Meet BA Director of Operations Gareth Kirkwood, the most embarassed man alive, announcing that Terminal 5 at Heathrow turned out to be a disastrous mess on day one. Beautiful (the terminal, that is), but still a mess.
That’s not a happy man, that.
Slashdot was kind enough to alert me to a lovely story that developed recently: Sebastopol – a little commune in California that hosts the world’s nerdiest publisher and apparently a large alternative community that until now lived peacefully together – apparently contracted Sonic.net to develop a low-power Wifi Mesh network to give the community easy access to the internet and its obvious educational and economical benefits. But they didn’t expect the tinfoil-hat community of Sebastopol to sabotage the endeavour: as the council meeting agenda shows, on the 18th of March council member and pro tem mayor Linda Kelley requested a “Discussion and Action to Reconsider the City’s Wi-Fi Agreement with Sonic” . The Press Democrat – the local paper – reports that the ‘sustainable health institute’ supportes the notion, because ‘A little bit more is going to cause a little more problems’ and supported Sebastopol resident Sandi Maurer in her claim that ‘she is sensitive to electricity much as some people are sensitive to chemicals’.
I would suggest to Sandi and her physics-challenged friends to find herself a place in Sebastopol that will not only shield them from the evil WiFi terror but also protects them from FM and AM radio signals (the ‘sustainable health institute’ uses those evil radios to broadcast their healthy message), TV signals, mobile phone towers the sun and magnetism.
Good luck and happy tin-foil hat folding.
P.S. In the meantime we hope that the absence of WiFi signals will aid Councillor Kelley in the quick resolution of her misdemeanor vandalism case.
This a wonderful little gem of a story: PZ Myers, associate professor of Biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris was prevented by the producers of a movie called ‘Expelled’ (in which he was interviewed) to attend a free showing. While this is not a clever thing to do and is bound to get you heaps of negative headlines, the irony of the whole incident is that Richard Dawkins – which must certainly be the creationists ueberenemy Number One – was allowed into the theatre and is now able to tell us what he thinks of the whole incident.
A good podcast is not easy to produce. If you look at the list of my favourite podcasts, you’ll see that most of them are actually long established radio-shows that are being re-broadcast over the intarweb or snippets from established radio productions , thematically put together. The only true podcasts on that list is Leo Laporte’s take on ‘grumpy old men of the tech business’ that is the highly entertaining ‘This Week in Tech‘ (even the best girlfriend ever likes it as they never actually speak about anything technological) and everything2’s podcast. So, it seems that making a podcast is obviously more than just some person blathering on about some old rubbish. The Lancet’s podcast is one of the better ones: it presents the weekly articles of its parent’s publication in short order and adds an interview with one of the research teams. Full stop. The whole thing takes only 15 minutes (your average tube trip on the way to work) and hey, presto: you have something memorized that’s not only good for your own practice but also for bragging kudos in front of your colleagues.
What else do you want. So, the Lancet’s weekly podcast goes on the list.
“To their monumental hubris, these little men who took us to war five years ago now prove that they have learnt nothing. Anthony Blair – as we should always have called this small town lawyer – should be facing trial for his mendacity. Instead, he now presumes to bring peace to an Arab-Israeli conflict which he has done so much to exacerbate.”
Continue reading over at The Independent.
Messaged from the Outhouse 