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Word Count
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1–2 minutes·
1 comment on Word CountA little experiment I want to try, perhaps tonight, is to count how many words I read in a day. Obviously it’s not going to be a comprehensive count, but I think that counting everything I’ve read on the Internet (which on some days constitutes 80-90% of the total, e.g. when I’m not reading a…
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The Debate
A transcript of the debate between Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy and Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. Essential reading for Pullman fans and anyone interested in the portrayal of religion in contemporary fiction.
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The Race
8:30am – I wake up with a totally parched throat, despite drinking a huge quantity of water the night before. Less than six hours to go before the relay race I signed up to a couple of weeks ago begins. 3.6 miles per leg – I’m hoping to do it in under 30 minutes, at…
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His Dark Materials
Lal, Kim, Lat (Lal’s sister) and I met up in London last night to see the first part of Nicholas Wright’s adaptation of ‘His Dark Materials’. Naturally, in true Culture style we only managed to get to our seats in the very nick of time, not once, but twice! (it is nothing less than an…
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For the early adopters
Those who emailed Project Syzygy in the first 24 hours or so of the site going online may not have received the autoresponder that was set up a bit later. So here it is. You wouldn’t have missed anything aside from the launch date: This is an autorespond to say thanks very much for your…
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Project Syzygy
For a weblog that’s supposed to be about ‘massively multiuser online entertainment’, I’ve been awfully quiet about the entire genre. Well, that ends now – at least partially. For a while now, I’ve been involved in a London-based venture called Project Syzygy which is developing what I feel is one of the most astonishingly innovative…
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CopyLeft
EasyMusic and Copyleft – interesting to see that Stelios is considering dabbling in the world of Copyleft music: “We are currently investigating business opportunities in the area of music downloads, especially following the ‘copyleft’ principle. Copyleft is where music has no copyright at all so music can be freely downloaded from sites and exchanged between…
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Self-Service
I was on my way into Marks and Spencers foodcourt today when I was stopped dead in my tracks by the sight of self-service checkouts. I know these checkouts are not uncommon in the US but I’d never seen them anywhere in this country until now. For the uninformed, self-service checkouts allow customers at shops…
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Royalty
At about 12:30pm today, Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, sailed past South Parks Road roughly two metres away from me in her Queenmobile and disappeared into the new…
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Superluminal
An excerpt from a BBC News story about a new Russian missile: “Colonel Baluyevsky gave few details of the new missile which was tested on Wednesday, but said it was one that moved five times the speed of light.” Wow, that’s some seriously good engineering they’ve got over there in Russia. If I lived in…