How to Lie About Books

How to Lie About Books
Since the day Shakespeare ghostwrote the Bible for King James, we
Anglophones have regarded reading as big stuff. But there’s no way you
can read everything. Scientists calculate that it would take twelve
hundred clones of Burgess Meredith—with fully functioning spectacles—a
minimum of four hundred years just to read all the Count Saint-Germain
novels. And so, lest we be tarred with such stinging epithets, we must learn to lie. More......

Firemen go over to the Dark Side

It looks like something out of Star Wars - but inside this futuristic helmet is a fireman.

Brigades across the country are buying the headgear which can stand heat of more than 1,000C, without the temperature inside going above 35C.

And in technology reminiscent of cartoon character Inspector Gadget, firemen can use a lever at the side of the helmet to pull down a gold-plated visor for extra protection. 

More at www.dailymail.co.uk

McCurry beats McDonald's in lawsuit

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) – Fast food chain McDonald's lost a lawsuit in Malaysia on Wednesday after an appeals court overruled a decision that its trademark had been infringed by a local restaurant called McCurry. McCurry, by contrast, serves Indian fast food from one restaurant in Kuala Lumpur as well Malaysian dishes such as fish head curry and is short for "Malaysian Chicken Curry," according to the company website

More at http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090429/od_nm/us_courts_mcdonalds_1

Honey, time to spray the lawn

The Insta-Green crew arrived on Peppermint Drive in green caps and green shirts, carrying buckets of green paint. Their mission? Convert a long-dead lawn into a lush patch of grass worthy of any golf course or polo field.  No sod or seed required, just a bit of water, a few chemicals and the willing suspension of disbelief.

More at www.latimes.com

Mowing with goats

Google using eco-friendly mowing machines

Flies in the Urinals

The NYTimes reports that the flies in the men’s-room urinals of the Amsterdam airport have been enshrined in the academic literature on economics and psychology. The flies — images of flies, actually — were etched in the porcelain near the urinal drains in an experiment in human behavior. After the flies were added, “spillage” on the men’s-room floor fell by 80 percent.

More at http://www.timebackmanagement.com/blog/flies_in_the_urinals

An era fizzles out…

Many of you will be distressed to hear that Sherbet Fountains are to lose their liquorice tube through which the fizzy powder is supposed to sucked. The makers, Tangerine Confectionery, are going to start using a plastic straw instead. Already, there is uproar from sweetie traditionalists who are browned off that Smarties no longer come in those curiously satisfying tubes and that KitKats are no longer wrapped in foil. Personally, I was never a great Sherbet Fountain user but I still miss one of the great sticky treats of the 20th century: the Bobby Bar, a tooth remover that used to put Bounty Bars in the shade.  By the way, Tangerine bought the Sherbet Fountain brand from Cadbury’s last year for  - well, guess how much. Click on the link to find out. There’s clearly gold in old-fashioned confectionery, even when plastic takes over from liquorice.

More at www.irishtimes.com

Gone on Gougane Barra

A circuit above Gougane’s glaciated valley provides an easy introduction to the Shehy Mountains, writes TONY DOHERTY

GOUGANE BARRA is beloved of Cork people. It is the source of the River Lee, at the mouth of which the city and port of Cork are located. It was from here that St Finbarr emerged from his monastic solitude to found the first settlement in what is now Cork City. It is also a favoured location for weddings – and, for an older generation, honeymoons.

For the hillwalker, a circuit above Gougane’s glaciated valley provides an easy introduction to the Shehy Mountains, which link mid-Cork with the Beara Peninsula.

More from Irish Times

typesetting a number with twelve million digits.

The H&FJ Institute for Unapplied Mathematics

On Monday, a correspondent called from National Public Radio to discuss the implications of typesetting a number with twelve million digits.

Monday's call came from Joe Palca, a science correspondent for NPR's Morning Edition, who was meditating on the best way to convey the magnitude of this number. Scientific notation is designed to reduce astronomically large numbers down to more manageable ones, which obscures the enormity of numbers like 2^43112609-1. What does it mean for a number to contain 12,978,189 digits? For comparison, the total number of atoms in the universe is often estimated at 10⁸⁰, a mere bagatelle of just 81 digits.

Joe liked the idea of measuring how long this number would be if it were set in type, which immediately called into question the choice of font. The number's length would depend chiefly on the width of the font selected, and even listener-friendly choices like Times Roman and Helvetica would produce dramatically different outcomes. Small eccentricities in the design of a particular number, such as Times Roman's inexplicably scrawny figure one, would have huge consequences when multiplied out to this length. But even this isn't the hairy part. Where things get difficult, as always, is in the kerning.

The 10,000 Year Clock

The 10,000 Year Clock

The idea to build a monument scale, multi-millennial, all mechanical clock as an icon to long term thinking came from computer scientist Danny Hillis and was published in the form of an email to friends. Later it was followed up with an essay published in the 01995 Wired magazine scenarios isssue

Pub is closed by Monty Python grenade

Pub is closed by Monty Python grenade

Tony Bassett
19.03.09

BUILDINGS were evacuated, a street was cordoned off and a bomb disposal team called in after workmen spotted a suspicious object.

But the dangerous-looking weapon turned out to be the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, made famous in the 1975 film Monty Python And The Holy Grail.

Celebrate Pi Day!

Pi, Greek letter (), is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi = 3.1415926535... Pi Day is celebrated by math enthusiasts around the world on March 14th.