For the first two days of The Times Cities fit for cycling campaign, the reaction amongst cycling campaigners was unanimouslypositive. For the first time, cycle safety was being addressed in a way that didn't blame the victims of cycling accidents, and furthermore, it was being addressed in a mainstream arena.
For too long, the emphasis has been placed on the cyclist to protect themselves in a dangerous environment, instead of looking at why our cities are dangerous places to cycle in the first place. Here was an eight-point manifesto that was largely about addressing these issues: placing mandatory sensor equipment on large vehicles, identifying the 500 most dangerous junctions and completely redesigning them to make them safer, and channeling more public money into safer cycle routes.
The potential impact of more people cycling as a result of this safer environment is enormous. Our cities become less polluted and more pleasant spaces to be, and people become fitter, healthier and better off.
If you think that pushing for this is some kind of social engineering against people's freedom to own and drive their cars unencumbered in our cities' streets... then you're probably right. But it's only to counter the social engineering that has been carried out by car manufacturers, car insurance companies, oil companies and supermarkets over the last 60 years that has led us to the point where we're driving half a mile down the road to find the car parking space nearest the supermarket entrance.
Bringing about a mass uptake of cycling as a form of personal transport - as it was before the invention of the car - isn't just about making our cities safer to cycle in; cycling needs to be seen as a normal way of getting around, a kind of 'augmented walking' as it were. There shouldn't be anything smug or aggressive about cycling, it need not require special equipment other than a bike, and it should only be referred to as a 'sport' if there is a competitive element to it.
So apparently in order to stay safe on a bike, we need £626 pounds worth of extra gear, and look as if we're about to cycle from John O'Groats to Lands End the hard the way.
When I first read about the The Times' campaign late on Wednesday night, I really thought it was a watershed moment for cycling campaigning in the UK; that finally we were beginning to see a Dutch-style cycling revolution, and that we were starting to tackle the real barriers to mass cycling uptake. However, after today's additions to their website, I fear The Times' campaign may be shooting wide of the goal.
In Gateshead town centre, huge steel structures are being bolted together like giant Meccano. Their sterile frames loom over and encroach the streets below in a way that demonstrates their designer's lack of regard for the people who will be using the spaces around them.
This is the new Trinity Square, built on the site of Trinity Shopping Centre and its infamous car park designed by the late Rodney Gordon of Owen Luder Partnership.
The purpose of these buildings is largely the same as the former occupants of the site; it's a shopping centre, a hub for commercial activity based around the private car. This time however, people will park their cars in a subterranean pit rather than a conspicuous multi story car park. There will also be two large blocks of student accommodation to capitalise on Newcastle's large student population.
It's a continued mining of public urban space for commercial interest, and cheap construction methods as well as scant regard for the importance of good urban architecture are creating places that serve commercial interests and not the residents of Gateshead.
Rodney Gordon's Trinity Centre and multi-story car park divided opinions; as a project to revive Gateshead town centre it was a failure, but as a piece of architecture, of art and design, it was unique. Much like the sculptures found in Gateshead's public places - the Angel of the North being the most famous example - it was an audacious piece of public art, but with a function that, for a number of economic reasons, was never fully utilised. Whatever you thought of it, it was designed by someone who genuinely thought their work would improve people's lives through modern design.
There is no such original thinking in this new development; its design is informed by cost and by market research. The associated public relations material is pure tokenism; yes, there will be what they call a public square, but I see it more as a kind of commercial clearing, or maybe a legally required fire assembly point. Try and exercise the rights you'd normally have in a public square, for example: to do street photography, campaign for a particular cause, protest, proselytise etc., and you'd no doubt be moved on by someone with a walkie-talkie line to the CCTV operator.
In thirty years time, will this development gain the notoriety that its predecessor enjoyed before it was demolished? I suspect not. The car park was a radical and brave building the like of which hadn't been seen before. These buildings will be homogenous with most city-centre retail buildings constructed in the UK during the last twenty years, so their sheer banality will no doubt be met by indifference. With that in mind, maybe we get the buildings we deserve.
A few months ago I took a front wheel to a local bike shop to get a replacement spoke fitted. I handed it over to the sales assistant and the first thing he did was look at the hub and turn the spindle. "That hub's absolutely buggered mate" he quickly concluded, referring to the apparent stiffness as it turned. He didn't recognise that the hub was a dynamo, and the friction is there to generate electrical power as the wheel turns.
If I took this wheel to be fixed at a bike shop on the continent, the shop attendant would recognise it right away; in fact it would be unusual for a city bike not to have lights powered by a dynamo.
Dynamos were fitted to many bicycles sold in the UK between the 1930s and 1970s. This was thanks mostly to innovations by Sturmey Archer, but really it was the only way to power lights at the time - battery technology wasn't good enough to do the job. But by the late 70s, racing bikes were heavily marketed to non-racing, everyday cyclists, and the myth of 'lighter is better' was born. Subsequently, a heavy dynamo and lights became an increasingly rare sight on new bikes. During the 80s, the cycling boom was based around the mountain bike, and again practicalities like dynamo powered lights were done away with.
Much has been written about the legacy of the 70s and 80s on today's cycling culture in the UK (see Robert Penn's book It's All About the Bike), and my experience in the bike shop further demonstrates how the UK bike industry is still very much based around sports and leisure cycling, rather than everyday utility cycling. New cyclists who go into one of these shops with a bit of money to spend are likely to come out equipped for a day ofcycling in a hilly forest, with a full suspension mountain bike and a bag full of Gore cycling gear.
But back to the issue of bicycle lights, it's true that dynamo powered lights had a reputation for being unreliable, especially those powered by a bottle dynamo. In the 90s, as LED technology improved, the 'blinky' revolutionised bike lighting and is now a ubiquitous sight in UK cities at night. These lights tend to be light-weight, battery powered, and quickly removable; this might seem like a list of convenient features, but in my experience the opposite is true.
The fact that they're easily removeable means they're easily stolen. Every time you park up your bike, you go through the routine of unclipping your lights and putting them in a bag or pocket, and go through the reverse process when you return. Except in my case, I spend five minutes routing through my bag or pockets trying to figure out where I put them, occassionally finding that they've switched themselves on and are wasting battery power (I once walked into a coffee shop with a rear LED still flashing in my breast pocket... I looked like E.T.).
The fact that nearly all LED lights available on the high street are quick-release is a legacy of the sports cycling boom of the 80s and 90s. They're a bit like the quick release mudguards that road cyclists use, where a practical item is only added to the bike when absolutely necessary to keep the bike as light as possible. When you think about it, there's absolutely no reason for a bicycle light to be quick-release for most city cyclists, except maybe to make it convenient to change the batteries. Which leads me to my next point.
The fact that they're inexpensive and battery powered means that they're enormously wasteful things. Batteries are harmful to the environment, both in the processes used in their manufacture and their disposal. Also, these lights don't seem to be particularly weather resistant, meaning the batteries can easily corrode, causing the light to fail; and because they're cheap to buy, it's more convenient to simply buy a new light than fix and re-use the old one. I've built up quite a collection of half-working LED lights over the last few years, to the point where I thought there had to be a better way!
That better way is the way it was done 70 years ago, by using a small amount of your energy to generate electricity to power lights. Couple this idea with the latest LED technology and we have the perfect lighting solution!
The best type of dynamo to use is the hub type that's built into the wheel. While bottle dynamos have improved over the years, hub dynamos are far more reliable. Their price starts at around £35 for something like a Shimano N30, however the more you pay, the less drag the dynamo creates as the wheel turns, and the more weather resistant the hub will be. The Shimano N72 or N80 might be a better choice if you're willing to spend a bit more, and of course you would have to add the cost of a good bike shop building it into your wheel. The best (and most expensive) dynamos are those produced by German companies Schmidt and Supernova; these models are the most efficient, and Supernova's latest model has a switch to disengage the dynamo magnets during the day for a drag-free hub.
In terms of lights, again Schmidt and Supernova manufacture the best and brightest dynamo powered LED lights. More affordable are those made by Busch & Muller. Something to look out for when choosing dynamo lights is to make sure both front and rear lights have a stand-light, meaning that they have a power reserve for when you are stopped at junctions. Also, some models have ambient light sensors which turn the lights on automatically when it goes dark; this simple feature makes bike lights completely hassle free - you never have to worry about batteries or switches and you know your lights are always going to be on when they need to be.
If you already have a rack mounted on your bike, it probably has the appropriate holes to bolt-on a permanently mounted rear light, and the front light tends to be bolted onto the fork crown. Admittedly, fitting and wiring dynamo powered lights can be a bit of a pain, but once it's done, you can just forget about your lights, which is something you can never do with battery powered LEDs.
To conclude, dynamo powered lights tend to be extremely bright and rear dynamo lights always have a large reflector built into them (a legal requirement in Germany); this really is enough for you to be seen by other road users at night. A good lighting system makes cycling a hassle-free activity you can do without special protective clothing and additional gear.
Human Beings' greatest technological leaps seem to always stem from military applications, and Boston Dynamics humanoid robot 'Petman' is no different in that respect. I look forward to the day then technology like this is developed to make our lives better, not to make war. It makes Honda's Asimo - a corporate marketing tool - look like Robbie the Robot.
Useable and feature-rich photographic workflow software for Linux and released under the GPL. I've tried most pieces of RAW workflow software for Linux, including non-free software such as Bibble and Lightzone, and this is the best.
A reflection of the cultural diversity of the victims of 9/11 and a reminder that America is a secular country. Meanwhile, most of the remembrance services in the UK were entirely Christian affairs. It's predicted that by 2050, regular church attendance will be made by less than 100,000 people in the UK. Yet the stranglehold Christianity has on events concerning national mourning and remembrance remains strong. I often wonder why that is.
Today The Times ran a piece by Sarah Vine (wife of education secretary Michael Gove) criticising the BBC's 'Wonders of the Universe' and its apparently egocentric presenter Brian Cox.
To be fair to Cox it’s probably not his fault that the show is put together in such an over-the-top way. Not even Narcissus himself would have had the brass neck to stipulate this kind of treatment in his contract: long, lingering shots of the handsome professor silhouetted against a night sky, or languid close-ups of him gazing manfully into the middle distance, flashing his white teeth in a carefree yet attractively wistful smile. No, Cox is not the problem; he’s the symptom of a dreary and predictable strand of programme-making: the “sexing up” of fusty subjects.
Of course, physics and astronomy is a subject only for people with beards, elbow patches and monocles!
Has Sarah Vine never heard of Carl Sagan's series Cosmos, which is essentially the programme that 'Wonders...' is modelled on? That program was hugely successful in educating American youngsters in the early 1980s about the wonders of the universe, and may even be one reason why science and technology is in better shape in the US than it is here.
It does seem that Brian Cox is getting unfair stick for being young, dashing and clever. I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the inventor of the Infinite Improbability Drive gets "lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smart ass".
Just as Sagan's Cosmos was a beautiful and - literally - wonderful series that opened peoples' eyes to the Universe we live in, Brian Cox's series aims to do the same 30 years later. So let's turn the soundtrack back up, listen to what he has to say and be thankful that our TV license money is being spent on fantastic, eye-opening programming such as 'Wonders...'.
I have a message for future generations. That is please accept our apologies.. we were roaring drunk on petroleum.
Everything that distinguishes our era from the dark ages is what we've been able to do with petroleum … and that is going to end very soon.
I think in the next few years we're going to see the price of fossil fuels go through the roof, and there will be no substitutes for gasoline.
I think that, from my reading of history, the only fun most human beings have ever had - any feeling of power and respect - has been driving automobiles, you get in a car and everyone respects you; and people aren't going to give that up easily.
I'm writing with regard to your Ghost Street road safety campaign website, specifically the pages about pedestrians and cycling.
My question is how are we supposed to encourage more people to cycle or walk if campaigns like this scare them away from it? A safer environment for cyclists and pedestrians is one in which fewer people commute by car, and more people choose to cycle or walk instead. The problem is that people choose not to cycle or walk BECAUSE of the dangers presented by the number of cars on the road and lack of adequate infrastructure (especially for cyclists who often have to share the road with motorists). This is a vicious circle that won't be broken by this sort of ill-conceived campaign that only perpetuates the idea that cycling (or being a pedestrian) is a dangerous activity.
Furthermore, this is a classic case of a campaign addressing the symptom and not the cause. A recent study in Australia has shown that in the majority of accidents involving cyclists and motorists, it is the driver who is at fault. In the scenarios depicted in your campaign, the onus is on the young people to protect themselves from cars, rather than on the motorist to drive with due care and attention for other road users (whether that is cyclists, or pedestrians crossing the road).
Also, I recognise that the use of shock tactics works in getting people to change their behaviour, for example, drink-driving campaigns have been successful in making drinking and driving a socially unacceptable activity, but with this campaign it seems out of place and only serves to discourage people from cycling or walking.
I'm concerned about the negative effect this campaign may have on other campaigns that are trying encourage people to cycle or walk. Surely public money would be better spent on improving Newcastle's cycling infrastructure and on campaigns that emphasise the positive benefits of cycling and walking.
As technology companies compete with each other, drive manufacturing costs down and put their marketing machines on full power, it's amazing how they can steer us away from technologies that are clearly better for specific tasks than others.
When Apple launched the iPad, it made a big deal about the new iBook store and the iPad's use as an electronic reading device. Here's the marketing blurb on Apple's site...
Reading on iPad is just like reading a book. You hold your iPad like a book. You flip the pages like a book. And you do it all with your hands — just like a book. The high-resolution, LED-backlit screen displays each page beautifully.
The iPad is an astounding piece of technology in many ways, but a good device for spending hours reading electronic books does not count among them, because of the backlit LCD display is uses.
A few weeks ago, Samsung announced that it's backing out of the electronic ink panel production, instead to concentrate on LCD displays for their dedicated reading devices. Also, there are rumours of a smaller, cheaper iPad which no doubt will be designed to take a take some of Amazon Kindle's share of the eReader market. So, given the marketing power of Apple, and the likes of Samsung turning their back on the technology, the odds seem stacked against a bright future for electronic paper.
Electronic paper displays mimic the high resolution and reflective quality of ink on paper. Compared to LCD technology:
it is more energy efficient; battery life is on a scale of weeks rather hours, which surely preferable on a device meant to be read for hours on end
it is much less bulky allowing comparably thinner and lighter devices
it is more comfortable to read, not only because of its higher resolution, but because it reflects light like paper; the more light hitting the device, the more legible it becomes. The opposite is true for LCD displays like the iPad's (not helped by its glossy screen). After all, it's much easier to control light on a device when it needs illuminating in a darkened room. When the situation is reversed, the light from that big fiery thing in the sky is not as easily controlled, and the brighter it is in relation to the LCD backlight, the harder it is to read.
Of course, electronic ink displays aren't with out their issues. They are restricted to monochrome for a start. Then there's the glacially slow display refresh when interacting the device. For some people I've spoken to this is a barrier to buying a device; for that brief second, the device looks broken, and in our Jobsian world of user experience perfection, that will never do.
There's the thorny issue of Digital Rights Management which seems to hang over the e-reader market like a grey cloud. I have issues with this but as this piece is about the merits of the display technology only, I'll leave that for a future post.
There's no argument that the iPad is a revolutionary device for consuming digital media, and its LCD display is ideal the multi-purpose nature of the device.
No doubt the next iteration of the iPad (and its rumoured smaller sibling) will have the much hyped 'Retina Display' but no matter much Jobs talks about pixel density, the reading experience will be inferior to that of electronic paper simply because of the necessity for a backlight.
Given the progress in computer generated effects over the last 17 years, as well as our better understanding of dinosaur evolution, maybe Steven Spielberg should re-edit Jurassic Park with more feathers.
Here's what the Velociraptor probably looked like, based on recent fossil discoveries…
Most of the streaks of light are planes plans passing by. The quicker flashes are meteors, and at 33 seconds you can see one of them explode in the lower left hand corner of the frame.
Recently, Northumbria Police had a stand at Newcastle Central Station giving away free RFID tags for your bike. The idea is that you register with the Immobitag website and enter the ID number printed on the tag. You then push the tag down the seat tube where it can't be removed, at least not easily.
Then, if the bike is stolen and recovered by the police, they scan the bike for the tag and contact you to reunite you with your beloved machine. Notice that there are two conditions that have to be met before the tag becomes useful, although the police claim it also works as a deterrent if you place stickers on the bike to warn would-be thieves that it's tagged.
At first I thought it's a pretty good idea, and the police officer I spoke to seemed keen to install it on my bike there and then. I declined that but took the tag anyway because I thought about installing it on a different bike. However, after thinking about it during my cycle home, I decided not to install it.
Firstly, I don't think it's an effective deterrent if you warn theives about the tag with stickers. Once stolen, I expect a hammer, an implement long enough to go down the seat tube and some brute force would allow thieves to remove the tag quite easily.
Secondly, adding an RFID tag to your bike means that your bike is registered on a database whether it is stolen or not. Of course, I don't expect an Orwellian situation where there are RFID scanners on every street corner tracking your every move, however I do believe that giving your bike an identity compromises your freedom and privacy as a cyclist, just a little.
There's a better solution to the bike theft problem, one that doesn't compromise your freedom, and it's to lock your bike more securely in the first place. Most cases of bike theft result because the bike isn't locked at all, is locked the wrong way or is locked with a poor quality lock that can be cut through easily.
Read Sheldon Brown's lock strategy page for information on how to lock your bike securely.
The photographer in the first picture is Mable Dean with her sister Sally, using the camera some time around the end of the 1920s, and the photographer in the second picture is her grandson, me, using the same camera in 1999.
The pictures were originally posted to the Mirror Project (mirrorproject.com) in 2000. The Mirror Project was a large archive of photographic self portraits taken in reflective surfaces. It went offline in 2008, so I retrieved them from the Wayback Machine and reposted them here.
While my picture was shot in a mirrored window, I've since realised that my grandmother's picture isn't a mirror shot at all. I printed it from the original negative, which I assumed had been shot with the Brownie in a mirror, but I always wondered why there would be a mirror standing in a field! Also, the distortion on the image is most likely a fault on the negative emulsion that occurred during processing rather than a distortion in a mirror.
The main giveaway is the position of our hands when the pictures were taken. The shutter release is at the front of the camera on the right hand side. In the picture of my grandmother, she is using her right hand to take the picture. In my picture, it appears that I'm pressing a shutter release with my left hand because it's a mirrored image (and I'm pretty sure I printed both negatives the right way round).
The most likely scenario is that the photo was taken by my great-grandfather, Joseph Dean, as my grandmother took a picture of him. Of course, the best evidence for this would be to find the other negative from the Brownie, which unfortunately is very unlikely to happen.
John and Greg are the only physical members of the production crew. The entire programme is conceived, produced and edited by some kind of monstrous autonomous machine that kidnaps members of the public (some of which it refers to as celebrities) and puts them, bewildered, into a large kitchen.
It then threatens them with something off-screen and unspeakable unless they cook food while they blather on about how much this competition means to them, how disappointed they'll be if they lose, and how much they enjoy cooking.
It gets John and Greg to pull a few confused expressions at cookware, then say a few positive and negative things about food to camera, like 'it's crispy on the outside, soft in the middle' and 'it needs more seasoning'.
Then, with footage recorded and an emotionally manipulative soundtrack thrown into the pot, this dreadful automaton puts the programme together using a strictly defined sequence of shots and edits, churning out series after series in a matter of hours.
Yesterday saw the biggest change to the Google homepage since 1998. They replaced the minimal, functional and revolutionary design of the original - which has remained largely unchanged for 12 years - by adding a Bing-like background image that you could change, but not remove.
Now, a few hours later, Google normality is restored; the 'Change background image' link is there, but it's something you opt into rather than not being able opt out of.
So it turns out this was a '24 hour experiment' to publicise the feature which, when you think about it, had to be the case otherwise Google's famous themed logos would have become redundant, and that would seem very odd given their popularity.
Still, it's surprising that Google appears to be so afraid of the growth of Microsoft's search engine that they decided to do this.
I recently bought a Busch & Muller E-Werk hub dynamo powered supply unit to power and charge up devices while I'm cycling (I haven't actually built the bike I'm going to attach it to yet, but that's a different story!).
It's a small device that plugs into a dynamo hub (in my case a Schmidt SON) and converts the AC output to DC at adjustable voltages. It comes with a large number of cables, including a variety of standard USB plugs and DC charger plugs that allow you to power your phone or charge up a dSLR battery while on the move.
At £140, it's not cheap. But then, being made in Germany, this is not a device made by under-paid, over-worked employees in a far-east electronics factory, and for the time saved while not hanging around wall sockets waiting for things to charge, it's very much worth it.
I'll write more about it once I've got it up and running!
Late last year, I decided to build myself a single-speed mountain bike. There are a number of reasons for this:
I rely on one bike as my main form of transport. If it breaks or I need to do some work on it, I haven't got another bike to ride.
In my experience, some staff in bike shops aren't very helpful, give the wrong advice or are too busy to help you. I decided it was time to learn how to build and maintain bikes myself. I'm sure that there are many very good bike shops around, just not in my area.
My other bike, a Charge Tap, is a great street bike but it's not so great in wintery conditions. I wanted to build a simple, low maintenance bike that I didn't have to worry about too much while riding in the winter months.
So, having recently finished building it, I thought I'd share what I've learned with the hope of helping others thinking about doing the same. I should add I've been hugely inspired by the late Sheldon Brown and his excellent online resource for bike maintainers.
Frame & Forks
I wanted a light-weight frame on which to base my bike. There are plenty of frames for sale on eBay, but finding a decent one that's suitable for a single-speed can be tricky. Single-speed and fixed wheel bikes have horizontal dropouts to allow the back wheel to move backward to keep the chain tensioned. However, unlike vintage road frames popular with fixie and single-speed riders, many newer mountain bike frames have vertical dropouts, meaning that you can't tension the chain without a tensioning device (essentially a jockey wheel and a spring that hangs below the chain stay).
As I wanted to keep the bike as simple as possible, I decided to look for a frame with horizontal dropouts instead. There are two options here; you either look for a newer low-end frame (many Raleigh and Peugeot frames from the 90s have horizontal dropouts) or an older but better quality frame from the late eighties and early nineties (early frames from Specialized and Trek had horizontal dropouts). If you've got a bit of money to spend on a new frame, manufacturers like Surly and On One make new frames designed specifically single-speeds and bikes with hub gears.
I managed to find a 1993 Specialized Rockhopper frame on eBay that came with forks, headset, stem and seatpost, all for £16 (although not including postage!). It's best to try and find a frameset as complete as possible, mainly because the steerer tube on the forks is cut to fit the headtube and headset, which can be an arbitrary length depending on the size of the frame. Also worth noting is that headtubes either fit a 1" or a 1 1/8" steerer tube; older frames tend to fit a 1" threaded fork.
Wheels
I bought a pair of second-hand but hardly used 26" Vuelta wheels complete with shimano cassette hub, chunky tyres and tubes, for about £25. To convert to a single-speed bike, you'll need a conversion kit, which is a single sprocket and a set of spacers which replace the cogs (cassette) on the rear wheel. The conversion is quite an easy job with the right tools: a lock-ring remover, chain whip and adjustable spanner.
Gearing
With a single speed bike, it's important to get the gear ratio right depending on the terrain you'll be cycling on. My bike is intended as a street bike with occassional off-road use on bridle paths. If you look up gear ratios for a single-speed mountain bike, many suggest a starting point of 2:1. The sprocket that came with the conversion kit was a 16 tooth, so to get this ratio I would need a 32 tooth chainring. This ratio is rather low; for every rotation of the crank, the rear wheel goes round twice. It's good for hill climbing, but not so good for riding on the flat as you'd be pedalling like crazy. So I decided to get a 38 tooth chainring with the 16 tooth sprocket, this gives a high enough gear to cruise along at a moderate speed, but low enough to get up those hills... unless it's really steep.
Bottom Bracket
Some second-hand frames are advertised with an old bottom bracket already installed. While this may be tempting to save installing one yourself, it's really best to get a frame without a bottom bracket. You don't know what state it's in, and worse, it might be seized to the frame leading to potential thread damage when you try and unstick it.
With the right tools, dealing with bottom brackets is quite straightforward, as they're mostly sealed units that screw into the frame (although do note that the right side of the bottom bracket tends to be reverse threaded). There are a few different types that need to be considered. I decided to go for a standard square tapered bottom bracket, which some now consider to be the old fashioned type, ISIS having become the more popular standard. There's also Octalink, Hollowtech or X-type bottom brackets, which seem to be an attempts at manufacturer lock-in to BB/Crank combinations.
Square tapered bottom brackets are cheaper but very robust, and fine for my requirements so I went for a Shimano UN54. Most frames take either 68mm or 73mm width bottom bracket depending on the width of the shell. The length of the spindle varies as well; for a mountain bike, you shouldn't go too far wrong with 118mm. However it's worth checking which length spindle is most suitable for your choice of crankset.
Crankset
Most right-hand crank arms are either all-in-one, where the crank arm and chainring are one unit, or you can buy the crank arms separately and bolt on a chainring. I recommend the latter option because it allows you to be a bit more flexible about the gearing. Also, this is the one component of the bike where I didn't scrimp on second-hand parts because they need to be strong and reliable, especially on a single-speed where up hill riding requires a lot of force to be put on them. Most crank arms connect to the chainring with either 4 or 5 bolts at a varying diameter called BCD (Bolt Circle Diameter). You just need to make sure that the BCD matches on the crank arm and chainring. For most mountain bikes with a 4 arm crank, the BCD is 104mm. I bought some FSA El-toro crank arms for about £25 and bolted on an FSA 38 tooth chainring for about £15.
Chain
I went for a Charge Masher half-link chain which is designed specifically for single speed bikes. The half-links allow a little more flexibility when both adjusting the length of the chain and positioning the rear wheel to keep the chain at the correct tension.
Brakes
Originally the frame would have had cantilever brakes on it, but I decided to fit vee brakes instead. I thought these were a straight replacement for cantilevers because the frame bosses are the same for both. However, while installing them, I had a problem when routing the cable through to the back brakes. Frames designed for cantilevers have braze-ons that ensure the cable drops down between the brakes. This is no good for vee brakes, as the cable enters the brakes from the left side. So, I had to buy a clamp-on cable stop that allowed the cable to enter the brakes at the right angle.
Epilogue
So I've glossed over a few things, mainly the outlay on the tools needed to build the bike, and the other bits and bobs like pedals, handlebars and the £2 bell. In total, it probably cost me about £160 to build. You could ask me why I didn't simply buy an old but complete Specialized Rockhopper for about £50 and convert it to a single speed. Yes I could have done that, but I wouldn't have learned as much and it wouldn't have been so much fun!
When Apple introduced the iPhone, it was like Steve Jobs reached through a mysterious wormhole and pulled from within it an object from five years into the future; its design and user interface were like nothing seen before.
With the iPad, it's like Jobs picked up a five year old magazine article about what Apple might have in store for the future, and based their new product on that. It's even called iPad.
Many of us who are underwhelmed, however, may remember that the iPod was met with similar disappointment (and derision for its name) when it was first released.
I doubt the Apple Tablet will be much bigger than the iPhone hardware. In the past, tablet PCs running Windows have been large and expensive devices, which is not a good combination for a hand-held product.
My prediction is something bigger than an iPhone (and just as thin and sleek), but no bigger than a Kindle.
There's a weird pattern in the history of 3-D cinema in that the craze seems to come back every thirty years. Interest in stereoscopic films began in the 1920s, then fizzled out a bit before the war. The first colour feature film was released in the the early 1950s, shortly after which a number of 3-D releases were successful, including a 3-D version of Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder.2
In the 60s, cinema-goers got their kicks through the use of psychoactive drugs, making 3-D glasses somewhat redundant. The 70s saw advances in technology making 3-D projection cheaper and easier, which lead to the next craze in the early 80s and culminating in the ultimate in three dimensional entertainment, Jaws 3-D, starring Dennis Quaid.
The thing in common with each of these periods of popularity is that they were all short lived; 3-D projection never became the default way to experience cinema. Maybe people realised that what makes a good film isn't a rather poor illusion of an extra dimension, but a good plot, a good script and the development of characters you care about.
Now James Cameron's Avatar is the second highest grossing film of all time largely because people are clamouring to see it wearing 3D glasses. Last week I was one of those people and while I found it quite entertaining in places, no amount of film making technology could mask the fact that this is a film with a weak and mostly silly plot.
On the back of the success of this film, Peter Jackson and George Lucas are said to be re-releasing their films with reworked 3-D visuals3 (I can only imagine that a 3-D Jar Jar Binks will be a third more annoying) and analysts are saying that 3-D will be the default way to see films in a multiplex cinema. I'm sure that cinema-goers in 1983 would have expected more when they future-gazed into 2010.
Typekit really need to improve the way they do their user-agent detection. At the moment, it seems that if the user-agent-string doesn't contain either 'Firefox' or 'Safari', then Typekit won't work, even when the rendering engine is capable of rendering the fonts.
This isn't an issue for many. But it is if you're using a development build of a browser, or you're using a Linux distribution with a modified version of Firefox that, due to licensing restrictions, can't use the Firefox branding. In this case, the user-agent string will contain the development name of the browser, such as 'Shiretoko' or 'Namoroka'.
In Firefox, changing the user-agent string in about:config to 'Firefox' will solve this problem. In Chromium (the development build of Google Chrome), you'll need to launch the browser with a command something like this:
Recent builds of Chromium now support @font-face, so you might not need the -enable-remote-fonts option.
Hopefully, Typekit will improve their browser detection by checking the rendering engine in the user-agent string, rather than simply the browser name.
What follows is an edited and abridged email I sent to a friend as part of a debate on the topic of 'scientific fundamentalism' and the proposal that 'science can't explain everything'.
Science as a big stick
As the opening sequences of 2001: A Space Odyssey reveal, humans have always applied our knowledge to build tools to kill for food, defend ourselves and dominate and populate other lands. Science isn't a new and dangerous development in the history of the human race; we've always sought to acquire knowledge about the world in order to give ourselves a competitive advantage over others.
The fact that humans have done terrible things with knowledge is irrelevant to the fact that the truth about our world and the universe is there for us to discover, and it's up to us to use science in a positive way.
Beyond Darwin
The notion that accepting the theory of evolution as the absolute truth in explaining our origin is somehow 'scientific fundamentalism' is, to me, a deeply corrosive and worrying train of thought.
The theory of evolution doesn't just stop at Darwin, his theories have been proven by the sequencing of the genome of many species including humans. We know that every single living thing on this planet shares a common ancestor, and humans are at the end of a small branch on the tree of life. It's a fact, like the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun once per year. Those who dispute this fact are rightly ridiculed, yet, in the 21st century, 150 years after Origin of Species, and after decades of gathering mutually supporting evidence, the theory of evolution is still being disputed, and opposing 'theories' are still taught in schools.
Eugenics is always raised as a kind of red warning light in the discussion of the theory of evolution. It's a bit unfortunate that it was Darwin's cousin that started the Eugenics movement. The basis of what Darwin discovered was that what humans had been doing for thousands of years, i.e the modification of animals - in this case for our own benefit - had been happening naturally for billions of years. Galton took Darwin's work and experimented with how disease could be selectively bred out of humans. I expect his intentions were good (if a little naive) at the time. It took the madness of Hitler to take Eugenics to the extreme of genecide and of attempting to breed a master race.
People call Dawkins a scientific fundamentalist, which, in my view is wrong. I'm going to quote this Dawkins article in the Times:
"Do not mistake passion, which can change its mind, for fundamentalism, which never will. Passion for passion, an evangelical Christian and I may be evenly matched. But we are not equally fundamentalist. The true scientist, however passionately he may “believe”, in evolution for example, knows exactly what would change his mind: evidence! The fundamentalist knows that nothing will."
On the claim that science can't explain everything.
I'm not sure it's possible to make the claim that science can't explain everything. Surely it's like someone in the 1500s saying 'We won't be able to prove the Earth orbits the sun.'
If we're talking about what explains our morality, then there's certainly no reason to think that religious belief provides us with our moral code. The question of why cultural shifts happen, such as the abolishment of slavery and rights for homosexuals (to name but a few), is a complex one to answer. But I would suggest that knowledge has played a big part in these shifts. Surely you wouldn't argue against the fact that hatred, bigotry and intolerance come from lack of knowledge and ignorance, and science and reason are the antidote for this?
Our social interactions are extremely complicated and a result of the complex societies and social groups in which we live. The social interactions of many other animals are also extremely complicated, but that doesn't mean they can't be studied and understood.
On attacking religion
If certain beliefs are causing harm to people, isn't it our moral imperative as a society to put a stop to it? Take for example, the belief that a woman should not have the right to an abortion. The belief that abstinence should be practiced instead of contraception. The belief that homosexuals are sinners and are going to hell? Surely these harmful beliefs are borne of ignorance and should be reviled and attacked? I'm very much with Dawkins (and Hitchens) on this one.
Is it more important to be happy than right?
'If ignorance is bliss, then religious people must be very happy" - Patrick Moore
I think I'd prefer to be happy and right. I have no formal scientific education, yet I'm now more interested in science, particularly astronomy, now than ever before. For me, finding out the truth is a deeply rewarding experience. Relatively simple things like how the tilt of the Earth's axis combines with our orbit around the sun to create our four seasons, in turn creating the cycle of life on the planet. How gravitational forces between the Earth and Moon create the tides, and how many species have adapted to, and rely on these tides. I love to think about stuff like that, that's my 'sprituality', if you like.
To conclude
In my opinion, it is not reasonable to that claim that scientists are as fundamentalist as the religious leaders they criticise, and that science itself is some kind of quasi-religion. To do so is to belittle the positive things we achieved with science over the last 400 years, and the positive outcomes do outweigh the negative.
In L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the road along which Dorothy walks is never referred to as the 'yellow brick road'. Instead, it is known variously as:
the road to the City of Emeralds [that] is paved with yellow brick
Gnome Shell will be the new window manager in Gnome 3, but it can be used in the current version of Gnome by installing the gnome-shell package, and running 'gnome-shell --replace' in a terminal.
To have Gnome Shell as the default window manager, setting the WINDOW_MANAGER environment variable won't work in Gnome 2.28. Instead you need to install 'gconf-editor' using your package manager, then go to:
/desktop/gnome/session/required_components
and set the 'windowmanager' key to 'gnome-shell' instead of 'metacity'.
At the recent Intelligence Squared debate in London, Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry spoke against the motion 'The catholic church is a force for good in the world', while Archbishop John Onaiyekan and Anne Widdencombe MP failed to put forward a convincing argument for it.
We cannot have a web on which a 140 character utterance of criticism against someone else causes a torrent of abuse against the offender and a front-page BBC article about the offendee's intention to quit because of it.
Yesterday, Twitter user Brumplum criticised Stephen Fry by calling his tweets boring, and Stephen Fry reacted by threatening to quit Twitter. We'll look back on this and see how silly it all is, and in future BBC editors with publish more important news.
In 1960, the American Medical Association ran a campaign against the Democrats' plans for free health care for the elderly. Calling it 'Operation Coffee Cup', they hired Ronald Reagan to record an LP entitled 'Ronald Reagan speaks out against SOCIALIZED MEDICINE'. In it, he warns that socialised medicine is "a foot in the door" for further government intervention, and that "pretty soon your son won't decide when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him." The campaign didn't really work, and the Social Security Act of 1965 was passed by congress, leading to the formation of Medicare and Medicaid, both a kind of 'NHS lite' for the over-65s and young, vulnerable people respectively.
Operation Coffee Cup was an example of a media campaign designed to spread fear amongst the American public and was a product of the McCarthy-era tensions during the previous decade. The Soviet Union had developed a public health service in the 1920s, China in the 1950s, and Cuba in the 1960s; in the eyes of the American public, socialised medicine became an evil borne of the socialist state, and any attempt to introduce it could only be a step towards such a state. This is the backdrop for the current controversy over Obama's plans for US health care reform, and each attempt at reform by Democratic administrations over the last few decades has been met with strong reaction from the republican right.
America is the only developed country in the world without some kind of universal health care system. If Obama gets legislation through congress, the health insurance industry would lose billions as public dollars go into a single-payer system. Just as the Bush administration mis-directed the American public and Tony Blair to support the lucrative Iraq invasion, it could be argued that the threat of a meddling Obama administration is really just fear stirred up by the health insurance companies and their lobbyists who stand to lose billions if Obama's plans go ahead.
Whatever is fueling the antipathy towards public health care, it's true that Americans value their freedom and their free market, and libertarianism runs deep across the political divide. But I fail to understand how a universal health care system can lead to either a more controlling 'nanny' state or to poorer quality health care. There are many things that the British Labour government are doing that make me uncomfortable; the ridiculous anti-terror laws and the over-surveillance of our cities for example. I think we are being over-governed to some extent, but I don't see our National Health Service as being part of this over-governance, it has become too well entrenched in British society for that.
A democratically elected government is there to serve not rule, and the NHS is owned by the public and governed by the people we elect. They are an authority that we elect to do to that job; they are not an authority over us. I certainly don't feel as though my well-being is being controlled by the government, because I have a choice of public health care or private health care. Surely what Obama is offering is simply choice, and a chance for 50 million Americans to get the health care they need.
Photography is under attack. Across the country it that seems anyone with a camera is being targeted as a potential terrorist, whether amateur or professional, whether landscape, architectural or street photographer.
Not only is it corrosive of press freedom but creation of the collective visual history of our country is extinguished by anti-terrorist legislation designed to protect the heritage it prevents us recording.
This campaign is for everyone who values visual imagery, not only photographers.
We must work together now to stop this before photography becomes a part of history rather than a way of recording it.
At last, I've finally knocked this site into a shape I'm happy with. You'll find no crufty div soup round here. It's all HTML5 goodness and it works on IE8 and IE7 using Remy Sharp's magic HTML5 enabling script.
I found HTML5 to be a bit odd at first, but as I started experimenting with it, the simplicity and meaningfulness of HTML5 mark-up started to sink in. The best way to think of the new elements is something like this:
use <header> and <footer> in the obvious places, this negates the need for <div id="header"> and <div id="footer">
use <section> for the main sections of the page eg. <div id="content">
use <article> where you would have <div class="post">
use <aside> where you would have information related to an article, eg. <div class="date">
use <nav> for your navigation links
Then, instead of using IDs and classes, you use CSS selectors to select parts of the document tree to style. I found the W3C's table of CSS3 selectors invaluable for this. I've mainly used CSS2 selectors for compatibility with IE and older versions of Firefox.
I've also made use of the @font-face selector to embed Museo font for the heading styles. There's a good list of free fonts available for embedding on the Web Fonts Wiki.
I must give credit to Croc Camen and Alex Gibson for their inspiring work with HTML5. I haven't had this much fun with web design in years.
Newcastle City Library isn't really just a library; it is a cultural venue as significant to the city than the flagship venues of The Sage and BALTIC. There's an openness to the place, from the glass exterior, to the open plan interior, and to the fact it's completely self-service.
Initially, the library was accused of an 'appalling lack of security' for not requiring identification when registering for the service. I congratulate the Library on showing a level of trust which otherwise seems to be rare in our civic spaces.
I use the library quite regularly during the week, as a place to work, drink coffee and read the papers. If you haven't been yet, go. It's marvellous.
The bloggers were a major force for political change in the United States, and in the run up to the US election, the presidential candidates were listening to them. They helped shape public opinion, an army of geeks facilitated a faultless online campaign and now Obama is revolutionising how the web is used to communicate to the American people.
Why do we seem so far away from such a grassroots effort in the UK? After all, it is something we need as the recession bites and our civil liberties are being eroded by a government bent on control though the pretence of protecting us, secure beneath watchful eyes.
It seems to me that UK blogs, ones which might affect change and have UK politicians listening, have and continue to be marginalised - not necessarily intentionally - by our large public service broadcasting and news organisation, the BBC.
The BBC's significance to UK web users is huge; much like it fostered the UK home computing revolution in the eighties, it has been playing a key role in internet literacy since the mid nineties. Because of this, I believe that web surfing habits in the UK are kind of gravitationally bound to it.
Take, for example, the surge in the number of Twitter users in recent months after cross-media patronage by the BBC. No doubt it did the same for the blogging phenomenon towards the start of the decade, but it's always Auntie Beeb that's ruffling the hair of these new and potentially powerful online communication tools. The BBC's approach seems to be a) how can we integrate this popular technology into the services provide, but b) make sure it doesn't impact on our status as a major service provider so that we can continue to justify the licence fee.
Particularly at the start of the decade, much of the British media treated bloggers as self-serving loons who had nothing to say except for uninformed gossip and dull introspections on on their lives (much like what the Daily Mail says about Twitterers these days).
Of course, it irks professional journalists to see amateurs publishing opinion pieces without rigorous fact checking and sub-editing in place. In America, on the other hand, where quality journalism is spread very thinly or not at all and where there is no public service broadcaster people call Auntie, bloggers are seen both as a valuable source of the truth and as a powerful force for political change.
As a nation, we need this respect for the independent voice. After all, it's the people that affect change in a democracy, and we now have the technology for everyone's voice to be heard.
With a controlling government, one which actively seeks to conceal information that is in the public interest, and one which threatens to take away our civil liberties (just listen to any interview with Jacqui Smith), we need a change.
So, let's make our voices heard, preferably not just using proprietary and rather unstable platforms like Twitter.
These are instructions on how to find Comet Lulin on the 1st of March 2009. To find it, look to the north and find The Plough. Draw a line between the stars that form the start of the dip and extend the line until you see the next brightest star, which is Regulus. Just up from Regulus at the 1 o'clock position, you'll see Comet Lulin. It's past its brightest point as it moves away from the Sun, so you'll need very good conditions to have a chance of seeing it.
When students at South Tyneside Marine and Technical College learned about navigation at sea, they studied astronomy using the College's planetarium and observatory. Now that navigation is done using the Global Positioning System, these facilities have become sadly unused. The college, now a place for general further education, is being redeveloped, which will see the observatory demolished and the telescope relocated to Stockton-on-Tees.
Last night, a few of us were lucky to get access to the scope and spend a couple of hours observing. It's a 15" Newtonian Reflector that's built like a tank, and probably also weighs as much as a tank. Situated at the top of the main college building, it is supported by a reinforced steel column than runs from the ground floor up through the stair well, so the scope is very much part of the fabric of the building. Compared to the observatory at Kielder - which is architecturally interesting but a simple timber construction - this observatory has a kind of solidity and sense of permanence about it that makes you think that, given today's need to build cheaply and quickly, its like will never be built again.
If you're in the Northern Hemisphere, the best time to see Comet Lulin will be when it passes Saturn and heads towards Regulus in the constellation of Leo from the 23rd of February onwards. It should be visible to the naked eye if you have clear skies and should look pretty good through binoculars.
A good way to track its progress - and find out how to spot it - is to use Stellarium. Stellarium is a piece of open source, cross-platform Planetarium software which has a database of 600,000 stars and other astronomical objects. However, a vanilla installation doesn't have information about comets, so you have to add Lulin yourself.
To do this, you need to edit the Stellarium configuration file called 'ssystem.ini'. This is found in different places depending on your operating system (note: you'll probably need an admin/root password to do this):
Linux: /usr/share/stellarium/data/ssystem.ini Mac: /Applications/stellarium.app/data/ssystem.ini (ctrl-click on the Stellarium.app icon >' Show package contents') Windows: C:Program Files\Stellarium\data\ssystem.ini
At the bottom of the ssystem.ini file, add the following:
[lulin]
name = C/2007 N3 (Lulin)
parent = Sun
radius = 100
oblateness = 0.0
halo = true
color = 1.0,1.0,1.0
tex_halo = star16x16.png
tex_map = nomap.png
coord_func = comet_orbit
orbit_TimeAtPericenter = 2454842.112213313327
orbit_PericenterDistance = 1.211815031505141
orbit_Eccentricity = 1.000243857235593
orbit_ArgOfPericenter = 136.8421983153854
orbit_AscendingNode = 338.5047481504214
orbit_Inclination = 178.3725975895116
lighting = false
albedo = 1
orbit_visualization_period = 10000000000
Credit goes to Robert9 for the posting the above to this this forum, which is in turn based on data from the JPL Horizons database.
Once you save the file and run Stellarium, you should see Comet Lulin appear. Happy Comet watching!
Well thank goodness for that. George 'Dubya' Bush is no longer the President of the United States of America, they now seem to have an intelligent and considerate President and the world breathes a sigh of relief.
I thought today would be a good day to relaunch my personal site and consolidate over eight years worth of posts from various blogs I've maintained and let lapse (although mainly from frownland.com which ran from 2000 to 2005). These posts have been through about five different blogging systems, from the original Blogger, through to my own crufty PHP systems, Textpattern, PyBlosxom and so on and so therefore need sorting out a bit, formatting, categorizing etc.
The design still needs work; I've spent months (on and off) working on and discarding more polished designs but I'm reasonably happy with this for the time being. I'm using some CSS3 specific layout stuff which doesn't work in IE7 but I don't really care. Thanks to Spain for the domain suffix.
Today, the Ministry of Defence published classified documents relating to UFO sightings in the UK between 1986 and 1992.
Those expecting high resolution photographs and detailed schematics of super-advanced alien tech may be disappointed to find thousands of poorly typed letters describing UFO sightings amounting to a stunningly feeble collection of evidence for extraterrestrial visitors.
There are also letters to the Prime Minister from distinguished organisations such as The Irish UFO Research Centre demanding that the UK Government release all the information they have on the program of 'genetic cross breading[sic]... with potentially hostile "Greys"'.
What is it about politicians that makes them start talking more sense after they have left office? It happened to Robin Cook when he resigned from the Cabinet in protest to the UK's involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Al Gore only seemed to become a much more powerful political figure, especially with respect to our attitude towards climate change, after he left office. Even Michael Portillo has managed to redeem himself slightly in the public eye after his fall from grace eleven years ago. And of course, everyone loves Tony Benn.
Yesterday, the man who played a key role in garnering international support for the 'War on Terror', powerfully enunciated what every right-thinking, educated person knows, that Barack Obama is the right person to be the US President.
Colin Powell resigned as US Secretary of State in 2004 after acknowledging that the sources who provided the evidence for WMDs - that was used to justify the deposition of Saddam Hussein - were wrong about their conclusions.
He was always seen as a moderate figure in the US administration, and was more popular with Americans than Rumsfeld or Cheney. However, I'm wondering how the same person who yesterday spoke so clearly and sensibly about his reasons for supporting Obama and not McCain could not speak out against the Bush/Cheney led invasion of Iraq, a country which had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks in the US.
The adage 'power tends to corrupt...' may be true, but unless you reach 'absolute power', it seems the process is reversible.
On a Saturday afternoon, Grey's Monument in Newcastle usually hosts Christian evangelists from different groups using various methods to indoctrinate passers-by with their religion; from the hell-and-damnation-type shouting preachers to the well organised and massively funded Alpha Course, who cleverly use the 'Big Question' type of rhetoric to encourage people to sign up for a ten week course on the Bible.
Today, handing out leaflets near a small table stacked with printed material, were two representatives from the North East Humanists. Many would argue that these people are trying to do a similar thing to the Christian evangelists, to bring people around to their world view. I would argue that as a registered charity they are there to campaign for secular interests: the abolishment of faith schools, the teaching of Science without the hindrance of religious sensitivity, and the promotion of the rather obvious idea that people can be good to one another without fearing the wrath of a supernatural entity.
At Newcastle University on the 11th of November - in a joint lecture with the North East Humanists to commemorate the forthcoming 200th Anniversary of Darwin’s birth - Professor Steve Jones will be giving a talk entitled 'Is evolution over?'. It's an astonishing fact that many millions of people in the UK believe evolution never even started. Anyway, I'll be there.
To think of the millenia in which we had no explanation for the bright object in the sky that gave us warmth and made our crops grow. Now, in the last few decades, science has finally revealed the true nature of the Sun, our nearest star.
...anarchy would result if everyone were allowed to behave exactly as he wanted and cited Oliver Wendell Holmes's adage that freedom of expression does not include shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theater.
I play a real guitar right-handed, but an air guitar left-handed. The air guitar is actually a right-handed air guitar played upside-down. I string it normally though, of course.
It will be interesting to see some figures for iPhone sales in the first few months of their release in the UK. I spend two and a half hours a day commuting, and I haven't seen one iPhone in use. iPod Touch sales will be strong in the run up to Yule, but the startling gap between the quality of the iPhone UI that of its competitors doesn't seem enough to lure us Brits away from our free phones and and choice of reasonable contracts.
Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham may have plundered the back catalog of various folk and blues artists of the past without due credit, but boy did they do it well.
You could argue that this is an activity very much in the folk tradition; the music has freedom, songs get passed from generation to generation, and are interpreted differently. Page is criticised for stealing Bert Jansch's Black Water Side, but really Page and Jansch were both inspired by Anne Brigg's interpretation of a folk song which is much older than any of their versions.
From what I can gather from the reviews and bootleg footage of the gig (I wish I had been there), the band returned to their roots; just the four of them, some instruments and some Marshall stacks, like they were back doing a TV studio recording in the late sixties.
After a number of poor reunion gigs over the last twenty-seven years - especially the Live Aid reunion - they proved that they could still perform at a level similar to the their early gigs, and being a life-long Led Zeppelin fan, I'm glad about that.
From the OLPC community Wiki that's used for documentation and sharing learning materials, to the software on the XO, everything is open, and that is the project's strength. Microsoft are just eyeing a new market for their old proprietory software and in so doing are not helping the OLPC project one bit.
Recently, Northumbria Police had a stand at Newcastle Central Station giving away free RFID tags for your bike. The idea is that you register with the 
There's a weird pattern in the history of 3-D cinema in that the craze seems to come back every thirty years. Interest in stereoscopic films began in the 1920s, then fizzled out a bit before the war. The first colour feature film was released in the the early 1950s, shortly after which a number of 3-D releases were successful, including a 3-D version of Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder.
Operation Coffee Cup was an example of a media campaign designed to spread fear amongst the American public and was a product of the McCarthy-era tensions during the previous decade. The Soviet Union had developed a public health service in the 1920s, China in the 1950s, and Cuba in the 1960s; in the eyes of the American public, socialised medicine became an evil borne of the socialist state, and any attempt to introduce it could only be a step towards such a state. This is the backdrop for the current controversy over Obama's plans for US health care reform, and each attempt at reform by Democratic administrations over the last few decades has been met with strong reaction from the republican right.
