The Daily Grind

A zooming development of TiddlyWiki. Gosh.

Firstly, the breathlessly monotone narration. But hey, the guy isn’t paid to be a presenter.

No, what really gets me is the flickering. Even with colour compensation (which is very neatly done, incidentally), the edge flickering makes my eyes go funny. Perhaps it’s not as bad if you’re using the software rather watching dodgy YouTube video of it, but still… bleurgh. I think I may have to have a lie down.

“A-level pass rate and A grades up” says the BBC, noting:

“Among the subjects showing increases were the sciences with entries for chemistry up 3.5%, biology up 2.7% and physics up 2.3%.”

Hurrah!

But hang on. The Joint Council for Qualification‘s bizarrely-90s website (it has an entry tunnel?! Is this a reflection on the falling take-up of ICT courses?) links to this PDF, the press release. Which notes:

“With a record 827,737 grades published for A-level this year (805,657 in 2007) … ”

That’s a 2.7% increase in entries. So… are science entries actually up proportionately, or up overall, or …. what?

Sure enough, the Telegraph’s full tabulation of the data – which, incidentally, I can’t find at the JCQ’s site – reveals that science entries are fairly precisely static as a proportion of the total. They’re up, but only by about the same degree that entries are anyway.

This is a marked improvement over declining numbers, which we’ve seen through recent years. But it’s not really the increase in take-up we’re working towards.

Not yet.

However pointless skills like this might be, I can’t help admiring them.

Stuck at your desk? Despite having a TV monitor on mine, I’m still watching the olympics on the BBC’s aggregator page. The video is higher-quality than I get through my aerial, plus it’s widescreen… and the automatic-updating text feed thingy is pretty cool.

Recommended.

Forget whatever Alicia Keys and Mick Hucknell (or whoever) are doing, this rocks.

[oooooh, OK. It’s by Adam & Joe. That explains why it rocks.]

There’s something particularly pleasing about ernest and thoughtful journalists working for august and respectable global news organisations… making complete prats of themselves.

Vinay correctly identified the short story I mentioned in my previous post as William Gibson’s The Gernsback Continuum, published in Burning Chrome.

“The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming.”

Genius. More:

“You saw a semiotic ghost. All these contactée stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties’ comic art. They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own”

1986.

An artblog of conceptual spaceships and experimental aircraft, updated more-or-less weekly. I used to love this sort of stuff when I was a kid, and it still makes me smile.

What was the name of that short story where the protagonist is driving through the high desert in the Western US, and keeps catching glimpses of the shiny aluminium/befinned/Flash Gordon-esque future we were promised in the 1950s? It might have been in the Mirrorshades collection.

It’s a terrific image, anyway. I was chased through Arizona by those spaceships, all fins and chrome.

CERN Rap from Will Barras on Vimeo.

Thanks to Laura for reminding me of this. Also, do visit the CERN Podcast site – cracking stuff. Chris Morris’ press articles following his visit were wonderful.