- Blog
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“It looks like we have a no-chute, sir”
This is how you test the resilience and optimism (and sanity) of a human being. You ask him to work for 14 years on a space science project, you grant his wish and send his path-breaking probe to gather specks of the solar wind (at a fascinating and mysterious location called Lagrange-1), you successfully return…
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An elephant
Billie, my four year-old daughter, drew this beautiful elephant. That’s all I’ve got to say about it really… (of course, you can click the small pic for a bigger one).
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The beginning of the post oil era (again)…
The prospect of the $50 barrel of oil is focusing the minds of the West’s policy makers and business leaders nicely. The last time we had a proper oil crisis the rich economies comprehensively cocked it up and wound up more dependent on oil and its fragile producer network than ever before – one of…
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Beslan
Is it possible (advisable, acceptable?) to blog Beslan? Blogging is such an utterly trivial thing to do with your time that even mentioning the apocalypse that overtook that town in North Ossetia must be wrong. Is it? I don’t know. It certainly feels crass to me… Would silence be worse, though? Of course, even worrying…
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Better than the Oscars
I’m dizzy with American politics. I’ve been watching C-Span’s coverage of the Republican Convention (via BBC Parliament). The convention’s a kind of collapsed super-dense cloud of rhetoric, sentiment, aggression and fear. Organised and cynical but also mawkish, naive, humourless and a bit slow-witted – lots of yearning for something simpler and older, lots of directionless…
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Accidental pavement art
Don’t ask me why I took these photographs. I think they look like a Sol Lewitt photogrid…
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Mosquitos
One of our favourite local treats is the shabby but brilliant de Havilland Aircraft Heritage Centre, which everyone knows as the Mosquito Museum. Here they made the first handful of Mosquitos in a hanger disguised as a barn (in case the Germans spotted it) and here they have two beautifully-restored planes and dozens of other…
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Olympics and spectacle
TV still has the power to knock your socks off. I’m thinking about the Olympics, of course. Some people are probably calling this the ‘red button’ games (at least in Britain) but I reckon this has to be the games of the ’embedded’ camera. Big, static cameras pointed at the action are obviously history. Now…
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Dragon slain?
The Komodo Dragon is the largest lizard in the world, a member of the Monitor family (and quite closely related to snakes). It’s been around since before the dinosaurs, runs at over 20km/h and eats 80% of its body weight in one sitting. We love Komodo Dragons (it’s only possible to say that in a…