Mssv

Saw four people busking with xylophones and glockenspiels in Cambridge city centre today - I think it’s been the first time for years that I’ve felt compelled to give a street performer some money. Their performance of Blue Danube was pretty damn impressive.
On another note, I have two long posts that I have in progress [...]

How to get rich - an interesting lecture by Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs and Steel (a very good book, on the whole). Fairly woolly, but it has some useful points.

Putting your life online - recording and organising all of your emails, conversations and other life events on a computer to serve as a supplemental memory system. This isn’t a particularly new concept, but it is likely to be the first decent implementation. Very interesting stuff - I wonder how it’ll affect kids growing up [...]

Not many updates recently, alas. I’ve been watching The Princess Bride and reading The Code Book, both of which I heartily recommend. I’ve also been emailing my crew mates for my upcoming mission at the Mars Society Desert Research Station in December and writing content for the MetaFilter wiki. I plan to write a couple [...]

I’ve finally done something I’ve been meaning to do for months; set up a wiki. Or to be exact, three wikis. Wikis are webspaces in which any material can be edited or added by anyone; a bit like a community whiteboard with hyperlinking, if you will. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but after [...]

I was feeling a bit bored this evening* and decided to have a look at my old school website. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it had been updated recently, and what’s more, it had some inspectorate reports online. Before the website was created I’m not convinced that it would’ve been easy to get [...]

Last night I saw Lagaan with a couple of friends. In short, Lagaan is about a group of Indian villagers who have to beat the local British soldiers at a game of cricket to rid themselves from an extortionate tax.
At the same time, it’s a romantic comedy/musical/sports film; a little like a toned-down Moulin Rouge [...]

There’s an interesting discussion taking place at Metafilter (say it ain’t so!) about an article written by a mother who doesn’t allow her daughters to watch television.
Most posters are in agreement that it’s absurd to ban a medium of information just because there happens to be some tripe on TV. You might as well ban [...]

New words and terms I’ve heard at my lab:
Fiascotorial, adj.: combinations or permutations of fiasco-like situations. e.g., “And then the squirrel fell into the bowl! Just imagine the fiascotorial possibilites!”
Gene-jockey, n.: derogatory term for a geneticist or molecular biology. e.g., “Those gene-jockeys working on the squirrel genome project, they don’t understand that the real discoveries [...]

Today I received an invitation from Space School UK to their ‘Christmas on Mars Reunion Weekend’ (it’s not really Christmas, but mid-December). I went to a Space School UK course several years ago, and it was enormous fun - building rockets, going to lectures, and meeting lots of other teenagers who were interested in space. [...]