The man who re-grew a finger
Science to the rescue again it seems.
Gene therapy aids youth’s sight
I think this is only the start, gene therapy holds a lot of exciting prospects for the future of medicine.
Easier Ways to Surf
A friend of mine has an iPod Touch, not so much to listen to music, but so he can check his mail and surf the web quickly and easily sat on his sofa. He’s been finding it great for those times when you want to quickly look something up or check your email without the hassle of booting his laptop.
I have to say I have been tempted by this to get a Touch myself, the lack of a keyboard and stylus means it’s very easy to interface with and I certainly have had times when I couldn’t be bothered booting my main machine up just to check a couple of emails. I haven’t been able to justify the expense just for occasionally checking email/surfing the web from my sofa (actually, I’d like an iPhone, but I’m not willing to pay £900 for including the contract, I’ll wait for a SIM-free 3G version). I also have a small laptop which is rarely used now I have my desktop, it’s a Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S6120D, not the fastest thing on the planet, but more than capable of surfing the internet.
The thing is, it also takes a long time to get up and running from hitting the power button, I was looking for something in iPod territory, i.e. sub-10 seconds, which, as it turns out, is impossible of a normal PC (my barely gets past POST in that time). Anyway, I tried a few small OSs (gOS and Damn Small Linux) to see if they worked OK, but they booted slower than Windows. I re-installed XP and set about finding tutorials to make it quicker and I managed to get the time from power on to usable down to under 30 seconds (with WIFI disabled), which is still a lot, but try timing your PC, I bet it’s well over a minute, more like two or three. I’ve listed what I did in an article over a Viewfinder Design for anyone who’s interested. read on »
ULTra Brings Public Transport of the Future to Heathrow
This looks like a pretty exciting development for public transport and a viable alternative to the car. Even better, it appears the Brits may actually be leading the way in something for a change.
Teacake set to cost taxman £3.5m
OK, so when you owe them as little at £1.60 (which is what I owed this year) there’s no waving the bill, but when they owe a company £3.5 million, all of a sudden it’s a different game and they don’t have to pay it all back, the same goes for individuals, you can only claim the wrongly charged tax for the last 6 years. Fair, I think not!
The UK argued that paying back the total sum would “unjustly enrich” M&S as customers had paid the money.
In the tribunal’s opinion, compensation of more than 10% (£350,000) would have amounted to unjust enrichment of the company.
Bullet-proof hoodie to go on sale
Says something when the streets have become so violent that we’re selling bullet and slash-proof clothing to civilians. How long before people won’t leave the house without one?
Energy-Saving Lightbulbs
I’ve been meaning to buy some lower energy replacements for my halogen GU10 bulbs for a while, but I wanted to test the options out first. For those who don’t know, GU10 bulbs are the standard halogen bulbs used in down-lighters and a lot of the small, modern room lights. We’ve got plenty around the house. They’re very small and nice and bright, typically 50w. They also get very hot.
It means they’re pulling a lot of power though, one room in the house has eight of them, equating to 400w of lighting. I did some searching and found that there are both CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) and LED (light emitting diode) replacement versions, both of which draw much less power. I bought some of each to see how they faired.
CFL
Compact fluorescent lamps are what most people understand as normal energy-saving bulbs, basically small fluorescent tubes that and small enough to fit into something that looks like a standard bulb. As the GU10 bulbs are very small, they seem to use a number of small U-shaped tubes. The ones I bought were Megaman bulbs, which seem to be pretty popular. I went for the 11w warm white versions, which equate to a standard halogen bulb in light output a colour. They are supposed to have a 10,000 hour life, but they are considerably more expensive than the standard bulbs (twice the price).
Having had them in for a couple of weeks now, I can say I am very pleased with them. The only negatives are that they take a while to get to full brightness, once there they are easily the match of the bulbs they replaced, but they do take five seconds or so to get to a point where you can see anything in the room and probably 30 seconds to get to full brightness. The other gripe is that while they fit in a standard GU10 fitting, they are much longer than the bulbs they replace and stick out a good 3/4 of an inch compared to the bulbs they replace. read on »
A Darkling Plain by Philip Reeve
I’ve loved what is now called the Mortal Engines quartet from the very first line of book one (Mortal Engines):
It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.
How can you not love that? The books have proved funny, inventive, thrilling and entertaining. I was a little less pleased with Infernal Machines, the last book, I didn’t think it was as good as it’s predecessors. A Darkling Plain returns the story to its previous heights though and is a stunning finale to the series.
It follows the separate groups of characters who were split apart at the end of the previous novel. Tom and Wren on the Bird Roads, Hester and Mr Shrike in the desert, Fishcake and the Stalker Fang as well as Oenone (now Lady Naga) and Theo Ngoni. The story is filled with actions, thrills, intrigue and double-crosses. Through it all our protagonists battle to keep their friends safe and stop all-out war between the anti-tractionists (those people who live in ‘normal’ static cities) and those aboard wheeled cities. Into the mess comes old characters and new, old locations and many new ones.
Great stores transcend their plots, they speak of the world around us. The benefits of fantasy and sci-fi mean you can put the world we live in under the microscope without directly attacking it and dividing your audience. They teach us something and give an understanding of human nature and society. I have read a number of books that have done this, but which are generally overlooked as they are not part of a ’serious’ genre (as I’ve asked before, why are sci-fi and fantasy separated from normal fiction?). For me, A Darkling Plain was another of those books.
Needless to say, highly recommended.
Were safe - relatively speaking
Not that I don’t agree with spending the money on protecting our shores, but:
In 2006, alcohol killed 8,758 people and cost the country an estimated £20bn. Tobacco killed 114,000 people. Road deaths numbered 3,150.
By way of comparison, since 2001 the annual death rate from international terrorism in the UK averages out as eight.
We do seem to have copied the US level of fear and if we let it rule us I think it will be bad for all.