Look Again

Prof. Richard Dawkins, scourge of all known believers, was back on his hobbyhorse last night. He made a TV programme which argued for the end of the link between religion and education in many of the schools in the UK. I have – simultaneously – a respect for some of his views, and a loathing [...]

So, the Labour party lost the election, and so far we have two people running for the leadership, who happen to be brothers. They both have websites, with links to twitter and facebook accounts. They both pay handsome tribute to the idea that we, the people, should let them know our thoughts, ideas and suggestions. Except: [...]

I was introduced to a great site the other day, called framerater, (I am christof on there) which asks you to tick off movies you have seen, from various ‘best’ lists from IMDB and elsewhere. I was quite surprised with how many I had seen. One of the lists was a 1001 movies you must [...]

I can’t get the logic of this. There is an installed base of millions of iPhone and iPod Touch users: why not release the iBook app for those devices? I can buy books from Amazon’s Kindle app on my iPhone, who seem to be Apple’s chief competitor in this arena. Surely it would help in [...]

Bitesizeedits is a fun site where random people edit and correct random little chunks of text. It’s really fun, and I thought I would submit one of my blog posts as a bit of an experiment, to see what would result from letting strangers hack around with my words. I got to approve the changes, [...]

I have been doing quite a bit of design work on my computer in last couple of days, and it really helps me to concentrate my eyes if my ears are busy. So, I usually listed to a podcast or something as I work. Today, I listened to a few TED talks. I have always [...]

A little while ago, someone came to my daughter’s school and told the assembly that mobile phone signals were killing the world’s bees. It turns out that there is not much evidence to support this view. I grew up in Apartheid era South Africa, and was told things, by teachers and authority figures, that really [...]

Why would someone as unqualified and uninformed as myself have the sheer gall to present his thoughts and opinions in a blog? Perhaps I am just a narcissist, indulging myself with my own mental reflection. After all, very few people read what I write here. For me, though, that is part of the point. The [...]

I recently changed my Twitter account name with someone who shares my real-world name. He asked politely, so I swapped, and it was all very easy from a technical point of view. The reaction I had was interesting. Some people I know were (naively, in my view) amazed I hadn’t demanded a lot of money, [...]