Status-Q

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:

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.

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.

The Telectroscope looks very cool, and some of the ideas further down in Tom Taylor's post are just the kind of things we want to do with CODA before long.

Hee hee.... this is fabulous...

At the 'rapture', when all good Christians will be whisked away to heaven, they may be kicking themselves that they didn't leave behind some words of wisdom for their loved ones below, perhaps a last plea for them to accept the gospel. My knowledge of escatological theology is far too rusty for me to remember whether changing your mind at this stage is actually an option still on offer, but if it is, I'd have thought that the sudden disappearance of millions of people would be enough of a hint that it might be worth considering.

However, if you're still worried, you can relax because there is, of course, a web service to cater even for this. At YouveBeenLeftBehind.com you can upload and store securely all your important messages and documents, which will automatically be sent by email to those who are left, a few days after the rapture occurs.

You can include your bank account details, powers of attorney etc so that your unfortunate friends and relatives can have fewer legal hassles after you've gone because, let's face it, that's the last thing anyone wants to worry about as they prepare for the everlasting fires of Hell.

As I, and many of my friends, become more frequent posters to Twitter or Facebook, I suspect the frequency of blog posts decreases somewhat. Is this a good thing? Wheat and chaff, and all that?

Do longer and more thoughtful posts now make it onto blogs for the benefit of posterity while shorter and more trivial stuff that once polluted the RSS stream is now swept swiftly away in the flow of tweets? Or is this post evidence to the contrary?

Answers to 'quentinsf' on the social network of your choice... :-)