That 100 food things meme

2008-08-19T09:54:33Z

Below is a list of 100 things that I think every good omnivore should have tried at least once in their life. The list includes fine food, strange food, everyday food and even some pretty bad food - but a good omnivore should really try it all. Don’t worry if you haven’t, mind you; neither have I, though I’ll be sure to work on it. Don’t worry if you don’t recognise everything in the hundred, either; Wikipedia has the answers.
Here’s what I want you to do:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison - Burger and pie, not steak.
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare - I've had some rare stuff, but I've avoided the raw so far.
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari - This is my favourite!
12. Pho - I'm sure I've had stuff sold as Pho, but not from a Vietnamese.
13. PB&J sandwich - Don't see what all the fuss is about really
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses - I don't recall specifically, but I've probably had it on a cheese board at some point
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes - Ginger, eldweflower, honey, various berries. I love it.
19. Steamed pork buns - Dim Sum in china town.
20. Pistachio ice cream - In Greece
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters - I never seem to get around to it. I've wanted to for ages!
29. Baklava - I've even made my own.
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi - Passed on it when in Eastern Europe
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar - Life long non-smoker
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail - I've had Ox tongue.
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects - Another thing I want to try. I think I had a grub once though.
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin - monkeyssk8

Just over half. Must do better.

Originally seen at desperance's and sbisson's then everywhere.

Bit busy at the mo

2008-08-13T14:32:18Z

Things that deserve a longer post, so I may come back to:

Great British Beer Festival

Hilarious failure of cueing system
Fullers serving chilled HSB. Gits.
Yummy gluten free ale
Much pig fat (pork scratchings) and burny jerky (chilly biltong)
Stone jug bought as walked past the stage, where there was an auction on.
Infamously rude waiters at Won Kei, brilliantly living up to reputation

Flinging cups around
Brining us food we didn't order

Shunt

Fantastic club in the vaults under London Bridge
Part art gallery, part skate park, part disco, part live gig, part kids craft workshop
Seats galore, pool table and pinball machines, late licence
£10 entry, £3 cans of beer. Not bad.
Simply amazing. Must go again.

Fandom Origin Stories

I've found a few, and have them bookmarked to blog on when I get a second.
but much praise to the fishlifter who found a 7 year old fanzine in the archive with a multitude of them. I'm looking forward to reading it a lot.

As we tell others about us.

A book reviewed on Saturday's Loose Ends
Bob Fischer: Wiffle Lever To Full!
Tales from a few years in media fandom
Why is nobody on LJ talking about this?

I've also fallen behind a bit on my LJ reading. I'll catch up eventually.

We can haz no wirez!

2008-08-06T21:27:18Z

I very strongly recommend you ignore our SSID.

Robot Brooker's treetop science.

2008-08-06T10:54:15Z

Went to see WALL·E last week. It's brilliant. The best thing I can say about is: that about 3 hours after seeing it, I suddenly remembered that it's supposed to be a kids film (I've been watching a lot of Ghost in the Shell recently, so animation does not equate with kids film in my head)

Went to a treetop adventure place over the weekend. Part of a chain called Go Ape. Seriously good fun. A couple of hours of Rope ladders, treetop bridges, zip lines, and Tarzan swings into cargo netting. It really deserves a better write up, but I don't have time right now.

Icon love! Seen here, based on these T-shirts.
I hate the cost of transatlantic shipping.

Science is like a good friend: sometimes it tells you things you don't want to hear.

From Charlie Brooker's TV rants seen at andrewducker's

"Technically, Ankh-Morpork is built on loam, but what it is mainly built on is Ankh-Morpork"

2008-08-04T20:54:52Z

There's a major bit of civil engineering going on in London at the moment. Thames Water are replacing miles of Victorian sewer systems. It's hard to wander far in the West End days these days without finding a closed street.

These photos were taken on what used to a wide bit of pavement between the Intrepid Fox, and Centre Point.

If you look in the middle of this one you can see some old brick foundations. They don't particularly line up with the current buildings or road. I guess once you've flattened whatever was there before there's no need to dig the foundations up, just roll the pavement over them.

Check out the crazy sewer(?) line here. 7 different bits of pipe, of different sizes and ages, in the space of about 2 meters! No wonder they're needing to replace some of this stuff. There's only so much patching you can get away with, before none of the original material is left.

Google killer this 'aint (yet)

2008-07-29T09:00:44Z

I don't remember the first search engine I used, probably Yahoo, or Lycos, but I remember the first I switched to. Hotbot. It didn't proclaim that it reached more of the web than the others, or that it was faster, but it let you use keywords like NOT or AND in your queries, so you could filter the results and get more relevant ones.

This week there's a new kid on the search engine block

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance.

This is such '90s fallacy. No-one cares if you have the deepest search there is. Internet search engines are all about relevance; Returning the best first page possible.

I've just tried out a not very scientific search on my name, and ~~Cool~~ Cuil fails on several accounts.

Not using popularity tests means that the first 5 pages consist of dozens of pages an artist selling prints in many online shops. Yes these pages use his name more than I do, but that just leads to spammers creating pages full key words. This isn't helped by the fact that there doesn't seem to be a way to exclude words. Otherwise it would be easy to filter out results with "poster" or "print".

I had to scroll through to page 6 to find anything that wasn't a shop page. But by then the spammers had started to creep into the result.

The policy of catching all websites seems to have had an interesting effect. Google never managed to cache all of my old blogger site, so I had a look for that. They don't seem to have it at all. But they do have a whole bunch of spammers who have copied the text from my site. Neat I didn't know I was so popular.

I thought I'd try and see how many there were. Filtering out the other sites that may accidently match my query. Searching on the page title (without any punctuation), which is also the first words on the page, and was included in the results returned ... nothing.
What?
It's right there on the page. 90% of the results Cuil already showed me had that exact text. How can they not find any matches?

It's not the size of your cache. It's what you do with it that counts.

War I did on Sunday

2008-07-28T16:57:00Z

On Sunday morning, I'd arranged to meet up with a few friends in London.

I knew that trains would muck people's schedules up, so came prepared with an mp3 player, some reading material, a few card games, a ball, a frisbee, etc. Even at 10:30 it was a gorgeous day. I sat in the shade reading Interzone, and listening to an old Boothby Graffoe album for a while. Then got up and tried to remember how to get my diabolo to work. I'd either fail to keep it horizontal on the spin up, or would launch it and it would fail to keep spinning when I caught (No mention will be made of launch attempts when the rope was twisted, that nearly lead to decapitation).

Fuzz turned up first and tried his hand at the diabolo. At about this point a young chinese girl came over and showed us what we were doing wrong (Hold one hand higher than the other when catching the diablo, so it rolls down the string and picks up rotational speed). She then did some Around The Leg tricks before running of after her companion, who wasn't impressed and had wandered off.

piesandmash turned up, and after a bit we headed down to the War Museum.

While they were searching our backpacks at the entrance to the museum, the steward asked if anyone had ever found my XKCD t-shirt offensive. I grinned replied that it only really annoyed wizards. Then a security guard came over and said that he was sorry, but it wasn't a joke. The War Museum has policy of no offensive words on T-shirts, and he said I really ought to turn it inside out. Instead I turned it backwards, and put my backpack on.

He seemed quite embarrassed, and came over later to make sure I hadn't felt picked on. There was a lot of kids around so I said I understood why they would say that. Thinking back on it, I wonder if the rule is there because people turn up with protest t-shirts? I could have stood my ground, and made a stand for freedom of expression, but frankly I was more interested in the shiny metal inside.

The main hall has got lots of big metal war machines in it, and one little wooden sailing boat (It was the smallest civilian boat of the Dunkirk fleet). The space is quite a bit smaller than the large gallery in the Canadian War Museum. However there's a good range of stuff in there, from spotlights and recoilless artillery, to tanks (with spare tracks mounted like spare tires) and planes.

While waiting for the last of party to arrive we had a good poke around. The shear mass of these things is impressive. Give the sea mine a whack, and you can just about hear a hollow ring through the thick steel, but the larger gun barrels are so thick that they may as well be solid for all that I could tell from wacking them.

Aesthetically, I love the details inside a complex machine [1]. Everything serves some purpose but it's pretty inscrutable from a quick glance. In that vein, the cut away V2 engines, and the brass gunner's sighting mechanisms were pretty nifty. Fuzz says that modern gunners still use those sights to double check computers, and are almost as fast them. Neither of us could figure out why they were all made of brass rather than steel.

The scariest exhibit in that room is also the smallest and least assuming. It's 3 meters long, less than a meter across, shaped like a black sausage with a tail fin. It's the casing for an early atomic bomb.

The lower levels were devoted to war from 1900 onwards, mostly focusing on the 2 World Wars. Like the main hall, each display case was densely packed, with well arranged examples of artefacts typical of the type suited for the narrative of the exhibition.

A few examples that spring to mind:
A corner of a cabinet devoted to bits of wood, with nails in. Also known as improvised trench clubs.
A 4-lines-a-day diary, opened to the D-Day landing. It reads like a twitter stream.
Many hand written letters.
A tea pot made from an old cocoa tin.
Italian hand grenades. Which were red, and different in design from any I'd seen before. If one of those landed at my feet I wouldn't recognise it to ~~run away from~~ ~~pick up and throw back~~ dive on top of.

The Trench Experience was a little disappointing. It was dim, narrow, and contained various wounded soldier dummies, but it smelt of cumin seeds and just didn't have the atmosphere. Bad audio I wonder?

By then everyone was getting hungry and thirsty, so we raced up to Marble Arch and booked tickets for The Dark Knight. We wandered around for quarter of an hour looking for a decent pub that would serve us food on a Sunday afternoon, but failed. So resorted to a Weatherspoons. They were out of beef burgers, charged more for ale than lager, and still publish a vaguly Eurosceptic newsletter.

The Dark Knight was a pretty entertaining film, which left us discussing motivations, and plot lines for a while afterwards. The action scenes were: thrilling, high octane, and slightly silly, which you'd expect from a summer blockbuster. Constantly I had no idea what was going to happen in the next 5 minutes and couldn't wait to find out. All that said, I doubt I'll ever buy it. I hadn't seen Batman Begins, which didn't prevent the film from making sense, but did mean I had to deduce a bit of what had happened. I'm glad I saw it, but it's not a film I feel compelled to go see again.

After that, rather than heading back to the Weatherspoons, we walked to the Cock, for some good cheap Samuel Smith beer. The drizzle that joined us for the walk was fairly warm and quite refreshing really.

Woah. That's around a thousand words. I never write that much.

[1]If I ever have a weekend without any plans (not had one free since before Easter) I ought to go down to the Science Museum, and have a go at drawing some of their sketching steam engines.

Cats with Blogs

2008-07-28T14:51:17Z

You might think that this comic strip about a cat's blog sounds silly, but cats' who own SF authors, or the power of procrastination.

Random thoughts

2008-07-25T10:22:12Z

I was standing on the tube recently and half noticed a pregnant lady standing by one of the seats. When the train pulled up at the next stop the guy who had the seat got up to leave, and as she went to sit down she hooked her foot round his and almost sent him flying. I gave her a big thumbs up.

If I shave of the sideburns I've had for this summer, am I going to have white stripes on my face?

Hang on. It's Friday. That's casual dress day. Why am I'm in a suit? Damn.

What's the point of BBCode? It's no less complicated than HTML, and just confuses things.

Some Thoughts triggered by Christopher Priest

2008-07-23T22:23:55Z

On Feminism:

At tonight's BSFA meeting Christopher Priest was talking on some of the differences between the Prestige film and his book. One of which I was going to ask him about but owlfish's friend got to first, and phrased better than me.

IIRC in the book, things are going very badly wrong for one of the Magicians, and his female assistant decides to help him by going to find out what his rival is up to.
Whereas in the film, things go slightly wrong, and the Magician tells her to go find out what's going on, so off she goes.

Priest felt that this was a weak motivation, but hadn't seen that it removed the power of the decision from the women. In fact due to this sort of thing the film fails to pass the Bechdel test, as at no point do two women talk to each other about anything other than men.

On Writing Techniques:

As it says in my profile I usually have at least 4 half written posts on the go at any one time. So the idea of someone completing a novel, let alone multiple ones, always intrigues me. I often ask authors about how they write novels.

One author (whose name temporarily escapes me) said that he works out the structure with post it notes, which he can shuffle around until he has the scaffolding on which to hang the story on.

On the other end of the scale was Diana Wynne Jones, who said when visualises a scene in the middle of the novel, and tries to write towards it, and is then surprised by whatever comes next. In fact she has to abandon many draft novels as it they don't turn into stories worth telling.

I asked Christopher Priest how he handles it, since his novels are often convoluted to put it simply. With events preceding causes, and causes being unclear, and ambiguous. I assumed he must have to do some heavy plotting before hand to get it all together. In fact he referred to his own work to a tesseract, or an Escher drawing. With impossibilities, and ambiguities being inherent in it. Saying that each one is just written in an organic manor, welcoming mistakes, and incorporating them into the flow.

On Fandom Origin Stories:

Fandom/BSFA origin stories interest me at the moment. Have done for a while. I keep meaning to write mine up. Here are some of the reasons why:

I spent Sunday trying to sell the concept of Fandom to comic and film fans.
I read Farah's Origin story recently and am fascinated by the differences, and similarities with my own.
I was chatting about the work that goes into a World Con, and realised that the lead times can be longer than the entire life of essentially fannish organisations!
I have a set of notes I jotted down from a conversation with Jonathan Cowie on how to recruit new fans, that I keep meaning to have a better look at.

So Christopher Priest's Origin story is really amazing. He had an anthology Penguin Science Fiction anthology edited by Brian Aldis and the introduction mentioned that he was president of the BSFA.

He thought nothing of it until he saw a review in newspaper which gave a typically offhand dismissive comment on SF. The next day the published a letter from Brian Aldis correcting the reviewers remarks, which included his address. So Christopher Priest wrote to him, and asked if the BSFA was for published authors only, or if fans could join. Brian Aldis wrote back, and Christopher Priest has been a member ever since.

I may start collecting these properly for a fanzine.

A quick tour of a dented Dave

2008-07-21T16:13:10Z

I just realised how many little bumps and scrapes I've picked up in the last couple of weeks, in the cause of having fun.

Slightly sunburned cheeks: Two Saturdays in Windy Brighton.

Split nail on left middle finger: Brighton Frizbee related mishap.

Rough skin on top of thumbs: It's a compulsion.

Cut under right thumb: Undoing one of those army style belts. I'd had a couple of scrapes there before and had blamed those stupid ring pull cans. I got a really deep cut from them once at uni.

Bruised side: Gentle poke from Radhs, when I was taking the mick. Must have been harder than I thought.

Scab on shin: Bought a reduced Frizbee as the sun was setting in Reading, and forgot to look out for benches.

Sore feet: Running on stones into the sea. Twice. Then standing up most of Sunday telling comic and film fans about our sort of fandom.

2000 Mad Nuclear Ant&Decs

2008-07-18T17:22:33Z

Go watch Dr Horrible's musical blog.

It's simply brilliant. Joss Whedon made a tongue-in-cheek mad scientist musical during the writers strike, and is releasing it free for one week only.

The last part is only going to be available for one day, so don't miss it!

More Mad Science!

Nukees, the Nuclear Engineering Students webcomic has left Keenspot.

This was possible the first webcomic I ever read, and since it's just lost the cross promtion from Keenspot so it deserves a brief plug. Essentially the early years, are largely a bunch of fairly geeky jokes, about the slightly eccentric titular Nukees. In the middle years there's slightly more adventure, with rouge AIs, robot ants, and occasional visions of Greek Gods. Then in the last few years it's become much more character driven, with the back story of King Luca being fleshed out, and I think we're due for fairly big moment with the stalkerish Cecilia.
Possibly not one to read from today, but start at the beginning, read a few strips a day, and pause with bookmark, and you'll be caught up in no time.

While I'm on webcomics Irregular Webcomic has reached its 2000th strip! Very few other webcomics can claim this.

And finally

Neither Wikipedia, nor IMDB have photos of Ant or Dec, as no-one knows which is which :)

Counterfit money.

2008-07-18T16:28:45Z

I got a few pound coins in change from a vending machine today. Remembering what Fuzz had said about more than 1% of pound coins being counterfeit, I had a closer look. These three were marked as 1983:

I really think there's something wrong with the edge of the middle one. The first thing I noticed is that the milling around the edge is more down than the other two. And the letter E is slightly fatter than the other. And it's upside down!

I suppose I ought to give it in to the police.

Memetic Engineering Sweets*

2008-07-17T12:35:24Z

Ear Worming Tablets : Removes those stubborn tunes that just won't get out your head.

Anti-retro-viral Marketing : Prevents you from passing on those Nostalgic feelings to others.

Eye Can'ty : Stops all cravings for Eye Candy.

Pre-release hype-odermic : One small jab, for 6 months immunity to spoilers.

*not coming soon to a shop near you!

The great LJ postie debate:

2008-07-15T14:33:45Z

Love 'em or hate 'em?

Do they bring you bills, and birthday cards.

They ignore ruudboy's redirects, write apologetic notes to ozgirlabroad, and generally cause merry hell for Offensive Mango.

Mine bought me a new pair glasses this morning.
Last week they hid a bundle of books I'd bought under the bin lid on the front door step. It kept the rain off. I couldn't fail to notice it. It saved me a trip to the sorting office.

So at the moment I like my postie. How about you?

cdave @ 2008-07-11T17:24:00

2008-07-11T16:31:23Z

Jim: how can The Rani, run in high heels?

easy, she’s a time lord, they’re probably shorter on the inside than on the outside.

A Graphic designer's take on the web 2008
seen over at the engineer's.

Knitted Dalek Toilet roll cover.

Stand clear of the doors

2008-07-11T14:24:16Z

The tube pulled out of High & I.

I'd given up trying to read the paper. There just wasn't enough room. Even folded in quarters, and held high above the nearest commuter's shoulder. It was rammed in there. I was stuck in the middle of the carriage. There was someone between me and the door, between me and the glass partition, between me and the rear of the carriage, and about three more between me and the ventilation window.

It was hot. And humid. And my waterproof jacket was trapping the heat. So I wriggled a bit and elbowed half a dozen people removing it. Draping it over my left arm, I felt a bit unsteady so grabbed the overhead rail with my right hand, and clutched the paper between my knees.

In fact I was beginning to feel very unsteady. And a little nauseous. I was really grateful for the tiny gusts of cool air that occasionally reached me from the window. I realised I was breathing quite deeply, and loudly through my nose. I decided I was not going to make it to work in one go, and would have to get off at Kings Cross, and sit down for a bit.

But Kings Cross was another few minutes away, and I was really starting to feel the heat. And spots had started swimming in front of my eyes. It was getting harder to catch my breath, and the edges of my vision were stating to go black. I looked at my hand on overhead rail and could see a film of sweat starting to appear. I squatted down on my haunches as that was the closest thing I could do to laying down, and getting the blood back to my head.

The train stopped, and I squeezed past the person by the door, stagered to the benches, sat down and closed my eyes. About 5 or 6 trains later one with some spare seats pulled up, and I got on, and finished travelling into the office.

I haven't had a hangover that bad since new year's. I don't see why it was so bad either. I didn't mix my drinks, stuck to bitters. I had a fair wack of water when I got in, and over 7 hours sleep. Ah well. I feel a bit more human after several cups of coffee, and hot lunch.

cdave @ 2008-07-08T10:45:00

2008-07-08T09:59:01Z

Having a decent customer service is important to me when I but things. It's why I won't use Dabs any more and use CCL online instead.

So I'm very pleased to be able to recommend Advanced mp3 players.co.uk.

There was a minor cock-up. I'd ordered an mp3 player that was out of stock, and due to be back in stock on Friday. I paid for next day delivery to get hold of it by Saturday. However it didn't arrive. I emailed them on Sunday, and had a reply at 9:20 on Monday morning. It seems that by the time it arrived, they had missed the cut off for next day shipping. So the refunded me the cost of the next day shipping. Great service, and incredibly cheap too.

Not on netiquette

2008-07-03T22:13:26Z

I've been "breaking into fandom" in super slow motion for about three years now. Mostly due to other time constraints. FIJAGDH. But partially due to learning the language etc.

One of the books I remember reading from my local library as a teenager was Surfing on the Internet : a nethead's adventure on-line. Published in 1995 it was at little out of date even then. One of the random bits of advice between the chapters on MUDs and cybersex, was the advice to lurk for a while before posting to newsgroups, lest you attack a flame war.
(That and "You can surf the net, work, socialise, and sleep. Pick three. Caffeine can substitute for sleep.")

However fanzine's (and student radio shows thinking on it) have a different attitude[1], encouraging contributions and Letters of Comment.

So, having received my first fanzine in the post (rather than by hand), I'm at a bit of a loss as to the un-written rules. I've not had time this month to scrape my thoughts together coherently enough to say what I want to in a letter. So I've just handed them a doodle. Now: can I post it on here? Should I wait until after the next issue to see what they've done with it? Should I have signed it? If so with my initials, as "normally" do with the few worthwhile (admittedly very few) doodles I do, or sign it as cdave, seeing as how most fans who know me, don't know my surname?

And should I post them the LoC when done? I know I value physical letters far more than emails, but then I don't have to re-type them.

I'm sure these things aren't important, but I do think about them.

[1] Now at least. Hearing some of the discussions about old fanzine's and the "kill the f*cker" (metaphorically) game against the noobs is quite odd against today's fandom.

Othar Tryggvassen vrs the Wikifiddlers!

2008-07-03T11:20:34Z

Explosives are booby trapped. Now that's just excessive.

Othar Tryggvassen is a spark (or mad genius) from the Girl Genius comics. He's an occasional visitor to the comic, but is a hero in his own mind. Battling against the tyrants of Europe.

You can see what he's up to when off panel, as Othar has a twitter. Every day he updates us on his latest adventures. It's quite a fun way to read a story.

Plus, he's battling the sort of person who's booby trap the explosives, and deploy other mokey based defence mechanisms.

iBon ran across this rather surreal corner of Wikipedia the other day:

The comprehensive list of usernames editors have expressed concern over.

It's a source of much puerile humour :)

Mykidsareplayinginthetoilet
Killyoureditor
Jimbo3000
Lolvandalisms
Yer Momma
Butt face999

Lies, damned lies, and bloody lies.

2008-07-02T11:55:30Z

I caught last night's file on four. It was an interesting discussion on recent theories involving the use of stored red blood cells.

IIRC They tend to be stored for between 10 to 30 days before being given to someone. Scientist know the cells change slightly with storage. For instance they become less flexible, so cannot fit down the smallest capillaries as easily. They can take up to a day to recover.

A lot of blood goes to people who've lost red cells through traumatic accidents, surgery, complications in birth, and haematology (leukaemia, chemotherapy, bone marrow transfers, etc.), and no-one disputes this saves lives. But some goes to people who read as anaemic on charts, or as a precaution during elective surgery, and the debate was around the benefits to this group, and the length of storage of blood.

Ben Goldacre would have liked it, as there was lots of discussions of methodology, and statistical evidence.

Both main participants were in favour of funding a proper randomized controlled trial, but disagreed on the validity of the retrospective study that had already been taken place. This study had found that people who receive older blood are more likely to have complications than people who hadn't

Participant 1 said that the retrospective study wasn't valid as the patients weren't randomised, and generally sicker people who receive blood in the first place. This would only affect the 10% who didn't fall trauma/surgery/birth/haematology group. So we should continue current practice while further evidence is gathered.

Participant 2 said that 30% of blood goes to people who haven't lost it in trauma/surgery/birth. And that they had taken account of the effects of the level of illness properly in their study, so we should stop storing blood for as long.

I don't have time to go through all the literature myself, but I know who I trust more at the moment. The scientist who didn't spin the statistics by leaving out haematology patients, and deflecting the question ("Yes, but the research is important because...") when confronted on it.

Boing boing hypocrisy

2008-07-02T11:20:07Z

I'm a bit late to this bit of internet drama, but I've not seen it on LJ yet, and it strikes me that some of you would be interested in it.

Boing boing caught deleting posts about someone they don't like anymore, and won't say why they don't.

Hypocrisy pure and simple.

{edit

Pratchett sews pants on sued printers: linkdump

2008-07-01T14:06:51Z

Neil Gaiman interviews Terry Pratchett.
seen at Ducker's Delicious Dump

I don't what amuses me more. Victorian ladies sewing tiny pants* onto their copy of the Bayeux Tapestry or that they were called the Leek Embroidery Society.

*middle of the three small images.

Seen in an old Cloud Chamber

M.P.A.A. send takedown letters accusing printers of downloading movies. One frame at a time presumably.

Big Macs worse than Chelsea Tractors.

2008-06-30T14:23:06Z

a vegan in an SUV is doing more to stop global warming than a cyclist powered by cheeseburgers.

Since cows fart. A lot. CO2 bad. Methane very bad.
from purplecthulhu comments on a locked post.

Liveblogging Dr No.

2008-06-29T22:43:32Z

Statute of limitation on spoilers must have run out by now, but just in case, review behind cut.

Chapter 1</a>

Tree frogs ... began to zing and tinkle.

What an odd bit of onomatopoeia to start with.

I've been re-reading Making Comics recently, and it points out that Will Eisner's technique of embeding titles into the first page isn't distracting, because we're not immersed in the story yet. Same thing with pre-title text on TV shows.

This is the exact opposite of that phenomena. The opening paragraph, instead of setting the scene, just had me imagining frogs with bells, zinging by each other.

Queen's Club ... Three blind Chigroes ... Morse Code infodump... Assasination! ... and the WRNS too ... Fire, and disposal of the bodies in a lake.

That's odd they burned the cypher books. They can't be counter spies. Hmm.

And why is a former Chief Officer WRNS content to do nothing more than dial in for the spy while he'd driving back for his bridge game?

Chapter 2.

M lets the chauffeur have the afternoon off because of the rain and says he'll get the tube home

Is this showing us M's soft side? He doesn't overwork subordinates unless necessary??

M talks to Bond's Doctor

Pretty clear that this isn't the first Bond book. He's had a rough time. M's clear that he'll put Bond through hell if has too.

'what happened to the Russian Woman?'
M said shortly 'Oh, she died'

Sexism or anti-Russian sentiment?

Bond enters

Intersting. A mid-chapter view point switch. M was narrated in third person, but we're getting Bond's feelings now.

Beretta for a Walther PPK

More M being Harsh. Won't let bond keep his favourite gun. Nice info-dumping, on Gun specs. Welcome to Bond's world.

Sends Bond to Jamaica

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M is doing this to give Bond an easy, but needed, mission. So he can ease his way back to active duty. Bond thinks he's being punished for failing last mission, and has lost M's trust.

So far then. Some good characterisation in the interaction between Bond, and M. Two bits of spy background info-dumping to set up the enviroment. Everyone else has felt like background. I guess they are, but still...