Taxi firms have been warned they face fines if they refuse to allow guide dogs into their cabs.

British Grand Prix preview

Brave Man Rescues Drowning Bear (from Sky News's hideous new site)

David Gray warns on torture music. It sounds funny, but it really is.

And if you think about it, Babylon is an apt choice. (I like the song in moderation.)

edit: And more scariness: Google must divulge YouTube log

edit2: *jawdrop* which, being close to home (what's a Channel between friends?), makes me feel less smug about *snigger* this.

Sacha Baron Cohen to star as Sherlock Holmes

D: And the other guy is worse. That's no Watson.

Looking further, it seems Guy Ritchie is directing and The new Sherlock Holmes will be less stuffy and more adventurous than previous screen incarnations, so I don't even dare look up whether they'll be covering A Scandal in Bohemia.

Remember dude, you got through I, Robot by repeating to yourself "That isn't Susan Calvin, it's just some woman with her name". You can handle this.

Elephant beetle! Squeeee!

Hidden abuse of domestic workers in the UK

On-the-run skunk Pepe caught out

Mediaeval Colemanballs

Gallery of sawn-in-half cameras

Notes of one of the first forensic pathologists are being sold.

Floridian builds flying saucer—which is not a UFO, because it's clearly identified. This is awesome partly because, far from being a spaceship, it couldn't move itself anywhere in a vacuum.

Drunken Facebook scallies pwned by police.

What a waste of resources!

Awww, it's Da Vinci! Cute! (video)

'Super Spam Me' experiment (video)

Nellie named Heroic Hearing Dog

Pets saved from smoke-filled home

US tycoon left $8bn to dog welfare

(not news) "The 8 PG-Rated Movies That Should Not Have Been Rated PG"

That Wizards clip is bad. In every sense. It comes with every warning ever.

A journalist volunteers to be waterboarded. He says it's not much fun.

Muslims in the military

In each case you can rescue one from destruction, but not both. (For the sake of argument, in each case both of them are equally extant and you don't know any more about them than is stated.)

Which will you rescue?

a) A child or an adult
b) A stranger or your dog
c) Hitler or Lassie
d) Your partner/mate/spouse or a Nobel laureate
e) A dog or a weasel
f) Your entire family or the entire family of Canidae
g) A bottle containing the cure for cancer or your brother
h) A bottle containing the cure for cancer or your brother, who just gave you one of his kidneys

Taken from here. I'm compiling a list of ethical dilemmas for work. I need more anecdotal ones (like number 16 on that page).

(I can't imaging what sort of butthead would make a distinction between g and h, unless it was to take into account a probably somewhat shorter lifespan for live kidney donors.)

(My response to questions like b is generally prefaced with "Is anybody looking?"...)

(not news) This is dreadful and you should beware before clicking it because it's fluffy and you might die.

France wants to get into space.

Dude comes back from space.

Digging up Roman bling.

Overrun by stoats and weasels!!!

Turtles released on beach (vid)

Violent games 'sold to children'

Clive Sinclair on flying cars, with embedded audio.

In "duh, just realised, have you?" news of the day, the US turns its back on big cars (vid) and the West is running out of gas (vid).

Right. Sing along, everyone! I declare this the new theme song of the end of the world.

Leisure manager peeked at woman. Yaknow, why does it make it worse that it was "for sexual gratification"? Damn right I find it creepier, but should the law?

(not news) Kitten vs pillow results in PWNAGE. (vid)

No to gays on mayo adverts!!1! Think of the sandwiches children!!!!!1111!!11122″1

My commentary is behind the cut.

read more...

A fun (and short) story: The Lady, or the Tiger?

Being also a nice example of the Sadistic Choice, which itself ranks highly on my writerly list of Things To Throw At My Characters (And Make Them Stick).

Experts who clean National Trust buildings show how it's done.

Lack of sleep mucks up old people's proteins.

Note that "Sleep in mice is characterized by short periods of inactivity". Wow, science!

This is awesome, not because they kept the poor mice awake with brushes(!), but because the complex systems that keep proteins properly folded are easier to baffle if you're old. Understanding them is the first step to keeping them in good nick, which will lead to immortality. And mice with death rays.

Surgeons list their top inventions of the last 60 years.

Hey, kids! You can get two marks in your English exam simply for writing "F##k off" - even if you don't use punctuation.

A comparative study of canine teeth in primates.

This is awesome because they don't know why we monkeys have such strong fangs. Were they for fighting? Mating displays? Particularly hard Pleistocene toffees?

They have also discovered that if our teeth were too big, they wouldn't fit into our jaws. Wow, science!

I miss the Neanderthals. Neanderthals were awesome because they existed alongside us. They were clever and sophisticated, not flint-waving savages, but they still bit the dust. Losers.

Battery hens get new life as pets.

Hens are underrated. They are descended from tropical pheasants. They can also grow teeth. STEALTH TEETH. How scary are hens, huh?

Biblical text-writing may have poisoned monks. This is awesome because "cinnabar" is a pretty word.

Relatedly, link found between brain damage and people who underline a lot of things in red ink.

Hospital doctors are working in short sleeves for reasons of Hygiene

A baby potoroo, a little rodent-looking marsup (cute), is out and about after mum hints that he's getting a bit big for her pouch these days.

Gilbert's Potoroos are awesome because they eat root-dwelling fungi (symbiosis is naturally awesome) and weigh a friggin' kilogram - and look at those talons.

Children with guns. The clip is well worth watching.

And finally. Architect designs rotating building (embedded video)

OK, granted, obligatory "OMFGcoolz" from me. Still, though, why?

I bet it's noisy, too...

Not news: funny b3ta-originated parody of British policemen and children's books.

Apparently not.

(This is supposed to be he.)

White expanse of fur
Summer moult sprawls open-legged
Licking its fat self

This is not a proper haiku with serious haiku-ingredients, although it does happen to contain a season.

Silicon photonic crystals key to optical cloaking. This is awesome because DUDE, invisibility cloak, at least for a given value of 'visible'.

Coils of ancient Egyptian rope found in cave. This is awesome because despite being a single kind of fibre (apparently Egyptians weren't big on cotton-poly blends), they have no idea what the rope was made of. And it's pretty good rope, adventurer-grade stuff.

Finally, an "epic Bill Gates e-mail rant" (a very polite one) in which Gatesy tries to install Movie Maker on his home computer.

This is amusing because I had been under the impression that someone in charge of something like Windows must surely run his own custom OS on his own PCs. You mean they actually use their own products?

edit: LOLOLOLOLMHHAO

http://wordle.net/ makes word clouds from text. Although it isn't any use for web development, because it only outputs a graphic. (For text output, use other tag cloud tools.)

Anyway, I put Mews into Wordle. The result (790×346 px) is behind the cut.

read more...

Ageing muscle 'given new vigour'

Rejected tiger adopted by dog (video)

You may know that the old "glass is actually a liquid that moves reeeeally slowly" rumour is bunk.

Glass is awesome (and weird) because it is not technically a (crystalline) solid or a liquid, but an amorphous solid, just like wax, a bunch of plastics and candy floss. You can even get amorphous ice. (This may or may not become important later.)

Science Daily reports that some folks at Bristol have found out more about what glass gets up to when it cools. This is awesome because it will result in metallic glasses. Metal glass. \m/

Turns out the differences in the brain between the sexes are long-established (but, to cover their backs, the people announcing this emphasise that these differences may not actually mean anything, please don't send us burning faeces).

This is awesome because it's purely about the brain rather than the damn glands. Am I ever sick of glands. But I wish science writers would not use the word "gender" when they mean "biological sex".

What I like about scientists (proper ones, anyway) is that their response to "You've been wrong all these years. This is a more accurate theory" is "Wow! Yay!" [Here's where I'd insert a particularly cute quotation if I could remember it well enough to Google it.] Here a team from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory says "Geneticists: you're doing it wrong" and there is general rejoicing.

This is awesome because it's already shown that new additions appear in DNA much more often than was thought, while deletions happen less frequently than was thought. We're all succumbing to software bloat!

I've been browsing the new BBC's new 'topics' pages for a while. (More about these, how they work and less-technical faq.)

They have pages about autism, dogs and books, which wins them points from me. Feeds of the aggregated content are apparently coming soon, which would be nice.

I watched Flushed Away at Paul's over the weekend and was kept happily entertained spotting all the references to other films (including, this being an Aardman Animations co-production, both Wallace and Gromit at separate points). Disney's Beauty and the Beast was my favourite, but I was also amused by what seemed to be a Terminator 2 reference—and no, nobody said "hasta la vista, baby".

As with any Aardman film, pay attention to any books or video cases that appear on screen, because the titles are guaranteed to be horrible puns. I didn't spot anywhere near all the references, particularly because I wasn't actively looking, but here's a full list.

The opening shots had me chuckling to myself ("ha, yes, this is exactly the American conception of London") and later on I was surprised by the stereotypical Yankee tourists. Can you still get away with that? Didn't they market the film in America?

I am so sick of capable, practical female characters who know judo being contrasted with useless, ham-fisted male characters who know nothing.

We'd just watched X-Men 2 beforehand, so I helpfully added "Charles!" while the villain spoke. Now I think about it, the whole Magneto-Toad connection is... heh heh heh. *ribbits spasmodically*

Overall, though, among all the references, cool as they were, and despite a generally pleasant time, there was nothing much about the film that suggests filmmakers of the future will be referencing it in their own cartoons.

Hey! Hey! Listen! Is it ok if I borrow your dog and take it to Glasgow?

OK, that's it, I'm voting for this man. He clearly has cojones of rawhide.

'Camera' takes photo of LIGHT. Badass.

Spinny thing to predict fluctuations in the earth's magnetic field.

You want a robot man to hold you tight. One that you can count on every single night.

Which makes this seem suddenly inevitable.

In pictures: Ugliest dog show

Chinese Cresteds are NOT ugly. They're frickin' class. I do find it hilarious that these humans are going "well, our species did this to your species, now we're going to laugh at you, ha ha, yuck!"

Now this, on the other hand, this is ugly. (And it's coming after your children. (To make them ugly.)) Ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly. Disturbing.

*runs away*

That day of days is here!

What am I on about? Why, Baby, of course.

Sci-fi workshop at my old uni! And damn, if I'd heard before now I would absolutely have gone.

Time for peace in the whaling world?

Meteorite could hold solar clues (contains video with patronising presenters and fantastic interviewee)

In Pictures: Spore at last! Eeee!

Are Britons miserable? We asked some moaning minnies website readers.

Traditional costumes of any sort are instant humour. These are Welsh outfits.

Birds damaged in oil spills get new pool

Idiot runs around after penguins.

Aardman Animations' charming animated film Chicken Run is apparently Zionist propaganda. Yes, the thinly-veiled references to POW camps were actually heavily-veiled references to concentration camps. Obviously all the Great Escape references were clever lies/complete coincidence/overlooked because the pious mouth-frothers haven't seen many classic Western films. Amazing!

edit: vagina dentata! what a wonderful phrase!

How Ubisoft makes computer games (video). I have no idea why it shows the presenter and interviewee yapping instead of what's going on on the mocap person's screen. Perhaps he was surfing Wikipedia.

New research on octopus memory. If you remember nothing else, remember to swim slowly past eight arms that octopuses are wonderful.

Advert featuring a school uniform striptease ruled inappropriate. Good.

Dementia burden 'could break NHS'

Sing with me. Where can you get poisoned by insec-ti-cide?

Nurses to be rated on compassion. Oh yes, just what we need. More retarded targets. Goody gumdrops.

Sun-free garden for girl with xeroderma pigmentosum.

More on xeroderma pigmentosum. And more.

The Caribbean monk seal is extinct. WELL DONE, EVERYBODY!

Egyptian pharaoh's 'missing' pyramid found. Meanwhile, ancient typo discovered in Discovery's headline. (Or possibly that was AP's doing.)

How not to have an Olympic mascot nightmare: have a little dignity and don't make it hideous.

(I don't really see why every darn thing needs a brand/snappy name/mascot, but my antagonism towards advertising and marketing practices is well documented.)

Pets abandoned because owners' irresponsibility with their money extends to their dependents, to whom they have a legal duty of care but apparently nobody gives a stuff about that. Horrible people.

Alpacas killed in dog attack.

More mental maths in primary schools (video)

50th anniversary of first computer to play music. (audio) Sorry about the choice of tracks. *wince*

Cardboard bike unveiled (video). Again, apologies for horrible patronising presenter and vox pops.

Bee species outnumber mammals and birds combined. Boggling. Yay!

Dog eaten by street sweeper. One of those "you shouldn't laugh" stories. She was a very (and I'm not being the least bit sarcastic here) pretty puppy.

Disabled dog honoured for rescue

Armada cannons go boomsplut! (embedded Flash video)

The Timewatch programme about the dive is planned to air late this year or early next, I've just heard. They will recreate and fire the weapons. More from the programme site.

Birds taught to sing (video). (I sincerely hope this clip was aimed at children, because that presenter is even more patronising than is usual for BBC breakfast tv.)

edit: Neil Gaiman interviews Terry Pratchett—with exclusive Kidby illustrations. Squee.