Recently in interesting things Category

Build yourself an Origami Concorde, quite cool.
BBC news also have a flash guide to the cockpit of concorde and lots more stories and background on the BBC news site.

Lucy was on Radio1 last night, listen to Sunday Surgery (Real Audio), about 37 minutes into the programme, amongst the people talking about their various problems is Lucy talking about mental health treatment. Audio file valid until Sunday 19th.
Read more of what Lucy wrote on the OneLife site, on depression and anxiety. The package from the Sunday Surgery show came from a longer interview, which Lucy did for OneLife.

Today is international talk like a pirate day, they have a quite humorous website to promote the event. I remembered that on the good ship flambingo there was a reference to a tome of nautical lore.
so avast your deck scrubbing and have some grog, before I send you to the bilges, you scruvy deck rats...

Last Saturday there was a one hour radio programme on the history of Black Adder, entitled "I have a cunning plan", listen to the programme.
It is very entertaining with contributions from most of the people who worked on the programme and numerous anecdotes.

Clive Sinclair has plans to release an update the C5 next year, see fan sites and an old review. In an article on the BBC, he is interviewed after taking a ride on a Segway.
His C6 is under wraps until next year, it should hopefully be an interesting machine. Clive Sinclair epitomises at times the British manufacturing entrepreneur, far from the bullish American and not the production line Far eastern approach, he built machines that are best described as quirky. It used to be said that the British invent things and the Japanese make them, things have changed a bit, but there is still a ring of truth to it. Even the empeg in car mp3 player was sold and has now been discontinued. Dyson is one of the few to survive.
However the UK owes its gaming heritage to Clive Sinclair for the ZX80, 81 and most of all the Spectrum, without them the UK would not have the position in the technical world that it does. Each time I use my mac it reminds me of swapping my old spectrum for cashback on my first Mac LC, so it sort of lives on.

From Vic
How weird is this...
While sitting at your desk make clockwise circles with your right foot.
While doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand.
What direction is your foot going now?

Blogstop is a game played on a weblog, or in a comments section of a weblog entry. You must write an entry using the last word of the previous entry as the initial letter for each word of your entry. Have a look at the orginal game on blogstop, where there are some further rules and the metafilter post on it. Thanks to Ben Hammersley, on whose site I saw it first.

Funny game from Dan, based on the news that Arial now dominates as the standard font for everything for those not in the know. Mention of this prompted a round office discussion on fonts, showing a wide disparity in views, with the exception of Comic Sans, which was revilled.
Play here and help Helvetica win
Once upon a time I learnt an awful lot about glyphs, character encodings and fo(u)nts whilst working in localization, this taught me that fonts are kind of cool, not that I really know how to use them.

Slowly waking up this morning, as usual listening to the Today programme, I heard an article about the "British Library, which is planning to release its library of animal noises as mobile phone ringtones. I think this will be delightful and cacophonous. They have released 40 initially, at 4 quid each and have a further 10,000 they can release. You need a phone which can play polyphonic ringtones. Virtually every animal, snakes, lions, gorillas and lots of birds. I might even consider buying some of these.
They raised the delightful idea of associating certain ringtones with various people... full article on BBC news website and also on Newsround, the excellent BBC childrens news programme.

The Reith lectures this year cover neuroscience. Dr Vilayanur S. Ramachandran is a compelling and interesting speaker. He speaks in a very direct manner, yet tells it as an interesting story, he is very listenable to.
Lucy and I have been listening to them whilst cooking over the past few weeks. They cover topics such as how the brain works, Synesthaesia, creativity and religion. I think that this is some of the best radio this year. Audio files and transcripts are available on the Radio 4 website.