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Cursed by Dust
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No comments on Cursed by DustSo 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…
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UseMod
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.
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Only a Matter of Time
“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,…
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We Can
iCan is a new website set up by the BBC to let people discuss local issues and team up with other citizens to effect change, by using a clever combination of forums, locational information and databases. Some issues they’re tackling are schools, anti-social behaviour, litter, traffic and so on. So, why are people whining about…
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Seal
Seal on Music – the Guardian Online interviewed Seal today, and he’s remarkably well-informed on the latest technological and IP matters. Nice to see that at least one musician has a brain.
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Books
In what must be a record for me, I finished Robert Sawyer’s Hominids in around three hours this weekend; that’s about 30 seconds per page. I don’t normally read that quickly, but Hominids was a particularly easy read and had several sections on the science of DNA and quantum physics, both of which I am…
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Planet Jemma
It’s a great idea – create a fictional online journal of a 19 year old English girl who’s interested in science (and boys, etc etc) to get other girls into science. And that’s what the British Council has done with Planet Jemma. Now, I don’t dare to presume that I have any special insight into…
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Middle England SF
Radio 4 on SF – the Open Book series on BBC Radio 4 recently aired (12th October) a very good programme introducing people to science fiction. You can listen to the programme at the link above, which features authors such as Pat Cadigan, Stephen Baxter and Iain Banks. I was pleasantly surprised to hear a…
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Quicksilver
Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Quicksilver, arrived on my doorstep (metaphorically speaking) some time last week. Initially I thought to myself, ‘I’m a busy guy, I don’t have time to read this 900 page book in one go, as I usually do. Instead, I think I shall read it in little chunks, perhaps a reasonable hundred…