Status-Q

I've just bought a new battery charger, which recharges standard AAs or AAAs in 15 minutes. You may be able to see the grill behind the batteries - for ventilation. Yes, this is a charger with a 60W power supply and a built-in fan, which cools the batteries as they charge.

It certainly seems to work as advertised, but does anyone know if there are implications, good or bad, for the life of your batteries if you charge them this way?

I bought it here, by the way.

I posted my quick reaction the Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty a few days ago. The Economist is saying the same sort of thing (only rather better, of course):

Europe's political leaders react to these unwelcome expressions of popular will in three depressingly familiar stages. First they declare portentously that the European club is in deep "crisis" and unable to function. Next, even though treaties have to be ratified by all members to take effect, they put the onus of finding a solution on the country that has said no. Last, they start to hint that the voters in question should think again, and threaten that a second rejection may force the recalcitrant country to leave the EU. The sole exception to this three-stage process was the Franco-Dutch no in 2005. Then, after two years of debate the politicians hit on the cynical wheeze of writing the constitution's main elements into the incomprehensible Lisbon treaty, with the deliberate aim of avoiding the need to consult Europe's voters directly again.

Now the Irish, the only people in the EU to be offered a referendum on Lisbon, have shot down even this wheeze. And as EU leaders gathered for a Brussels summit, after The Economist went to press, most had duly embarked on their usual three-stage reaction, all the while promising to "respect" the outcome of the Irish referendum--by which they mean to look for a way round it. Some have had the gall to argue, with a straight face, that Lisbon must be brought into effect despite the Irish no because it will make the EU more democratic.

Full piece here.

If you give a talk in a research establishment, is that a lab-oratory?

Here's a useful site: the Awesome Highlighter. It lets you create a short URL link not only to a page, but to some text you'd like to highlight within that page. There's a bookmarklet and Firefox plugin to make it easier to use. Quite clever.

Here's an example of the results. The yellow bit isn't in the original page:

http://awurl.com/ndnnpi85864

Hee hee... The Irish have voted 'No' to the Lisbon treaty. Splendid stuff!

Now, the Eurocrats have a long tradition of bypassing the democratic process. In 2001, they asked the Irish people to vote again until they got the answer right. A bit like Mr Mugabe.

This time, they changed the name of a previously-rejected treaty, and most of Europe didn't even get a chance to vote because the French and Dutch got the wrong answer under the old name and they might not quite be bamboozled into voting differently this time. So, no doubt, the suits in Brussels will now come up with another way to ignore the wishes of the people. Ah well...

Europolitics is like Eurovision. The votes are highly dubious, it gets sillier every year, and it too is likely to go into serious decline when Ireland stops winning.

from xkcd

Neil Davidson from Red Gate software was visiting the other day, and since he'd seen my interest in the Iliad, he brought his along:

My brief experiments left me quite impressed. It's beautifully manufactured and has the best e-ink-type screen I've seen yet. It has wifi, too, and I gather from friends that it's rather more 'hackable' than some of the competition. And unusually, you can also write on it with a stylus:

Nice for notes & sketching, but you can also annotate PDFs.

Of course, there are downsides. Joe Newman tells me that it's slow to boot, and the battery life is around 5 hours of reading... both of which are markedly different from my Sony. I guess you have to keep more bits powered up on the Iliad, to detect stylus contact etc, whereas the Sony uses almost no power at all until you turn a page. I felt it really needed a processor with double the speed, which no doubt would swallow a battery even faster. And, of course, the biggest problem is the price: at £400, it costs more than two Kindles.

Nonetheless, I think this, and not the Kindle, is really the shape of things to come.

Rose found my 'cute story of the day' for today.

I’ve always felt that one of the things I’d miss most if I ever left the UK for, say, America, is our network of public footpaths. I’ve spent many a happy weekend afternoon on them, discovering places I’d never seen before.

An example from this afternoon for all you Cambridge residents. Where, within 10 miles of the city centre, can you find white limestone cliffs? You can’t see them from the road.

They’re a lot more dramatic than they look here, too.

But as well as drama this afternoon, there was beauty:

And history:

and cuteness:

But the cutest moment came near the end of my walk when, hearing lots of cheeping coming from the river, I went closer and saw a couple of swans and three cygnets heading homewards:

There was quite a current, and the little one were having to work hard to keep up.

But no, wait, I was mistaken. Four cygnets:

One had obviously found the current a bit too much and had to be given a lift.

They headed off in the evening sun.

And so did I.

More photos here.

For those in the Cambridge area not heading for Strawberry Fair to smoke illegal substances, I'd strongly recommend the Cambridgeshire Art Fair at Chilworth Hall, the best art exhibition/sale I've been to in a long time.

The quality of work was, I thought, very high, and with nearly 50 exhibitors from all over the country, many of them galleries showing several artists, there's bound to be something to suit everyone's tastes, if not their budgets.

Highly recommended, but the last day is tomorrow, so you'll need to be quick.