10 interesting things I've read since 22 November

I have, of course, read a lot more than 10 interesting things in nearly two weeks -- and I've only got nine in here.

I had thirty-six hours notice that there is, hopefully, actually going to be a bed available for me in the hospital so it's in at 10am on Wednesday, operated on Thursday morning and get back to something like normality sometime the following Monday. The intervening period will be spent so full of morphine that I'll be on cloud nine!

Anyway -- the bizarre, the interesting and the thought-provoking (I hope).

1. Webcam cheddar fetches £1,145 on eBay from VNUNET.COM by Ian Williams
   Wedginald, the cheddar cheese watched by millions over the Internet, has been auctioned off for BBC Children in Need.


2. Speed penalty point plan attacked - BBC News from Inner Temple Library by Sally “Plans to increase penalty points for speeding motorists could ‘criminalise’ a large section of the UK’s workforce, driving instructors have warned.” Full story
   My immediate reaction to this? Unprintable! If you break the law then you deserve the punishment. And if the rats who race over the humps down our tiny street could be caught I'd be more than happy to do worse to them than "criminalise" them.


3. Law won't help Darling's data victims
   The law is impotent when your data is carelessly lost or discarded by government or companies, discovers Stewart Mitchell of PCPro
   I don't understand why the data victims belong to the Chancellor nor do I understand why there is no recompense in law for damage done -- except, I suppose, that the damage hasn't actually happened as yet and could be a long way down the line for some people.


4. Friday fun from Science, Engineering & Technology Blog by Anne
   Did you know that Intute has a collection of interactive science quizzes? Check them out! They range from fun topics such as dinosaurs and chocolate through to more educational content such as mineralogy and the periodic table. Top quiz scores are posted on the site.


5. The importance of art 35,000 years old discovered in the Swabian Jura. Originating some 15,000 years before the cave paintings of Southern France. Aside from the beauty this shows the importance of representational art in human evolution. You can read the article here, and Dave Snowden found it thanks to Thinking Meat.


6. The Wednesday Word Wise Roundup from Word Wise by Dan Santow
   "Not too long ago – don’t ask why – I was trying to think of what that little indentation between one’s nose and one’s upper lip is called. Not only didn’t I know its name, I had no idea how to even start a search for it (Google “little indentation between one’s nose and one’s upper lip”?). Then I read about the Visual Dictionary Online at Lifehacker and within about six seconds learned it’s called a philtrum (“small cutaneous depression extending from the lower part of the nose to the upper lip”). The Visual Dictionary Online, from Merriam-Webster, is illustration-based and as Lifehacker points out, it can help you “find the name of a whatsit.” It's also a load of fun to surf through."


7. Dan continues: "I’ve been ranting and raving for years about the use and misuse of the word “unique,” and a few weeks ago The Wall Street Journal’s online Style & Substance column weighed in (happily, on my side, even if that wasn’t its intention). According to the Journal: “Talent Scouts For Cirque du Soleil Walk a Tightrope: Ms. Giasson’s Tiny Acrobat Just Might Be Too Unique,” said the headline, resurrecting the perennial conundrum of whether there are degrees of uniqueness. The short answer, as we said ominously in May, is “not on our watch.” Because unique uniquely means one of a kind, we should say such things are too rare or too unusual. Then there is the issue of “unique” users aka “unique” visitors, an imprecise but often quoted measurement of the number of individual visitors to Web sites. When we use the term, we should use quotation marks around unique to indicate it’s an industry term that uses unique in a unique way."


8. The English do poetry says Morgan Meis at 3 Quarks Daily
   Here are two opening lines:
   “Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,”
   “Lord, the Roman hycinths are blooming in bowls and”
   The first is from Walter Raleigh’s The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage, the second from T.S. Eliot’s A Song for Simeon.
   The American play jazz, the French write essays, the Germans compose music -- the English? They do poetry.
9. Purge This from Kids Lit Get ready to be a little ticked off. Or a lot, if you are like me. Publishers in the UK are censoring children's books not for sexual content or violence, but for real evil. Brace yourself. Ready? They are protecting your children from (gasp) sharp objects and walking alone - IN BOOKS. Yup. So, no child in Britain will be exposed to the horror of sharp sticks, fire-breathing dragons, perching on ladders, or heating elements glowing red. Well, thank goodness that someone is protecting my children! I mean, silly mother that I am, I might have read them books about dragons, swords, painting the stars on ladders, or any number of things. Now let's understand what the real enemy is here: IMAGINATION! GASP!Wouldn't want those kids to start thinking, dreaming, learning! Just turn the TV back on. They won't see anything bad there. It's the books that are dangerous. You could lose an eye!
10. Well that's going to have to wait until I get out of "that tha 'orspital" when I've been "done". I didn't think I was doing too badly -- got the printed ADSET Members' Update finished, PDF and Word versions created and sent; wrote a business newsletter for my colleague Leonora at The Accounting Bureau and all this with only thirty-six hours warning that there was, in fact, a bed booked for me!