Category: Misc

Someone just handed me a photocopy with this poem on. It hits the nail on the head as far as my English is concerned. Spelling “Eye halve a spelling chequer It came with my pea sea It plainly marquees four my revue Miss steaks eye kin Knot Sea Eye strike…

Wikipedia is running its annual fund raising campaign. If you rely on Wikipedia to make you look cleverer than you really are (like I do) then it is time to flex your plastic friend and give it some dosh.

I used to be ambivalent about drug legalisation then I heard this great polemic from Ed Vulliamy (author of Amexica: War Along the Borderline) on Start the Week on BBC Radio 4. I set off vaguely with this idea that is prevalent in liberal circles, you know, just add instant legalisation and the…

Look at the Wordle above. It was produced from Tweets of all the Greater Manchester Police incidents over a 24 hour period. I pinched it from this BBC new article. What is remarkable is that the article does not mention the biggest word in the Wordle. It looks to me that…

I came home the other day to a letter informing me that my pensions appeal had not succeeded. It is a long and boring story. I have a ‘Classic’ civil service pension that I am not allowed to pay into even though I am currently in a pensionable civil service…

This quote “‘Expect to see smart phones accounting for a growing proportion of the wider mobile phone market as they become increasingly affordable to more customers,’ said Canalys Senior Analyst, Pete Cunningham. ‘By 2013, smart phones will grow to represent over 27% of shipments worldwide, with the proportion in some…

PDF version of this diagram

I have decided to close down comments on the pine nut blog post. I have been meaning to do this for some time but people seemed to find it very useful, or even therapeutic, to be able to express their feelings and I figured I was providing something of a service…

This is the graph you will not see presented often in the media – I had to make it up myself. It shows the proportion of the vote and the proportion of seats in the House of Commons both plotted together from the results of the May 2010 election (649…

My blog post “Bitter taste after eating for days – caused by pine nuts?” has just past the 1,000 comments mark. Today’s count is 1,013. I have been thinking of trying to get funding to research a DNA barcoding system for pine nuts. I am sitting here surrounded by people…

This page on the NHS England website claims that eating fish oils (long chain Omega-3 I assume rather than any Omega-3) help prevent depression. It says: Omega-3 fatty acid Research has shown a link between the amount of a fish people in different countries eat and the level of depression….

Just doing some SQL against the Catalogue of Life ’09 database and came up with some figures unrelated to what I set out to do. I can’t decide if they are useful or not so they are going here. Species % of species Genera % of genera Species in monotypic…

My Mukka coffee maker just arrived. It is great! It is like a regular stove top espresso maker but you put milk in the top and it has a clever-valve-thing that froths the milk as it makes the espresso thus creating a  cappuccino. Bit tricky to get used to at…

Today I start a new job at the Natural History Museum London. For the next two years I’ll be working on Pan European Species Infrastructure as the project officer for Work Package 4 – which is all about standards for exchange of taxonomic data between databases in Europe. I’ll still…

When I was impressionable and even more naive than now I was warned not to trust anyone who started a story with “When I was in …”. This was tremendously good advice. For some reason the society I swim in rates travel above all else and fails to see it…

The nice people at Julian Graves wrote straight back to my email and sent me a post paid envelope so that I could send the nuts back to them for analysis. Lets wait and see what they say. BTW Julian Graves has be bought by Holland and Barrett. The bitter…

The bitter taste in my mouth continues so my investigation goes on. The suspect ‘baby pine nuts’ came from Julian Graves store in Livingston a couple of weeks ago. I remember they had both regular and small pine nuts and we bought the small but as I quickly discarded the…

I started to get a bitter taste in my mouth after eating. At first I thought I was going to die so I Googled on it – how many people a minute go through that process! My scatter gun approach to diagnosis came up with a series of suggestions. I…

Well I got a link to a US political on line test and I am just another bleeding lefty – ah well no great surprise there then though I would describe myself as a liberal… Take the test if you like. Link at the bottom. You are a Social Liberal…

This is just an amazing 20 minutes.