Linksville

Theoretically, I'm rewriting last year's Christmas Lectures today... in practice I'm trying to clear some of the blog posts that have backed up in NetNewsWire. So, in no particular order:

• WorldMapper. This is genius, fascinating, and from Sheffield: an altogether too-rare combination, Medlo excepted.
• Cars -- second trailer. So... best guess, folks: is this where Pixar jumps the shark, or will Lasseter manage to pull a charmingly folksy tale out of the bag that has 'over-familiar cliché and environmentally unsound' stamped on it?
• Aventis prize for science books winner. This is where I was on Monday night. Er... no, not winning. Good bash, and the children's books are particularly good: Royal Society's pages (thanks to a corporate merger and name change, the main Prize site is... er... offline. Oops). It's True! Squids Suck rocks.
• Lee Siegel rants about Malcolm Gladwell at the New Republic Online. I read Blink while I was traveling to and from India, pretty much hated it, and scrawled a bit of a diatribe in a notebook that I haven't yet had chance to post here. My criticisms are different to Siegel's, but I'm still relieved that I'm not going to be the only nay-sayer.