This is fascinating! By 2010 there will no longer be a clear majority of white people in the USA.

("Immigrants" contrasted with "white people" = unintentionally hilarious and ever-so-slightly depressing. Anti-'immigrant' Americans = very depressing.)

Flying dog poo, BUT IS IT ARS???

Device 'steals chip-and-pin data'

It seems to require the cooperation of a staff member, or ridiculously lax security, and if you have either of those then you're going to be able to do any number of nefarious things.

Famous tent keeps burlesque alive

WHY?!?!

WHY(ii)?!

Why remake cult things when you KNOW the remake will be rubbish and loathed by fans of the original? Know why people liked the original? The clue is in the word ORIGINAL???

Privacy worry over location data

Targeted or personalised adverts. Some people seem to like them. Do you? Why's that? Myself, I dislike them because anything that makes ads harder to ignore is an irritation. But I never buy anything I see advertised, with the exception of going to see films.

Rat-brain robot aids memory study

Gordon Brown aide vetoes leadership question. Haha.

What stops trees getting bigger? There's a height limit on how high they can move their water.

Trees move water around by capillary action, transpiration pressure (a sucking effect from water at the top evaporating off) and osmosis. They don't have a powered circulatory system. The xylem (tissue in the stem or trunk that moves water) is in fact dead cells, wasted away so there's nothing left of them but the rigid cell membrane on the outside.

In other words, tree intra-wet is a series of tubes.

Bullied teen loses 44kg

Yay! Well done! I want a Cheshire Cat shirt.

Economy 'counting' somethingorother. Accessibly explains why economics as reported in the media is balls.

White-tailed eagles released in secret location. Look at their metull hair, and listen to that chick croaking "foodfoodfood". *headbangs* I can't believe they steal chicks, though! :(

Robots in war games challenge. This kind of situation is where you'd typically think of using a dog.

Inside Beijing's 'secret' tunnels. We're very privileged to get this exclusive access, so to make the best of it, we sent a patronising blonde idiot to report on it. She can't even read whichever Chinese alphabet that is. THE BBC, DUMBING DOWN FOR YOUR PLEASURE.

Dangerous jellyfish on rise in UK

Footage of Charles mouthing off. "Conurbations of unmentionable awfulness". (Why can't you all have country homes as well as your palaces in the posh bit of London?)

If nobody paid attention, Royals wouldn't blahblah all the time. I don't particularly want this guy openin my Parliament being my figrrhed.

Post union demands dog attack law

Owners plea over dog microchips

Petitions will save the world

The contraceptive pill affects women's ability to pick out genetically dissimilar partners. The biological quirk that leads to this actually makes perfect sense in non-pill-taking females. The pill mimics the conditions of pregnancy, during which a woman is no longer looking for a studly mate but instead, I presume, more interested in a long-term supportive partner who may or may not be the dad.

Speaking of sex or gender differences, this from Philanthropy UK makes interesting reading.

And this on OCD from the Guardian because it's awesome.

Although not all people with OCD are as adorable as Mister Monk, nevertheless it's an interesting condition.

Aimless archer fish get target practice (why'd it take the keepers this long to think of this?)

Reptile 'first-time' dad at 111

Rare form of synaesthesia <3

Hen harriers don't kill other rare birds: it's official.

Net address bug worse than feared

Genius Great Dane swallows two-foot-long stick. Brilliance. *pines at video*

Boy 'youngest' to get guide dog

Your pictures: Pets that yawn with you

Society takes YET MORE steps backwards when it comes to women.

Gardener finds rare, valuable truffles

Shakespeare's 'first theatre' found

Justin for Slen.

Iron Maiden in stolen guitar plea

US election gets ugly (what a surprise)...

...comparing someone to Paris Hilton is tough language. What costs me sleep is that she'd get more votes than either of them, both from stupid-yet-legitimately-disaffected young people and from the tv-goggling oh-I-think-I've-heard-that-name-before-so-I'll-vote-for-'em brigade. Think I'm wrong? Ronald sodding Reagan. One-off? No.

One for Ree: Cairo paternity test for King Tut

Now, science!

Elastic electronics see better and more from Science Daily

This is awesome because our eyes work better than flat sensors, and cracking being able to put sensors on a flexible, concave membrane is something several groups have been trying to do.

A new look at how memory and spatial cognition are related... in the brain!!!

This is awewsome because... well, I can't really follow their reasoning here, but it seems they've proved certain areas of the brain aren't important (or as important) for spatial memory as was thought.

Simulated robots learn to move themselves. Odd. And terribly cool.

Pet dogs can 'catch' human yawns

One for Tivo: Horse and rider rescued from ditch, where they were stuck upside down

Anti-freeze cat poisoner sought

Life-sized pig sculpture is found and I can see why you'd steal that. It's totally sweet. And totally evolutionarily unsound.

One for Charly: Why Microsoft 'Midori'?

Arctic Map shows dispute hotspots. They should kick everyone out and declare it Antarctica in my opinion.

Sea squirts! These were mentioned in Fish with Fingers, which I'm reading at the moment. (It's about Devonian tetrapods, not genetic anomalies.) Sea squirts are awesome because they undergo quite a drastic metamorphosis between their baby, tadpoleish forms and the adult stage in which they're stuck on rocks, like any normal anemone or what-have-you.

Amusing Juxtaposition of the Day:

Hospitals 'infested with vermin'

Maggots could help in MRSA battle

Victorian boot found in a tree

Cataplexic young lady falls over if she laughs

One for Anke: colour-blend Large Blue butterflies

Race for antidote after snakebite

Should baby be risked for sister? I wish I had time to digest this one properly. Medical ethics are ace.

EastEnders dog Wellard is killed off

In pictures: Stranded whale (warning - not happy ending)

Nine-week-old kidnapped from garden. Free the Berkshire One! Poor baby!

Bashir sorry for 'tasteless' quip, just like he was sorry for his last 'tasteless' quip...

Phear Phorm

Pet charity's credit crunch fears

Amusing Juxtaposition of the Day, Part 2:

Iranians suspend death by stoning

Texas executes Mexican murderer

Bush presses China on freedoms

(Bush did try to make them reconsider the Mexican guy's verdict. IT'S STILL FUNNY.)

Simply Noise: this is very cool. A coworker clued me onto this site, which generates static noise to help block out ambient noise (eg hugely loud air conditioning!!) or block distractions.

I can't stand the white noise setting, but the brown is lovely. Even when cranked to a comfortable level, though, it doesn't block out the Radiohead* stuck in my head. (I could turn it up further, but I'm always worried about damaging my hearing.) Bass frequencies still get through, too, so I can hear one half of my boss's conversation with an older gentleman.

*Airbag. Dammit, I'm at the mercy of whatever I listened to last.

I SUPPORT THIS.

US vote says cigarettes are drugs, meaning they'll be regulated by the FDA now.

Broadband boost for island monks

Full steam ahead for new engine

A month without plastic

'Fitness pill' being developed

Mental health killings 'falling'. Yes, I can't remember the last time I've decapitated someone on a bus. Oh yes, I remember now.

Army 'does not tolerate beasting'

Who is buying up Britain? Read only if you want to go into a red-masthead panic. (I for one welcome our new Norwegian masters, but all oil-rich regions can take a hike. Yes, including the North Sea.)

Poetry prize shortlist revealed. Oh yeah, I wonder how many of them rhyme. >:( Sadly, the site linked doesn't seem to let you read the shortlisted entries.

UK 'deluded' over emissions cut

Nasa's lander samples Mars water. This is awesome because it's not that email joke with a glass of water on a Mars bar (although that was funny, the first time I saw it).

Rescuers in fight to save stupid whale

Hungry seals 'steer by the stars'

Chicks with blogs get money. Or something. I've no time to do more than skim most of these today.

Harare diary: No more trillionaires

Superhero costumes go on sale

Bishops raise homosexuality issue

Making energy from waves

Tonga crowns king in lavish rite, or view the photos.

Anger over no mutilation charges

Presenter bitten by dog at show. I don't really know Purves, but what a great speaker to camera. Very dignified. Yay for ex-presenters.

County second for animal cruelty

Narrow escape leaves Turkey divided

I've been getting spam with fake headlines as the subject line.

"Tom Cruise dead in plane crash", "Facebook hacked into, millions of accounts stolen", "Clinton found hanged in hotel room".

Very clever! But when I check them and find out that yes, of course they're pen0r and ph4rma-spam, which was obvious especially because they come from random people's names (what's wrong with spoofing some news agency instead of a fake person?), they get spam-filtered and trashed same as all the other crap I get sent. So apart from wasting a fraction of a second more of my time and teasing my cruelty lobe a little, well done, you achieved nothing.

UK legal name change by deed poll - a DIY guide.

Nice site, so I'm doing my bit to get it up Google. If you want to change your name, do it there.

If you use this, please fix the typo in "substitution" ("subsitution") under point 1. I've notified the site owner and they're fixing it. (Now fixed.)

To-night... I'm gonna have myself... a real good name.

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

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.

Today (yesterday, actually, but I'm posting late): two sisters want recognition as a couple, pixie dust makes a man's body part grow, a baby is horny, and some people are addicted to innuendo.

But before that, these. The following amusing links require Flash and sound.

Scrapbook Central (closing down sale? But how could they fail?!?)

I Love Horses (will likely traumatise you, whether or not you love horses)

Birmingham is ace! Ah, questionable American Anglophiles, my other one weakness.

Identity 'at risk' on Facebook

Baby white rhino makes his debut

"Dr [Brett] Mills [a lecturer in film and television studies at the University of East Anglia] says a less restrictive climate might make innuendo less necessary."

No, no, no. That's to miss the very point of Brits. Remember that humour thing? And how repressed we are? Latter is not exempt from former. In other words, we love laughing at how repressed we are. It's not a terribly serious battle of principles to sneak this stuff past the censors, or a symptom of hypocritical puritanism (for the latter, see USA). It's done for a laugh at every level. Double-entendres are one of the beauties of a mongrel language with so many homophones.

(Poor doggie had a stroke?!) (audio)

(Also, I think I deserve kudos for not making a joke like "what's a homophone then, is it one of these?")

(Then again, with a name like Lord Laidlaw, the jokes write themselves.)

Device 'spins silk like spiders'

When does kinky porn become illegal?

"There is no reason for this stuff. I can't see why people need to see it."–Liz Longhurst, in article

I agree. I also feel that way about Oasis, and I bet loads of murderers have listened to them, and it's still a REALLY STUPID reason to ban anything.

Students wear gorilla suits in order to promote gorillas art(?) to the general public

Why should people with children get special treatment? All together now, piercing East End accent: 'coz it's FAAAAAAHMLUY!

Superficial 'reviews' of GTA4 (vid), but the real prize is this related link showing

the development of the first Grand Theft Auto (vid). <3 that rap song, and yes, I can still recite along with it. "T, theft, determination, to steal what you can and run from the nation..."

Two sisters have lost a battle to have the same inheritance tax treatment as cohabiting couples.

You can bet this one irks me too.

'Pixie' dust helps finger grow (vid) (no, nothing to do with the LSD creator dying)

Four weeks? The nail looks too old...

Dan Dare 'inspired innovation' (vid)

nclüdr is beautifully crafted. Of particular note is the CAPTCHA and its accessibility options. Truly an exemplar for the ages.

Their privacy policy looks moderately less scary than what I hear about Facebook, too.

Another random cool thing.

Black squirrel boom time

Free game hopes to save gorillas

Iran calls for ban on Barbie doll

Tiger and zebra among NI 'pets'

Get off your bum, you lazy noisemakers. This problem happened to me a few times when I used to do Sunday morning 6am shifts... usually I was watching out so they didn't get a chance to honk.

This looks awesome. And if it's Tony Head speaking, it'll sound awesome. If I could steal his speaking voice and Brendan Brown's singing voice, I would be a happy, happy individual. And sound very weird.

Flies get 'mind-control sex swap'

Hunger makes bats 'act strangely'

Tourism crash threatens big cats

Crew hopes to film ghost (Flash vid)

But first. *gripes*

This morning:
Spam in inbox: 69 (dudes)
Spam in spam filter: 3 (one of these being a mislabelled real email)

FAIL, MAILFOUNDRY. FAIL.

I really don't want to switch to Gmail, because I likes me some EU data protection laws... but the rubbishness of SquirrelMail as a primary email application, coupled with MailFoundry's non-filtering, is pushing me in that direction.

Killer dogs shot dead by marksmen—ON FATAL RAMPAGE! (sry, no video)

Should Microsoft buy Yahoo? (embedded Flash video)

I recommend you just kind of sit slack-jawed at the epic geekiness. Oh hi, I have a robot. And a 360. (Look at the state of his living room! \m/) And now we'll go off on an argument about Microsoft being evil.

So guys, is the secret geek plot to parody ourselves already underway? 'Cause I didn't get the Twitter.

Eeeeeheeheehee. Want.

Colossal squid comes out of ice—BURNING FOR REVENGE!

Allo Allo dubbed into German... 0,o

US prisoner sues over weight loss—this is hilarious and deeply disturbing. In short, the sort of thing I wish I could make up.

Humphrey Lyttelton has died. :(

London is versus the wider UK (vid, as above)

Kew to display botanical art (vid)

Awesome mandrake in there.

Underwater treadmill tested by doggies, boring journalist. (vid) (relevant sequence ends at 2:00)

Galaxies go wild—FOR YOUR PLEASURE. (vid)

Rapid rise in dumped pets. But, like, for really really good excuses?

The BBC Radiophonics Workshop did some groundbreaking, creative stuff, which is why the most creative organisation in da wurld closed it down 10 years ago. But hey, the corp can still trade on the glory, right? Right? Guys? Er... observe, everyone—Dalek voices!

Now, disgusting behaviour.

Balding penguin given wetsuit (embedded Flash video)

(Isn't it nice when there's no commentary?)

EARS. PUPPY. EARSWTFSPLASH. (embedded Flash video)

Lion cubs. (embedded Flash video) I find these a tad creepy actually. (00:45 PAWNED!)

Priests sign huge record deal (embedded Flash video)

The state of the obvious, for all those of you who haven't yet realised that MMORPG players are morons playing is popular.

Oh, and the white hats say Tesco's'a gonna get haxxored.

40-years-dead man dug up, put in rubber mask, displayed to public. If you haven't been following this charnelcuterie of a story, then no, it's not the Tate Modern. It's Padre Pio, a guy who miraculously grew wounds just like his hero Jeezus's, honest. Creepy.

Is there a world? No, thank Baphomet, it's not Zen Buddhism, it's world politics. Yay South Africa, incidentally.

Giraffe's tongue destroys webcam. Striking a blow at Da Man! FREEDOMOMG! from teh surveillance society!

My aunt does audio descriptions for theatre. Somehow, this made me think of her.

Sweden won't follow Norway and Denmark in banning sexist ads.

Calf found running loose in town. Somehow, this Friday cute animal story forgets to say whether "it" is a veal, beef or milk calf. Which is it, guys? Guys? Gonna be killt for leather? Vellum? Burninated 'cause of foot and mouth? Anyone? (Oops, I think I just lost my entire readership.)

read more...

Great news!

The BBC Religion & Ethics website upon which I lavish my workday attention has been nominated for a Webby Award. These are big things, apparently (I'm told) the Oscars of the internet.

We're up against stiff competition from our old nemesis, the well-funded and magaziney Beliefnet. If you do care to pop along and vote for us in the People's Vote category, I'll not be the slightest bit aghast.

Our news pages have more information.

New WordPress. So far, the new admin theme is far too light and messed-up-contrasty for my tastes (or at least for this monitor, which has real trouble distinguishing any whites). We shall see. I don't see much difference in the admin 'dashboard' as regards better organisation or finding options more easily.

Anyone use LJ Crossposter? If so, installing WP 2.5 will break the plugin, but here's a fix. (It let me activate the plugin, and this post cross-posted OK. Seems to work so far, then.)