“China: The Three Emperors, 1662-1795”, Royal Academy, London
I may be somewhat overwhelmed after absorbing this exhibition of such extraordinary richness, historical interest and crushingly lovely detail, but as I wander from the Royal Academy’s Three Emperors show into cold, dark late-afternoon London, I am almost struck dumb with awe. I can barely write, such will be the chasm between these words and […]
The positive leap second is cancelled
Working where I do – BBC Radio and Music, and vaguely close to the operational support around live and on-demand broadcasts – I tend to get some occasionally fabulous emails. Here’s today’s, from one of our broadcast duty managers: "More "timelord" information. Sorry to be the harbinger of news of yet more cutbacks but the […]
Transportation Futuristics
“What is “transportation futuristics”? Many of us are familiar with covers from Popular Science that depict commuters buzzing around in tiny aircraft and landing on rooftops, or fanciful drawings of vehicles that run on roads, float on water and also take to the air. The basic problem many of us face each day– how to […]
Science Museum opens up storeroom
“The Science Museum is opening up its vast storerooms in west London. The public can now book a curator-led tour of some of the 170,000 objects that are not on display in the museum’s South Kensington exhibition halls. Known as Blythe House, the storerooms are home to early telescopes and operating tables, Stone Age tools […]
We can make flowers sing
New Scientist reports that some genius technology company (Let’s Corporation, based in Okayama, southern Japan) has developed an audio technology that turns plants and flowers into loudspeakers: "Flowers are inserted into an acrylic tube containing a magnetic coil and an oscillating component. Applying an alternating electrical current causes the tube, and the flowers, to vibrate […]
Iain Sinclair on The War Of The Worlds
Iain Sinclair contributes the foreward to the new Folio Society edition of HG Wells’s classic The War Of The Worlds, and last saturday’s Guardian Review (yup, still playing catch up) contained a juicy extract. I particularly like Sinclair’s observations on the location for the action, suburban London, and on the radical form of the novel […]
Weather Report
150 years old this month, the UK’s Met Office have just bought themselves a new computer, upgading "from a pair of Cray T3Es to the NEC SX-6." They have a long history of using mathematics and computers in their work: "In 1922, the English mathematician, Lewis Fry Richardson was the first to apply mathematics to […]
Theoretical physics and urban planning
This looks fascinating. Michael Williams, over at kuro5hin.org: "If you’ve played Sim City you’ve wrestled with one of the problems faced by supercomputer designers. Unfortunately there’s no GameFAQs.com for the technical staff at Japan’s Earth Simulator or Srinidhi Varadarajan and colleagues at Virginia Tech. True enough, they won’t have to deal with rising crime or […]
Journal: “Elite”, tiny Acorns, and Britain in the 80s
There is an excellent article in The Guardian today, actually an extract of the forthcoming book Backroom Boys, by Francis Spufford. It took me right back to 1982, when the 12-year old me started fiddling about with a BBC microcomputer at school (yes, for those who weren't in the UK, the BBC actually made a […]
Life imitates anime
‘Thermoptic camoflage’ in Ghost In The Shell vs ‘‘Invisibility Cloak’, at Tokyo University.