• August 8: Rare river dolphin ‘now extinct’
• August 29: Rare dolphin ‘sighted’ in China

Damo Suzuki’s flared trousers may have dated since the early 70s, but his music certainly hasn’t. Can are one of my all time favourite bands, and this is the video of ‘Bring me Coffee or Tea’ from their 1971 album Tago Mago.

Phil Plait reviews Google Sky

… I don’t like it yet.

Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing

A method of resizing images using connected paths of pixels or ‘seams’ to gracefully alter the aspect ratio without distortion.

If you’ve ever seen a Wallace & Gromit film, you’ll know that we British like our Cheese, and that many localities of the British Isles are proud of their cheese heritage; Cheshire, Leicester, Wenselydale and Stilton to name but a few.

I grew up on the border between Cheshire and Shropshire, so Shropshire Blue cheese was regularly on my dinner plate. The locals like to think of it as their local version of the venerable Stilton – a cheese who’s origin dates back to the early 18th century. Unfortunately for the locals, Shropshire Blue harbours a nasty secret: it was invented 1970s in Inverness and it’s origin has nothing to do with Shropshire. Yes, it’s the Marketeers who named it Shropshire Blue to make it more appealing to us English.

If you tell a Shropshire resident this piece of trivia, it’s likely that they won’t believe you, such is the power of Marketing to ingrain complete misconceptions into millions of people.

A reducibly complex mousetrap

To illustrate the concept of irreducibly complexity, Behe uses the common snap mousetrap… I wish to point out that the mousetrap that Behe uses as an analogy CAN be reduced in complexity and still function as a mousetrap.

It’s ten years to the day that Fela Kuti died of AIDS. Here’s a clip from the 1982 documentary ‘Music is the Weapon’ by Stephane Tchal-Gadjieff and Jean Jacques Flori.