Would You Put Your Hand in the Large Hadron Collider?

Just brilliant...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NMqPT6oKJ8

There We Went, There We Went, There We Went!

..oh dear

Every Bart Simpson Blackboard Line - Ever!

My favourite is ... well, you decide for yourself

http://www.work-club.com/blackboard/

Do Not Read This Book!

That's two book reviews in as many weeks, but don't panic this isn't going to become a book review thingy.

I've been really looking forward to getting hold of the new Hitchhikers Guide installment 'And Another Thing' written by Eoin Colfer (of Artemis Fowl fame). Douglas Adams' widow Jane gave the go ahead for Colfer to be the author to continue the trilogy and I was delighted at this. I'm a big kid at heart, and have read all of the Artemis Fowl books. They are fabulous immersive tales, with that classic sci-fi winning formula of a well-formed other world. Aimed at teenagers, and as I have never really grown up that makes them perfect.

OK lets cut to it, this preamble could go on and on - the book stinks! I didn't get past the half way point before I gave up trying to make sense of the characters who changed personality every second page, the rambling going nowhere in particular disjointed narrative, and lets not fool ourselves that there is a plot to follow, because there isn't. And why on earth did Colfer feel the need to pay sickly homage to past characters whilst at the same time giving them different personalities and functions. An example is Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged who travelled the universe insulting people. Now Wowbagger is suddenly a super being who insults whole planets at a time, and then he doesn't insult people any more. Except Zaphod, who has become contrite, or Arthur who has become terribly assertive and uses space slang, although he is still tea-obsessed just to let the readers know he is the same character. But again, he isn't.

This is a mess of a book, and it will be going back to the library early. It fails miserably as a Hitchhikers episode, and even more so as stand alone new work. Bah!

Not Just Me...

By the way, I just spent half an hour clicking on "next blog". Turns out nobody has anything interesting to say.

Hi ho.

This year has been a year of learning so far for me - and I'm enjoying it!

I've spent my life wallowing in knowledge, determinedly learning no practical skills. My father was an incredibly capable man, and could do pretty much anything he turned his hand to. I can recall clearly him bringing home an old gas canister (a big one, about 2-3ft high) and leaving it at the top of the garden with the valve open to leak away its remaining contents. What? Why? The following week, happy that it was empty, he welded an electric motor to it, did some other magic, and made a compressor that he used in his garage for years and years. When I was ten, he built the extension on our house - a huge two room thing that had a kitchen and dining room in it. First he excavated the garden, then started measuring out right angles with three bits of wood he had cut to 3, 4 and 5 feet respectively. Ah ha, he said, these three bits of wood made a right angle. That was knowledge, I was happy with that and have always remembered the moment and the clear picture of him telling me. Digging foundations, putting in new drains, building walls, etc. - just more magic. He even built the kitchen worktop from first principles - I have another very clear memory of him putting glue on a big slab of wood, and more on a huge piece of laminate. He waited for them to get to just the right level of tacky dryness, and brought them together expertly. No mistakes allowed as the two parts would be irreversibly stuck once they touched. These days even the most ardent DIYer would surely buy a worktop at Wickes? His final proof of being Bob The Builder was in my early teens. He came home with some bits of wood and a book. It took him a few hours to make a lovely architects drawing board. The book was the current Building Regulations. Two years later he had built a house on a patch of land in the Cambridgeshire fens, and a little later when I was at university acquiring more knowledge (and some life skills!) he upped sticks and moved there.

So how come I grew up unable to change a light bulb? It must all be in the head, so moving into our current house three years ago has been a catalyst for learning new things. I've already 'done' plumbing (proper plumbing, cutting pipes and everything) and been on a woodwork course, built many things out of wood, some of them competently, but most of all I've been doing garden stuff. And the pinnacle of this has been my first ever path. First of all the bit you can't see, leveled and hammered down aggregate base, weed control fabric, and then some nice pea shingle on the top. Cyberkim kindly offered some advice on the top step, which I have completely ignored, but thank you anyway. Wifey likes it so much, I'm now carrying it on all the way to the bottom of the garden.

So what next, car maintenance? Don't be daft, they run on magic.

Mr Norrell and Jonathan Strange

Blimey, I'm about 50 pages from the end of one of the longest books I can ever remember reading. Its an odd story set in the early nineteenth century whereupon two magicians battle it out over the best way to return magic to England. At 782 pages, it is longer than the fattest of the Harry Potters (and has much smaller print!)

But what makes it stand out is the author's use of postscripts. Almost every page has one, and in even tinier print. Many of them take up far more of the page than the actual story, and even take up two and even three pages. One memorable page had six of them. Now I don't mind a postscript, perhaps a reference or bit of extra information that would otherwise have broken the flow of the story. In this book, the postscripts occupy a whole extra novel and must account for a third of the page count, and at times rendered the book unreadable - one aside about the Raven King wrapped around three pages, and by the time I returned to the main story I had to reread a couple of pages to remind myself what was going on. Quite extraordinary! And no wonder the author looks so grumpy...

Good book, though.

Escape The Room

I was unlucky enough to get a summons for jury service, starting on Monday. Some may enjoy the idea of taking part in the judicial system, but aside from the inconvenience of being away from work at a rather important time, I can think of many other things I'd prefer to do.

Thankfully, those pesky criminals saved the day. Here is my entire experience of jury service:

Day 1 - sit around until 3.30pm, getting only an occasional update from a court usher, until finally the judge calls us (40 of us by the way!) into court to apologise for our boring day, but the defendants finally put in a guilty plea that satisfied the prosecution.

Day 2 - sit around until lunchtime waiting for some action (on page 200 of my book by this time) and told we can go home for the day as the bad boys have yet again pleaded guilty. Get home, warm up laptop and do work.

Day 3 - as day 1 without the excitement and variation of going into court, and we are told by the court usher that due to circumstances beyond their control there will be no further cases and our jury service is over. (300 pages read, nearly halfway through the book).

So in answer the the question "What is jury service like?" It is like being held in a room for three days with a really big book to read.

And in honour of my experience, stumbleupon (set for games) kindly offered up a list of the 50 best room escape games. I like these - the good ones are tricky and imaginative puzzles with a genuinely enjoyable ending. (The bad ones are truly awful).

Enjoy!

http://www.mytechmix.com/2009/06/25/the-best-50-room-escape-games/

Sublime Movie Moment

I know I've posted about Classic Cinema Online before, and I know equally well that you'll forgive me for reminding the you that they exist - because this week they have listed one of the finest films ever made - A Matter Of Life And Death. Fast forward to the scene where the table tennis game is frozen in time - way ahead of its time. And how many fantastic images can you list from that film? The stairway to heaven? The teardrop on the rose? The courtroom in heaven? The change from colour to black and white? The operating theatre? Brilliant from start to finish.

Enjoy!

http://www.classiccinemaonline.com/1/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=921:a-matter-of-life-and-death-1946&catid=45:drama&Itemid=883

0110100001100101011011000110110001101111

..or Hello to you non-robot readers. I Stumbled upon a website that translates anything into binary. I have no idea which of my preferences caused this to pop up, but felt compelled to share.

I'm on the first day of 24 days away from work today. I booked a week off after Easter, then got a jury service summons through the post which happened to be for the two weeks following my hols, so with bank holidays and weekends. 24 days! I am full of trepidation about the jury service, and would much rather be back at work. Its the What Ifs. What if I get a trial that has stomach churning evidence we have to look at/hear? What if its a complicated one that could go on for more than two weeks? What if I don't get a trial at all and have to sit around bored senseless for two weeks? What I need is a bloody good book.

Anyway, have to go, so here's the website.

http://nickciske.com/tools/binary.php

011001010110111001101010011011110111100100100001

Bah Humbug

...is the correct expression for anyone living in a house of disorder, which ours is by the way. So Bah humbug.

We had our bedroom plastered, the last room in the house to be done after three years of living here. So the entire contents of the bedroom are distributed about the house, we are sleeping in the front room until the room is ready to move back in (spent tonight applying a coat of paint) and much of the house has that annoyingly fine layer of pinkish dust that inevitably follows a plastering job.

On the upside, we've replaced all the radiators with nice modern efficient ones to match the nice modern green boiler (it's white, but you get the idea) so the house has never been warmer, and the chickens are all laying daily, so we have three eggs a day to deal with - see earlier post about 100 things to do with an egg.

Which doesn't link to anything I've stumbled on lately, so here for your enjoyment is an oddly addictive challenge - How Fast Can You Type The Alphabet? I have managed a sluggish 6.06 seconds, Girl has done 8.17, which has led me to believe I need to curtail her computer time as this is disgustingly fast for a ten year old. Wifey plodded to a risible 13.5 seconds, but will be the first to confess she can't type. Girl and I were second and third.

http://playfreeonlinegames.eu/playonline/typethealphabet.html

One of my all time science heroes was Stephen Jay Gould, a professor of palaeontology at Harvard, and so much more to those who were touched by his incredible life. Gould was a huge influence in my young zoological career, and the man who really turned me on to evolution theory through his essays and papers (On The Origin of Species may well be the "bible" for evolution theory, but makes a very dull read).

The real reason he is my hero though is that whilst being one of the most prolific science writers of his generation, he made time to respond to the childish letter sent by a Nottingham undergraduate asking him why men had nipples. The thoughtful and uncritical note he sent back remains one of my most treasured possessions.

However what first switched me on to SJG was the titles he generated for his books and writings. Whilst most scientists would publish "A study of arthropod timelines in the cambrian to precambrian fossil record" (feel the eyelids drooping?), the first SJG paper I read revelled in the title "The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist programme". And the content matched the title, using the shapes in a cathedral roof and the ranting optimism of a Voltaire character to form a well reasoned argument about pre-adaptation in evolution theory.

SJG died in 2002, but he lives on in his work. I have a shelf of his books (actually, a box in the loft since we moved) but stumbling across this website has prompted me to dig them out and re-read the lot.

And yes, he even made it onto the Simpsons.

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/

Chicken Farming

Technically not a Stumbleupon posting, but had to share that we have now enjoyed our third egg from the chooks, not bad for less than a week's work. Our initial purism of only giving them mixed corn and layer pellets lasted about half an hour, and they now enjoy lots of scraps - even less waste to put in the bin! Another enjoyable aspect of having the hens is that Seamus now has Cat TV - little brainless ginger furball sits for hours at a time plotting how to get through the wire - bless.

All of which makes me think, is this the real life? And how tenuous a link is that to the excellent Sporcle site which has some challenging and fun games - so, can you type out the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody inside ten minutes? Or are you just a poor boy?

Enjoy.

http://www.sporcle.com/games/bmo1616/bohemianrhapsody

Chookie Chooks!!!

We got chickens! We all jumped in the car and risked our lives going out to a farm up in the hills near Buxton (ice, thick fog) and came home with three Warrens, lovely natured hens with a reputation as good layers. It was supposed to take a week for them to get used to their new home, but just two days into their new adventure, one of our girls has produced a beautiful egg.

Ok, its not the biggest thing you'll have ever seen, but it was probably her first ever, so a good effort (its the one on the left - the one on the right is a local large free range for comparison. We fried it gently in some butter, great colour and rich creamy tasting yolk.

And yes, we're sure there will soon be plenty to share.

Anyway, this blog is supposed to be about gems that Stumbleupon serves up for me, so here is a recent egg-related one (there's an egg in the recipe - it was as close as I could find, ok?). Instructables seems to be an amateur-led site to post your favourite ways to do things. The one that stumbled up for me was the 5-Minute Chocolate Cake. I made it in a mug as suggested here, microwaved for two and a half minutes, and Ta-Da! A really lovely chocolate cake. Nobody more shocked than me at the ease and success of this recipe, so if you fancy a quick cakey snack - go for it!

Enjoy!

http://www.instructables.com/id/5_minute_Chocolate_Cake/

Rip Off Great Britain

I spent most of Monday sounding like a tabloid headline. I took wifey and the nippers to London for a few days. We stayed at my Uncle's flat (still washing the fag smoke out of the clothes) and tubed in to the centre each day to see the sights. My headline here refers to the cost of lunch on Sunday. To be fair, it was on Whitehall at a place called Churchills, you could see Horseguards Parade to one side and Westminster to the other. But is that ANY excuse to charge £4 for bowl of chips???? Probably.

And then Stumbleupon gave me this - a wiki posting of hundreds of mad playable card decks. I spent a number of years playing a card game called Magic: The Gathering (they're still going strong) so find myself drawn to this sort of thing. My current favourite here (out of the quarter I've been through) is Mornington Crescent, and how I smiled each day this week as we went through that station and heard it being announced.

Enjoy!

http://www.dvorakgame.co.uk/index.php/Category:Playable_decks

Further Proof!!!

Remember the "Iamawesome" website? How many of these wonderful sitea re there out in cyberspace?

Enjoy!

http://www.isnickelbacktheworstbandever.com/

Head Case

I love social psychology experiments, and this is one of the many really good ones. What a mixed bag of neuroses us herd animals are!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTOwE3hnEWk

Enjoy.

100 Ways To Cook An Egg

We're getting some chooks! I've been converting an old hut into a coop, and building an enclosure, wifey has been scoping out the local farmers market at Chelford and has acquired a huge amount of chicken wire. So one weekends work left to do, and as soon as we get back from a jolly in London at half term we'll be buying a nice cage of hens. I can't wait to see how the cat reacts to them.

So, good recipe sites make your mouth water and this one did straight away. I will certainly try some of these, and in a few weeks time we hope to do so with eggs from our own chickens.

Enjoy!

http://www.endlesssimmer.com/2009/04/16/100-ways-to-crack-an-egg/

Animals On The Underground

Wow! I love this for so many reasons - creative, funny, challenging, utterly pointless. Makes me want to have a go. Perhaps Cars on the Underground? Instruments? Food?

Enjoy!

http://www.animalsontheunderground.com/the_animals.html

Classic Cinema Online

If you haven't been following this fantastic site since I posted it a few weeks ago (and why not???) I just wanted to share with you some of this weeks updates:

1984 - with Michael Redgrave and Donald Pleasance
Duel - with Dennis Weaver
The Candidate - Robert Redford
Soylent Green - Charlton Heston

Quality all the way, and the other few weekly updates are no slouches either. I suppose Wild Women of Wonga was just a phase it they were going through!

Cute thoughtful game

Help!!! Heeeeeeelllllppppppp!!!!! My Mother announced she was coming to stay with us. We haven't seen her in two years despite her repeated trips back to the UK, so it was a bit if a shocker to get a phone call mid-week - "We're coming up, can we stay with you Friday?"
One very clean house later, they duly arrive, only to announce that they are staying for the whole weekend. Gaahhhh! Heeeeeeeeeeeeeelllllllllllppppppppppp!!!!!

Which is why I find myself hiding away playing on Stumbleupon and blogging (actually, they've gone to bed - our bloody bed - so I don't feel so guilty - wifey and I on camp beds in the front room).

So, games. I probably play too many games, and always enjoy a new a thoughtful one when it comes along. Sprout is just such a game, akin to the Grow series of games that required certain environmental factors to be turned on in the right sequence. Sprout takes a few turns to get right, but rewards you at the end with a short animation, and is fun to play. It only took five minutes to complete.
Enjoy!

http://www.smart-kit.com/games/sprout/

Street Theatre

Well you've probably seen those wonderful viral e-mails (not an adjective that can be applied to 99% of them!) where a group of "passengers" on a train station suddenly start singing and dancing, and before you know it there are 200 of them involved in a great piece of free theatre.

I was delighted, then, when Stumbleupon popped this one into my browser - it's a video diary of a bunch of New York improv artists, and there are some quite fantastic moments, the best of which may well be "I Love Lunch! The Musical"

Really, really, enjoy

http://improveverywhere.com/

I Am Awesome!!!!

No, not me. This bloke. So, what website would you register simply in order to leave a one-liner hanging in cyberspace? How about www.hesbehindyou.co.uk with the text Oh No He's Not! on the site?

Enjoy both of these...

http://community.anarchy-online.com/

http://www.iamawesome.com/

Then and Now

What a lovely idea - get an old photo of you as a child, and recreate it with your current adult self. I have just the snap in mind of me as a baby sitting on my uncle's knee, him wearing a rather silly party hat and me looking startled because he had a horn growing out of his head. We are positioned in the bay window of the flat he still lives in 44 years later. Only trouble is I might kill him if I sit on him these days!

Oh what the heck - here it is.

Enjoy!

http://www.funnyjunk.com/funny_pictures/131311/Then+and+Now/

Role Playing Virgin

I'm brand new to this role playing lark - rolling dice and all that. Well, not 100% true, I did go through a period of playing a card game that was kind of similar - its still going strong and you can read about it here: http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Multiverse/

Anyway, I'm new to this role playing lark - all the dice, choices, sliding doors kind of thing. So when I stumbled into this text-based multiple choice game earlier, I surprised myself by playing it to its conclusion. My dragon eventually got the crap beaten out of it by a wizard, but I did die rich with 14500 gold thingamies.

Can you do better? Enjoy!

http://www.choiceofgames.com/dragon/

Truly Disturbing

This is Truly Disturbing. You probably won't enjoy.

http://www.tom-phillips.info/flash/dexter.screen.cleaner.swf

Where's RFB????

The bloke below might not be so clever at painting after all. In this photo I used brilliant painting techniques to make me look badly and hurriedly Photo-shopped...oh, and cleverly changed the scaling so it looks like I'm standing next to a giant gate in land of the giants. Or something.

Ditto Last Post - Too Much Time!!!!!

This is ludicrous - is he paid for this?????

http://www.binscorner.com/pages/s/spot-ths-man-see-the-creativity.html

Some People Have Too Much Time...

If some of the inventiveness and creativity on the Net could be harnessed and turned into usefulness, there would be no war, poverty, starvation, disease. There would be huge overcrowding because of this, fuel prices would be double or triple its current high watermark - and worst of all we'd all be bored to death because all the creativity and inventiveness got canned and re channeled.

Which is why, morally at least, I am in favour of Lolcats (if you don't know, Google it - on which note, laugh of the day earlier. My beautiful and woefully young daughter was watching a news item about Google withdrawing from China. "Never mind" she said "They can use Ask Jeeves")

And all this preamble brings me to something which I would file under 'Pointless, valueless, and interesting for about ten minutes, but I might try it myself'. I Stumbled upon an article headed Transparent Monitors. Really? I thought - no, not really, just some clever photoshopping and applying a wallpaper of the ,,well, wall. Enjoy!

http://www.listropolis.com/2008/04/mind-blowing-see-through-mac-monitors/

Shape Photo Collage

There isn't much on the web that is truly free - nothing that you'd want anyway.

Here's one I stumbled upon a few weeks ago, and we've been having fun with it ever since. Simply load all the photos/pics you want into the left hand window, pick any shape you can think of (you can even use text shapes or numbers, or even free-draw your own shape), click 'create' and the software does the rest. Here's one I did just now (took me about five minutes) of cat photos in the shape of a cat - well why not?

Unusually, and pleasantly, although the free version asks you to upgrade every time you start the program, it doesn't nag you again or time out, or keep telling you "this option only available in (insert software name here) Pro"

Hours of fun - enjoy!

http://www.shapecollage.com/

Classic Movies for Free

Stuck working at home again today as I didn't fancy the icy slide into Manchester. The car thermometer read -9.5 deg C at about 8am. Brrrrrr, and the news mentioned un-gritted roads into town. I slipped and slid into school with Boy only to be called 20 minutes later - he has gone pale and pukey so could I collect him please. He is now cuddled up with a hot water bottle and a bucket watching CBBC, and I'm blogging. Guess who's going to be working this weekend to catch up?

So, I know what you're thinking - just where can I get a copy on DVD of the 1968 B-Movie classic "Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women?". It seems not to be on in any of the cinemas, and even the reasonably comprehensive Love Films doesn't stock it.

Classic Cinema Online has the answer - hundreds upon hundreds of movies that you might not want to watch, but plenty that you would. I really enjoyed the 'Trinity' spaghetti westerns, and recently enjoyed a re-watch of "They Call Me Trinity" - worth it just to see Trinity eat a pan of beans.

Enjoy!

http://www.classiccinemaonline.com/1/index.php

5 Second Movies

I've mentioned before that I love a good project website - come up with a (preferably completely pointless) idea and see where it goes. So why not see what happens if you make 5 second movies? What can you do in 5 seconds??? Quite a lot as it happens.

http://5secondfilms.com/watch/the_day_before_yesterday

Science IS Fun

Well it is.

A good indication of how I feel about a site is how long I spend there. I wasted an hour of my life on this one, watching all the brilliant little videos from academic staff at Nottingham University. A fantastic example of altruism and desire to teach that makes me love the internet. Just click on a symbol and sit back (speakers on!)

http://www.sixtysymbols.com/

BTW, I have just been hit with the thing I hate most about the internet, a bloody virus attack. My freebie AVG software saw it off, but now my Stumbleupon toolbar is permanently set to only show sites from - Blogspot!