”… English sport’s greatest moment since 1966.”

And I completely missed it.

Well that was more difficult than I thought it was going to be. I ended up having an unexpectedly busy afternoon with arguably more important things to sort out. Still, I got there in the end, and I definitely feel inclined to write more regularly now. Thanks for reading and thanks to Steve and Ash for taking part. Same time next year?

Dr Seuss’ classic The Cat in the Hat has been turned into a Christmas Hollywood CGI-fest starring Mike Myers. To all parents of young children out there, please buy them the book for Christmas instead of taking them to see the film, they’ll get so much more out of it.

The UK’s first major offshore wind farm has started generating power off the coast of North Wales. Although it’s the first major wind farm, Blyth’s two offshore turbines have been spinning since 2000, at which point in time they were the largest of their kind in the world.

I don’t understand why some people dislike wind turbines; as well as their purpose of generating energy cleanly and efficiently, they’re huge kinetic sculptures which, like other public artworks, uplift their surrounding environment.

Some animal welfare experts believe that large wind farms are a hazard for sea-birds. I suspect we’re underestimating the intelligence of birds to fly clear of them.

I’d like to point out that National Blog Writing Day is in no way related to the BBC fund raising event Children in Need. Just thought I’d clear that up. Um, I guess that was post seven.

L’espion KeyCam

I like BBCi. I often link to its content, mainly BBC News Online articles which offer topics for me to write about here. When I create a link to a BBC News article, I know that link will continue to work months and years into the future; news archives in any format are important and old content needs to be permanently accessible for the purpose of historical study.

Why then, doesn’t the rest of the content on the BBCi site follow to the same rules? A while ago, I linked to a piece in the ‘Cult’ section about the return of the Hitch-hiker’s Radio Series (at the time of writing, it’s still there over in the linklog). Follow that link now, and you get a 404 File Not Found error. Did I imagine the article? Has it been removed because they’ve decided not to go ahead with the recording? This isn’t the only incidence of BBC instigated link-rot, browse through the archives of this site and the BBC’s 404 page will crop up many times.

I know BBCi is a huge site incorpating hundreds of thousands of pages, but there’s really no excuse for disappearing content.

Musician and scientist Henry Alan Hargrove has released an album of original compositions based on the DNA base pair sequences of the Human Genome.

To be true to the DNA of the genetic code, the actual ATCG base pair sequences need be maintained in DNA music. This is by nature very restrictive. Just as adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine are in themselves complex molecules, the musical phrases used to portray them can also be somewhat complex. The task that faces the composer here is to create phrasing that opens, provides substance to the body, then closes the piece successfully.

Samples from the album are available as well three full tracks (MP3 downloads):

• Chromosome 7
• Chromosome 15
• Chromosome 17

It’s actually much more musical that you’d think, in fact Moondog and late Miles Davis spring to mind.

The Dun Cow is the Sedgefield Pub that George Bush and Tony Blair will be shortly enjoying their lunch in. Here’s the menu.

Update: Apparently, they had Fish, Chips and Mushy Peas. Marvelous.

I’ve always thought it an odd coincidence that the rotation of the Moon is synchronous with that of the Earth. It’s because of this that we only ever get to see one side of it. Pink Floyd famously referenced this with their album ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’, helping to perpetuate the mistaken idea that one side of the moon is in perpetual darkness. Well it’s kind of true, but of course, the side of darkness shifts as the Moon revolves round the Earth, and the Earth revolves round the Sun. For example, here’s a picture – taken on the Apollo 16 mission – of the far side of the moon when the side facing us is in darkness.

As for the side that we are familiar with, the side that we know more about than the ocean floor, The Full Moon Atlas offers highly detailed maps and geographic information of the thousands of craters and mountains that litter its surface. Sector G-3 contains features made famous in 2001: A Space Odyssey: at the bottom left is the crater Clavius, where the moon base resides, and just north is the distictive crater Tycho where the Monolith is discovered.

Scientists believe that if the Moon had not come into existence, either life would have not occurred on the Earth, or it would have taken a very different form. The most popular theory as to how the Moon formed is called the Giant Impact Theory, in which a Mars-like planet called Theia smashed into the young Earth, the resulting debris then – over hundreds of thousands of years – coalescing to form the new Earth and the Moon.

The Moon effects us and all life on the planet in more ways than are immediately obvious. For example, I’ve started a fitness regime of (almost) daily jogs on the nearby beach and it’s the Moon and its gravitational pull of the tides that dictates when I can go. Then there are the strange psychological effects some people believe take place during the full moon as well as the effect of the Moon’s phases on the human reproductive cycle.

Well, that’s enough Moon talk for one day; a quick glance out of the window and I see the tide is out. I’m off for a quick jog.

Newcastle Upon Tyne’s Side Photographic Gallery now has a complete archive of its exhibitions stored online. The gallery and its founder Amber Films have a history of documenting – in photography and film – life in the North East of England during the boom and subsequent decline of heavy industries such as ship building and coal mining. It is these industries that have shaped the architectural landscape of the North East and to view these images is to have a better understanding of working class life here.

The archives can be listed by exhibition, photographer or theme. My favourite series is Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Writing in the Sand, a series of photographs taken on the beaches of North Tyneside. In fact, you can almost see my flat in a couple of them.

If you’ve noticed this site temporarily (for want of a better phrase) crapping out just recently, it’s because the MySQL queries I’ve been using to retrieve the posts from the database have been pretty badly thought out. Thus, the MySQL server has been getting clogged up with slow queries, rendering the site inaccessible for short periods throughout the day.

The most straightforward way of formatting a weblog with PHP and MySQL is to return each entry with a title, body text and the date it was posted underneath. However, I decided to group my posts together by day with a date header at the top of each day’s posts. I came up with a solution that involved querying the database for distinct dates and then doing a sub-query for entries posted on those dates. Simply put, I was using MySQL queries for something that a simple bit of PHP could have handled much more efficiently.

As I’ve learnt, it’s best to keep the number of MySQL queries to a minimum, especially if the database is stored on a shared server where resources are limited. So, the new streamlined PHP I’m using looks something like this.

".date("d/m/Y", $time)."

\n";
  }
  // Set the date of this post for comparison in the next loop
  $previous = date("d/m/Y", $time);
  // Print the blog post
  print "
$title

\n";
  print "

$body

\n";
}
?>

Budding novelists have a cure for writer’s block, it’s called National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short). Having started on the 1st of this month, hundreds of people are writing a novel to hit the target word count of 50,000 on the 30th; that’s an impressive 1666 words a day.

NaNoWriMo is all about quantity and not quality; it’s about getting the ideas down and not being too uptight about the quality of the prose.

So, for my own benefit (although you can join in if you like), this Friday (21/11/03) is National Blog Writing Day (or uh, NaBloWriDa) in which I’m going to write 10 posts within a 24 hour period. For those prolific bloggers amongst you, that might not seem like much, but seeing how little I write these days, I think that’s quite a target.

WAP is the sound a clunky Internet-enabled cellphone makes when you throw it at a brick wall in frustration.

Kuro5hin > Top 10 Internet Fads

According to this BBC report, a study has shown that parents in America are increasingly naming their children after global brand names. First names that these kids are lumbered with for the rest of their lives include:

• Chevrolet
• Armani
• L’Oreal (because she’s worth it)
• Timberland
• Del Monte (he say yes!)
• ESPN (?)
• Denim
• Canon (if anyone can)
• Courvoisier

Thankfully, no-one seems to have named their child ‘Microsoft’ yet.

I haven’t renewed my .Mac subscription which means my systemattic@mac.com mail address and iChat screen name are no more. So, I’ve set up a new iChat/AIM screen name which is this: quantumturnip.

The first game in the Chess match between Gary Kasparov and X3D Fritz has ended in a draw. The human vs. machine chess matches are always interesting, although the sponsorship from 3D Technology company X3D has given the match a strange twist: Kasparov has to play the match wearing 3D glasses. I’m not sure whether this is supposed to help Kasparov or it’s a handicap for the Chess Grandmaster.

Apparently, he gets to watch Jaws 3-D in the lunch break.

The Robot Hall of Fame recognizes excellence in robotics technology worldwide and honors the fictional and real robots that have inspired scientific accomplishments.

Inductees so far include:

• HAL 9000
• Sojourner
• R2-D2
• Unimate (the first industrial robot)

There’s a report on Salam Pax – the Baghdad Blogger – on tonight’s Newsnight. It will interesting to see what Paxo (um, Jeremy not Salam) thinks of it all.

[via Plastic Bag]

Update: The programme is now available as a Realplayer stream (the Salam Pax report is about 20 minutes in).

John Travolta is a qualified pilot and this is his house. Full article here.

[via Metafilter]

As I’ve already noted in the linklog, the original cast of the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Radio Series are re-uniting to make two new series based on the books ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’, ‘So Long and Thanks for all The Fish’ and ‘Mostly Harmless’. This is great news if, like me, you grew up reading, watching and listening to the Hitch-hiker’s series.

The first two novels, ‘Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ and ‘Restaurant at the End of the Universe’ were based on the original radio series, whereas now they’re making radio series based on the final three novels. It will be interesting to see how this turns out as Douglas Adams admitted that he was kind of running out of ideas by the time he wrote ‘So Long…’. Still, I’m looking forward to hearing the original cast perform again, albeit without Peter Jones as the voice of The Book.