My 400th Post - and my first video file

Well, this is my 400th post, so I thought I'd put up a video file for a change. This video is of the Phoenix Band at Stockton Heath walking day. Walking Day is held each year at many villages and towns in this part of North-West England, principally in Warrington.

The video shows the highlight point in Walking Day, when the band stops in Victoria Square in the centre of Stockton Heath, and the baton man (who incidentally works at Daresbury Laboratory), does his stuff.

Jesus in a Peruvian sand dune

Can you see Jesus in this satellite photo from Google Maps?

Wired News: Blogging + Video = Vlogging

Blogging + Video = Vlogging more internet madness.

Home-grown suicide bombers

Today's news has confirmed what most people were thinking: the London attacks were performed by British suicide bombers. And these are the first suicide bombs on British soil.

Given the information that is available from the police, it doesn't take much to put two plus two together to work out what these guys did. They hatched a plan up in Leeds, travelled down to Luton, took the bombs out of their car and then went their separate ways from King's Cross. Three of them killed themselves at 8:50 along with their victims. Perhaps the fourth one bottled it, then travelled around in an agitated state (according to one eye-witness) before blowing himself up on a bus. Was this fourth one deliberate or accidental?

I've been keeping an eye on the official victim list: although I checked on all my friends that I'm in regular contact with, I have this nagging doubt that someone I know might have been on one of the trains/bus. I guess that's a feeling shared by many people.

But, the attacks won't stop me going to London. See you there next week.

The Sorting Door Project

The Sorting Door Project - an interesting study into how multiple RFID tags can be used to reduce your privacy.

Truth In Cosmetic Surgery Blog

Truth In Cosmetic Surgery - an interesting website about how bad plastic surgery is.

RSS to JS

Free RSS/RDF to JavaScript Conversion Tool for Webmasters. Hmm. Could be handy.

Fingernails store personal information

Fingernails store personal information. An amazing article on biometrics from optics.org:

'Secure optical data storage could soon literally be at your fingertips thanks to work being carried out in Japan. Yoshio Hayasaki and his colleagues have discovered that data can be written into a human fingernail by irradiating it with femtosecond laser pulses. Capacities are said to be up to 5 mega bits and the stored data lasts for 6 months - the length of time it takes a fingernail to be completely replaced.'

Man vs. Car - in London

As an antidote to the terrible events in London last week, here's a little something to cheer you up. Tonight on Top Gear - the UK's most popular driving program - we were shown a challenge between car and runner. Each had to cover the same London Marathon course through Central London during rush hour, from Greenwich round to Westminster and back again, or thereabouts. Even with it being London, and knowing that the average speed of cars in London is 10.6 miles per hour, you would have to bet on the car, right? After all, marathon runners can only get up to about 15 mph, and there had to be sections of the 26 mile course, where the car would get way ahead of the typical runner and easily win the race.

Wrong! Although the car was initially in front (in a quiet part of Greenwich), it was quickly overtaken and never caught up. The runner won by a good 10 minutes.

Ok, so it's a runner not a normal commuter, but there's an important lesson here. It's total lunacy to drive around London. For short journeys you might as well walk. Am I the only person who thinks this in London? It seems so, given the zillions of people who struggle through the congestion charging zone every day.

Anyway, you can find out more about it here.

ELSEWARES » INDEPENDENT ART & DESIGN

ELSEWARES » INDEPENDENT ART & DESIGN. Cool stuff from old junk.

A Letter To The Terrorists, From London

From The London News Review. This pretty much sums it up to me:

This is London. We've dealt with your sort before. You don't try and pull this on us.

Do you have any idea how many times our city has been attacked? Whatever you're trying to do, it's not going to work.

All you've done is end some of our lives, and ruin some more. How is that going to help you? You don't get rewarded for this kind of crap.

And if, as your MO indicates, you're an al-Qaeda group, then you're out of your tiny minds.

Because if this is a message to Tony Blair, we've got news for you. We don't much like our government ourselves, or what they do in our name. But, listen very clearly. We'll deal with that ourselves. We're London, and we've got our own way of doing things, and it doesn't involve tossing bombs around where innocent people are going about their lives.

And that's because we're better than you. Everyone is better than you. Our city works. We rather like it. And we're going to go about our lives. We're going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we're going to work. And we're going down the pub.

So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your arseholes, and get the fuck out of our city."

Astrologer Sues NASA Over Comet Probe - Yahoo! News

Astrologer Sues NASA Over Comet Probe - more marvellous lunacy.