BBC -
'Renegade agent ends exile.'
'Former MI5 intelligence officer David
Shayler is preparing to return to
Britain amid speculation that a legal
case against him may never reach the
courts.'
'The 34-year-old Briton, who for three
years has been living in "political
exile" in Paris after making a string
of revelations about the secret
service, is due to arrive at Dover with
his girlfriend Annie Machon on Monday.'
19th August
BBC - 'Big Brother spawns 'Big Badger'.'
BBC Online has installed webcams in
a man-made badger sett to send pictures
of the creatures' lives to the Web.
As there are no weekly evictions, it's
really nothing at all like Big Brother.
It might be quite interesting; badgers
are rather secretive.
More
BBC Nature webcams.
Thoughtful essay on animal rights.
'As we learn to appreciate the complexity of animals and the deep
continuities between their world and ours, we begin to respect them more and
accord them the rights they deserve. Every marginalized human group has
fought for its liberation; now it's the animals' turn. Since they can't
speak for themselves, their liberation demands our own liberation from the
long-standing tradition of human biases against them. As we grant animals
minds, we may free our own.'
Via
Arts&Letters Daily.
I very much like
Potential Fossil Assemblage
weblog. Funnily enough, I too used to
live in the Sydney suburb of Newtown.
Great place.
Clue for the Nutlog challenge :-
the word I had in mind was 'and'. As in
'Coach and Horses' or 'Slug and Lettuce'.
New Scientist - 'Voice from the grave.'
A new study indicates that the quality
of suicidal people's voices changes.
'Wilkes found that two factors helped
him discriminate between those who
were at high risk of committing
suicide and those at low risk. First
he noticed that people who are truly
suicidal use a narrower range of
frequencies when pronouncing their
vowels than people who are just
depressed. The voices of suicidal
people also become higher pitched.'
New Scientist - 'The naked chef.'
'Chimpanzees
are on their way to becoming
half-decent chefs. Captive chimps
in Madrid have begun to puree their
own fruits and vegetables, in what
looks like the first case of an ape
transforming food to improve its
taste and texture.'
Lingua Franca - 'Rage against the regime.'
Article about the Serbian student opposition
group, Otpor.
'None of this has stopped the students from staging their exuberant,
symbolic, and sometimes cryptic street performances. Students play Monopoly
and Risk on the street "to tell the authorities to stop playing with our
fate," Djuric explains. When Milosevic ceremoniously named himself a
National Hero, Otpor activists decorated themselves and passersby with
badges that read I AM A NATIONAL HERO. '
16th August
Oh no, could this be the end of
neighbour sex?!
BBC - 'Movie captures dying star.'
'Astronomers have, for the first time, made a time-lapse movie of gas being
ejected from the surface of a star other than our own. '
Pawsense -
software that knows when your cat is
on your keyboard.
Reuters -
'Scientists develop weather-resistant
strawberry.'
'Fruit researchers in Ireland have developed a strawberry which they say is
impervious to the country's notoriously damp climate.'
15th August
Congratulations to Mat, the first to solve
the Nutlog challenge
(see yesterday's post). Keep trying you others.
I'll post a clue in a while. Be aware there
is more than one possible answer.
BBC - 'Ice Age star map discovered.'
'A prehistoric map of the night sky has been discovered on the walls of the famous painted caves at Lascaux in central France.'
The Guardian supplies us with
some interesting background
on the 1967 drugs raid on the Rolling
Stones.
'The official files in the public
record office and the West Sussex
county archives show how far the
police were prepared to "fit up"
the Rolling Stones after their
bungled drugs raid on a weekend house
party at Redlands, Richards' Sussex
country home, on a tip-off from the
News of the World.'
14th August
Take the Nutlog challenge.
Can you find a sentence in English with any one word repeated five
times successively? The sentence must make sense.
Mail me
if you know the answer. No prize though
(sorry!), just a sense of satisfaction.
I do recommend a visit to
the Pitt Rivers Museum of anthropology and
ethnology in Oxford. It has a wonderful collection of
artefacts, from totem poles and buddhas to shrunken
heads and opium pipes.
1st August
Haiku art.
Riots in Iran as shopkeeper is falsely accused of
flirting with his wife in public. Actually, he's cross-eyed.
You can submit a message to
Keo, a French satellite which will travel through
space for the next 50,000 years, all being well.
Via
Latte.
The Pin-Up Page.
The Onion celebrates the Queen Mother's 100th birthday
in its own way. Via
Pop Culture Junk Mail.
Walking through Leicester Square on Friday evening,
I came across a man selling
the Big Issue with the cry,
'Read all about it... Queen Mother pregnant!'.
This made me chuckle. If I see him again,
I may nominate him for the 'best Big Issue seller' award
they do every week.
(For non-Brits, the Big Issue is a magazine which is
sold in the UK by the homeless or vulnerably housed).
Frida Kahlo - Self-Portrait with Monkeys.
