little bits of everything

A word of explanation for the blog title. My children have brought to my attention the YouTube phenomenon of videos entitled "(social grouping) reacts to (meme)", e.g. "teens react to Flappy Bird". It consists of watching the expression of a member of these social groups watching the meme on YouTube. They also get asked questions about it. I thought about recording my own "I react to (social grouping) react to (meme)", which would consist of me with a puzzled expression on my face as I really don't see the point of watching someone else watching YouTube. However I thought it made a good title for this post. The elder is me, because my children tell me I'm old. Magic: The Gathering  has been around for over 20 years and at some point in the past few years I became aware of it as some sort of trading card game. Recently one of my children has bought a set of cards and so I can play it too, after a fashion. It's a fantastically complicated gam...

From Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything", talking about a cell in the human body: Typically a cell will contains some twenty thousand types of protein, and of these about two thousand types will be represented by at least fifty thousand molecules. 'This means,' says Nuland, 'that even if we count only those molecules present in more than 50,000 each, the total is still a very minimum of 100 million protein molecules in each cell. Such a staggering figure gives some idea of the swarming immensity of biochemical activity within us.' In a single cell. Wow.

I don't often check my Flickr photo stats, but I happened to the other week and found a massive spike in the number of views. Normally I get around 100-200 views a day, but on that particular day I got 569,829. My theory is that they came from this post on Viralnova about money trees . I reckon that somehow embedding the pictures on that web page caused the view count to go up. It's interesting that as well as the two money tree pictures the ones near it in the photo stream also got a lot of views. I couldn't find anyone else reporting that they've had a similar big jump, so I put this post out there in case someone knows just why the pageviews did go up.

I didn't realise until I came across this book that Douglas Adams had written Doctor Who episodes. So what was the intersection of these two major parts of British SF like? Douglas had already written an episode called City of Death  (note requires Real Player - actually it doesn't require it, but I just wanted to say such an anachronistic thing). Then he was commissioned to write six episodes. They got abandoned after three because of a strike. What Gareth Roberts has done here is write a novel based on all he could get hold of with those scripts. Unfortunately I found that the combination was lesser than the sum of its parts. It's well written, but not as brilliant as I might have hoped. The story is quite slow, but not tedious and the ending doesn't disappoint. Maybe just for fans only.

Why am I even wondering about this? Let's start back when I was a young teenager in the late 70s. There were four music papers around then: (from memory) Melody Maker, Sounds, Record Mirror and the NME. A friend of mine subscribed to Record Mirror. On the letters page there was discussion about mods and rockers; this was the first time I'd heard the terms. I didn't know anyone who would fall in either camp, but being rural Lincolnshire this isn't a surprise. Another friend was embarrassed to discover that his dad used to be a Teddy Boy. Although his dad was middle-aged then, I did the maths and it was entirely plausible that he was a teenager at the right time. The music I listened to and liked around then was the Specials and Madness, and not Shakin Stevens. If someone had made me choose then I would have said Mod. When we moved to our current house and I was no longer able to walk to work, as I had done for almost all of my previous working life up that point...

ELO status codes: ELO1: communication breakdown on the line ELO2: insufficient data coming through ELO3: sweet talking woman

The year is 1970. It is around the time when a man went into a shop to complain about a parrot, and when there was a Government Ministry of Silly Walks. "Hello there, I've come for some work." "Well you've come to the right place sir, this is a Work Shop." "What sort of work do you have?" "Well, sir, we have some light secretarial, some tedious paperwork, some spurious form filling, some skilled plumbing, a bit of carpentry, and some medium-grade filing." "The light secretarial sounds good. I think I'll have some of that. How much do you pay?" "Pay, sir? I don't understand." "How much do you pay for the work?" "I'm afraid you're mistaken sir, we don't pay you, you pay us. This is a Work Shop, you come in and you buy some work." "Why would I want to buy some work?" "Well, sir, in the future, when machines meet our every need people will be des...