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  • Senses

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    1–2 minutes

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    Senses (Flash) – a nice little interactive quiz from the BBC that deals with psychological phenomena and illusions (and some other not quite as interesting stuff), via Bhisma.

  • Killer Chairs

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    2–3 minutes

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    My karma was restored to its correct level this evening when I went to a signing by Neil Gaiman at Borders. I turned up half an hour early, just in time to bag one of the last chairs available (handily situated near some Philip Pullman novels); by the time Neil came out to talk there…

  • Delivery

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    I spent the weekend visiting friends in Cambridge and fully expected to come home to Oxford to pick up my new laptop, which I ordered a while ago. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t at my college. When I checked the TNT website to track the package, it said that it didn’t have a correct delivery address for…

  • Wake Up

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    Wake up calls in Portugal – people pay for personal wake up calls in Portugal, and we’re not talking the automatic hotel-variety calls either. We’re talking human operator wake up calls. No, I couldn’t believe it either. More on those calls (scroll down).

  • The Rules of the Game

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    I’ve just finished reading John Gribbin’s Science: A History, which is by all accounts a very well-written and interesting book. Gribbin could have probably done with making some of his sentences a little shorter and more readable, but other than that it’s an excellent review of science and the people who discovered it, starting from…

  • Cursed by Dust

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    So Philip Pullman will be at two events in Oxford in the next few days to promote Lyra’s Oxford. The first one is a signing at Waterstones on Saturday, conveniently at the same time I’m going to be in Cambridge. But no fear – the second one will be a presentation organised by Borders at…

  • UseMod

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    The long awaited UseMod 1.0 is now out. UseMod is one of the best simple wiki engines in development and 1.0 offers a number of useful new features (such as RSS feeds) that I may try out for a new idea I have.

  • Only a Matter of Time

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    “The location of the Greenwich Meridian, that was decided arbitrarily, right?” “I suppose. They put it there because our system of time or mapping or something like that was designed in Greenwich.” “But if it was designed in, say, America or Russia, the ‘zero time’ could have been there?” “I don’t see why not.” “So,…