Month: October 2004

  • Election Watch Day 6717

    The most credible analysis of Bush’s “bulge” appears today in Salon. Up until now I’d thought that people were properly making a fuss about nothing. Now I’m with Gary Trudeau and this week’s Doonesbury on this one. He did have some kind wire down his back. And this week, The Economist has grudgingly backed Kerry.

  • Don’t Kill Analogue

    A good short piece by Tim Luckhurst in today’s Times pleaing for the Secretary of State not to kill off analogue radio. I must say that I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon. Digital’s great, but it’s completely true that FM can carry on surviving in a digital world. As can AM to…

  • Cassini Imagery

    The Cassini probe has been sending back some spectacular pictures of Titan from its first close flyby. (Incidentally, last week’s Horizon was all about Saturn and Cassini. If you missed it, you can either read the transcript or watch the signed version very late next Monday night or very early Tuesday morning depending on how…

  • Hobbit Found

    The press is full of stories today about a new small species of human that was alive in a remote part of Indonesia 18,000 years ago. Both The Guardian and The Independent had pictures of it on their front pages today. And Nature, where the findings are published, has a special section with a certain…

  • Red Sox Win

    Last night the Red Sox finally won the World Series for the first time since 1918 – I won’t even get into the whole Babe Ruth curse thing. I’m not sure what that’ll make Newcastle United fans feel like. They haven’t won a domestic trophy since their 1955 FA Cup win. The Red Sox hadn’t…

  • Mythology on TV

    A great article from the Boston Globe on my favourite new US TV series, Lost, and what it defines as mythology TV in general. The author talks about the danger of these types of shows running away with themselves towards deeply plotted by untenable solutions – he mentions series like Twin Peaks and The X-Files.…

  • So How Hard Is It To Hold An Election?

    Because sometimes you get the feeling that Florida is making a real fist of it. Now 58,000 postal votes have “gone missing”.

  • US Elections on the BBC

    BBC Four had an excellent debate with first class speakers on Sunday night. Even Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly wasn’t as obnoxious as usual. Then there was last night’s Newsnight featuring a Greg Palast report on dodgy goings on in Florida. Is it just me, or does the US really need consistent rules and regulations across…

  • Office Equipment That’s Rubbish #1

    Binding Machines. Despite much looking around, at work we still use wire binding machines. Surely this must be basically the same technology that they had at the beginning of the last century? Oh, sure they’ve come on a bit with the introduction of plastic combs rather than only wire ones, and electric hole punchers. But…

  • John Peel

    Many people are upset at the untimely death of John Peel yesterday, at the age of 65. I was never a massive Peel listener, but last night I did listen to Radio 1’s 2 hour tribute which comprised solely of tracks recorded for Peel Sessions over the years. Just listening to the range of songs…

  • Burnout 3

    Burnout 3 is consuming way too much of my time at the moment.

  • Psephology – US style

    What a wonderful word psephology is! It’s defined as “the study of elections and voting, and their statistical analysis in the prediction of results.” Thanks to The Guardian’s Newsblog (the comments are hilarious – as a result, I suspect, of Operation Clark County) I today discovered MysteryPollster, a wonderful website put together by Democratic pollster…