped one year earlier than would have been necessary to finish the job. Malaria today kills nearly as many people each year [...]
We found this recipe a couple of days ago on Simply Recipes and tried it this evening. It’s easy to make and very tasty – so it’s been added to our (non-computerized) recipe collection!
John Bolton, arch-neocon and former US ambassador to the United Nations called for Iran to be bombed yesterday:Mr Bolton, who was addressing a fringe meeting organised by Lord (Michael) Ancram, said that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was “pushing out” and “is not receiving adequate push-back” from the west.
“I don’t think the use of military [...]
