Status-Q

Leo Laporte is the host of the TWIT.TV network. He's an excellent host and his range of podcasts on a variety of topics have been the background for most of my shaving for some time!

The nature of the group discussions on the shows mean, however, that you never get to hear Leo for more than a couple of minutes at a stretch, and he's a very smart guy with a lot of interesting experience. So it's great to be able to hear the whole talk he gave at the Online News Association conference.

I've loved this image since I first saw it some time ago, and have just managed to track down a copy. I don't know its... errm... origins, though. Does anyone else?

Found this in the past, somewhere out there on the net...

Look at the dot in the centre and move your head towards or away from the image - the surrounding circles seem to move.

Anyone know why? Could you use such effects to make advertisements, or road-safety signs, more noticeable?

If you don't get to see the sights of Europe during your lifetime, don't worry. If you're really good, people may take you on holiday after you're dead.

A casket containing part of the remains of St Therese of Lisieux is starting a month-long tour of Britain this week. Don't miss the show! Apparently, this ex-nun is something spectacular - and a mere tour of old Blighty will be as nothing to her. Bits of her have even been sent into orbit, and other bits were also taken to Iraq in hope of averting the war.

So it obviously works well, then.

For more exciting nun news, visit St Therese's web site.

Anyway, it reminds me of Blackadder:

Percy: Look: I have here a true relic. Edmund: What is it? Percy: A bone of the finger of our Lord. It cost me thirty-one pieces of silver. Edmund: Good Lord: is it real? Percy: It is, my lord. You stand amazed, Baldrick. Baldrick: I am. I thought they only came in boxes of ten. I could have let you have one for a couple of groats. Fingers are very big at the moment.

Here's a fun page - enter your birthday and you can find out the number one hit on the day you were born. It gives the UK, US and Australian charts.

This could almost be a kind of astrology - what does it say about me that I was born to Sandie Shaw's Puppet on a string? Was I destined to seek out VC funding? (Actually, I was born in Kenya, rather a long way from any radio that would be playing the UK charts, but still...)

My brother became a doctor, no doubt inspired by Lily the Pink's 'medicinal compound', about which he might have heard much in his first few days.

I found this thanks to a tweet from Martin Weller and retweeted it. A couple of my more senior friends responded that the nearest they could get was Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock, because the charts didn't go back far enough. And I guess any kids born in the recent past won't know what the charts were...

Bill Thompson thinks Google should be allowed to digitise the world's books. And he also thinks the proposed deal allowing them to do so should be rejected.

Here's why.

Well, I'm only about 9 years behind the times, but that's because of my classical education.

As any well-educated computer scientist will tell you, most things in computing are measured in powers of two; a natural result of the fact that all of today's computers are binary-based. And thus it is that a kilobyte is not 1000 bytes but 1024 bytes, because 1024 is 2 to the power 10. A megabyte is 1024 kilobytes and a gigabyte is 1024 of those.

That, at least, is how most of us were brought up, but there was always a certain degree of confusion caused by the fact that marketing types wanted to use 1000 where computer scientists used 1024, because it made their hard drives, flash drives etc look bigger. This is why, when you were sold a 100GB hard drive, and you took it home and plugged it in, it would look rather smaller; computers would report the size using a gigabyte that was about 7% bigger than the marketers', so they would tell you that you had fewer of them.

Now, in 2000, the IEC established a new set of prefixes which are unambiguous, and have names which sound funny to those of us who have got used to thinking that 'gigabyte' is a normal sort of word. They are kibi, mebi, gibi etc - the 'bi' indicating 'binary'. So a gibibyte (GiB) is 2^30 bytes, while a gigabyte (GB) is officially 10^9 bytes (a billion bytes), which is somewhat smaller.

Most of us have just ignored this change, but some systems now - like Apple's 'Snow Leopard' operating system - apparently reports sizes in 'official' GB, so your 500GB hard disk will actually look like 500GB when it's plugged in.

It isn't really any bigger though. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

Here's another unit you'll want to get used to over the next few years: the lumen. If you're not familiar with it, it's (roughly) a measure of brightness. A traditional pearl 60W bulb gives out about 700 lumens.

And this is important, because you're not going to be able to buy a traditional pearl 60W bulb in Europe for much longer - that's the theory anyway, though a loophole may help out - and it turns out that manufacturers of low-energy replacements have been misleading us somewhat as to how bright they are, claiming that bulbs are '60W equivalent', for example, when in fact they're quite a bit dimmer.

So, look at the lumens, not the watts, because the watts, they are a-changin'.

And I'd better start stockpiling incandescent bulbs until someone produces a low-energy one that works with the dimmer switches that are throughout my house. Thankfully, they're not far away...

It's 25 years since we started seeing footage of the space shuttle taking off - during which time the whole World Wide Web thing has happened - but it still makes for impressive viewing.

This is a pretty high quality video clip (on my broadband connection at least). Plug some good speakers or headphones in, turn up the volume, and watch as those rockets kick in. It's hard not to be impressed at what man hath wrought.

The tragedy is, of course, that it took a cold war to get us to the moon, and nothing has quite lived up to that - it's the rash but inspirational decisions that can perhaps only be made in wartime that often lead to mankind's greatest achievements.

Will it take another war to get us beyond orbit once again?

So said the headlines in the Telegraph a few days ago. (Interestingly, in the online version the big banner headline becomes the web page title, and so is much less visible at the top of your browser window.)

Fortunately, the article is much more moderate than the headline. Journalists often make many mistakes, but they often don't write the headlines, and editors are much more concerned with sales figures than with accuracy. Creeping tabloidism has been infecting almost all of our broadsheets for many years, but how many readers will register that the article doesn't really back up the headline imprinted in their memory?

Ben Goldacre has found himself a nice niche dissing - I believe that is the mot du jour - such reports after examining the evidence. Here's his response to this one.