I'm the target of a racist comment by Lula da Silva on the banking crisis:

"It is a crisis caused and encouraged by the irrational behaviour of white people with blue eyes,"

Willem Buiter has an interesting comment as ever, but my reaction is, 'The only thing I've got in …

Red Nose Day at work.

That's Pascal behind me, and Bill took the photo, at March's Cafe Scientifique. We learnt how the current lithium ion batteries in phones, laptops etc. were invented in Oxford in the 80s and commercialized by Sony in the early 90s.

The speaker is working at Bath Uni on the next …

I wouldn't bother. It's shit.

It's so sad that Michael Crichton has died. It's selfish, but I'd have loved to have heard his thoughts on global warming as time went on, and I've always enjoyed his books. State Of Fear seems to challenge the idea of global warming, and attacks the atmosphere in which it's …

I tried the link, but the site seems to be down :-(

I wage an intermittent campaign to get people to use Ogg Vorbis rather than MP3 because MP3 is encumbered by patents. Here's my latest message:

Hi, I went to http://www.hooverdamdownload.com/ to download the album, but it was only available in the MP3 format. Could you consider offering …

I remember You Spin Me Round (Like A Record) from 1985 (I became pop-aware on 9th March 1981), and now I'm listening to the version by Flo Rida Featuring Kesha.

For me, covers fall into two categories; those that simply parrot the original, and those that take the original and …

One of the great things about Ubuntu is its automatic updater thing. Every now and then it checks to see if there are any updated versions of anything you've got installed. If there is, it gives you the option of installing them. This means that everything is always up-to-date. I …

I hope this is fair dealing of this book cover.

It has a 50s feel to it. I like the descriptions of the protagonist's inner life. It seems incredible to us that such early machines could become conscious. However, he was on the right track...