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  • 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,…

  • We Can

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    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…

  • Seal

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    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.

  • In Print

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    ‘One of the best veteran bloggers’ (scroll to the bottom of the page) – that’s what I am kids, according to the NetGuide NZ magazine. A while back I got an email from some reporter asking for weblogging tips for a magazine. I was in half a mind to delete the email because it looked…

  • Books

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    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…

  • Planet Jemma

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    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…