News reports on the BBC somewhat precede April 1st. Apparently the Scottish National Party want an airbase in Scotland to be used as a Scottish spaceport.
The party's Westminster leader, Angus Robertson, wants Virgin Galactic to use RAF Lossiemouth in his constituency as a base for space tourism.
I see from the BBC news site that panda diplomacy is on again - China has gifted two giant pandas to Taiwan. I admit that giant pandas are cute, and have the interesting novelty of a extra digit (the "Panda's Thumb") that is derived from a modified sesamoid bone. But, really, a carnivore that subsists on a diet that is 99% bamboo, that cannot digest cellulose, and which needs to consume 9-14 kg of bamboo shoots a day has been dealt a rather unfortunate hand!
On the other hand, this YouTube video never fails to make me laugh:
The Register reports another of the original Star Trek cast has died: Majel Roddenberry, who must have had more roles in the Star Trek franchise than any other cast member:
When Astana rider Alxender Vinokourov was busted from the 2007 Tour de France for a pretty obvious case of blood doping, he received an astonishingly light 12 month ban from the Kazakhstan cycling federation. A UCI challenge to the lack of severity was postponed because the dope cheat retired at that point.
Now that Vinokourov has announced his return from retirement, cyclingnews.com reports that the UCI has reactivated the appeal. The UCI apparently seeks a doubling of his ban. And so they should. The guy is a fraud and cheat, and lied about the blood doping bust at the time, with flimsy excuses that his abnormal blood results were due to his injuries sustained earlier in the Tour de France.
While browsing through Biogerontology looking for the citation details of one of my publications (which appears to still be available only online), I came across this review, which kind of stands out because of its subject matter. And any paper with two citations from 300AD and 1300AD has to be looked at!
At the outset, I should say that I know next to nothing about Ayurveda, and that I am unwilling to take claims of efficacy of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) that lack a serious evidence-base seriously. (I regard Ayurveda as a CAM, as it most certainly is that from a western perspective). This paper is a brief review article that I suppose has been peer-reviewed, and seeks to review the impact of the therapy on brain ageing. Does it convince me?
I've spent a fair bit of time lately modifying websites. I run several websites: Flies and Bikes (which you're reading now), my cycling club's website, the Oriel Cell Senescence conference website, and a simpler html-based website for the defunct cycling club Northwood Wheelers.
The first three sites use the Joomla!* content management system, which I find to be very flexible and with plenty of useful add-ons.
The Register reports that a senior Vodafone network architect has be recruited by the Home Secretary to draw up proposals for the Interception Modernisation Program (IMP).
Tim Hayward, erstwhile senior programme manager at the UK's second largest mobile operator, was appointed IMP director in August. While at Vodafone he was responsible for 3G network architecture, according to careers information posted on the web.
There's a rather depressing article in Ars Technica (UK ISPs playing Grinch with P2P throttling, surf data, video?)about ISP attitudes to the service they provide (or not) in the UK. AT focusses on three areas in which the ISPs want to maximise their profits, in some cases by restricting costs (throttling P2P services), selling our data (by deep packet inspection, such as the vile Phorm system), and by demanding payments from broadcasters such as the BBC (because they have the temerity to introduce a very popular service such as iPlayer).
I'm not a BitTorrent user, but I feel rather anxious that a legal application like BitTorrent, which can of course be used for entirely legal activities such as legal downloading of videos, games, and software can be throttled back on the basis (or rather the explanation used to deflect criticism) that some people abuse it for illegal activities. Of course this is a bit weasly, the real situation is that the ISPs have pitched their services at a price that doesn't cover the bandwidth people use. Their solution seems to be to throttle back P2P services under the guise of copyright protection.
Well, I have to confess that I have some sympathy with this Iraqi journalist. One might suspect Bush was lucky they were only shoes, after the mayhem he wreaked on the Middle East.
[video:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=9uIj0YvDBKE 425x340]
