• More on the Bravia Ad – Music

    The backing track for the Sony Bravia ad is “Heartbeats” by Swedish band “The Knife”, covered by José Gonzales. I finally found the original, and I swear it’s like taking a step back into the 1980s: http://hype.non-standard.net/search/heartbeats/1/ – load the little music player, track 5. There are several versions, it’s a bit hit and miss

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  • Cynthia in Colombia

    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cmmRTW/message/756 The first part of the ride to Medellin was great – friendly locals at petrol and coffee stops, no rain, decent road. Then I was stopped at an army checkpoint. A young soldier insisted he wanted to search the panniers. I couldn’t get off the bike where I was because of the adverse camber,

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  • Skype toasts the US long-haul carriers ?

    I’m not usually one to do advertising for big corporates – unless I happen to work for them – but this just dropped into my mailbox and although totally inapplicable to me, I suspect it may be momentous: From: noreply@news.skype.com (Skype) Subject: Free calls to any phone within the US and Canada with Skype Calls

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  • Tango Clear remakes the Sony Bravia ad.

    In an indescribable way it was a nice advert, so it definitely deserves a spoof. (Via)

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  • Can someone please tell me which tense this is in?

    Independent Marilyn Monroe would have turned 80 on 1 June this year. It’s an anniversary that raises intriguing questions… I’m having a bit of a Douglas Adams Tense Moment – not this sort of Douglas Adams Tense Moment, but more a Dr Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveller’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations moment. The above describes

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  • Word for today: Superluminal

    Useless fact for today: apparently all these SciFi authors with their ‘FTL drives‘ have been using the wrong word all this time; they should be using ‘superluminal’ (Wikipedia). The former wording is far more common than the latter, but then the drives are nonexistent, so that’s understandable; if you’ve ever seen any of the pre-sound-barrier-breakage

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  • British Puritanism

    Independent Griffith-Jones was visibly flummoxed. “I thought I had lived my life under a misapprehension as to the meaning of the world ‘puritanical,’” he said. “Will you help me?” “Yes,” said Hoggart kindly. “In England today and for a long time the word ‘puritanical’ has been extended to mean someone who is against anything which

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  • No more Mr Nice Guy?

    The BBC write: The conman, it seems, is an endangered species. Gone is the sharp-suited, debonair, sliver-tongued fraudster who’d charm his way to a personal fortune. In his place: countless thousands hunched over computers, stealing bank details and exploiting technological weakness – without witnesses, and often for hire. “There’s none of what we used to

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  • The Slippery Slope to Sperm Smuggling: An Upcoming Lecture…

    …delivered by my good friend Helen The Criminologist: Manchester Metropolitan University Lecture by HELEN CODD Tuesday 9th May 12pm midday (ASW, room TBA). All welcome. Helen Codd, Lancashire Law School, UCLAN “The Slippery Slope to Sperm Smuggling:Prisoners’ Families, Artificial Insemination and Human Rights” At the invitation of the Gender and Sexuality Research Centre, and the

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  • Spindle Mathematics

    I just gutted a disk drive, and some statistics are as follows: It’s a Seagate ST336607LC – a 36Gb disk – containing a single platter, with (obviously) two faces, top and bottom. There is a hole in the middle of the platter, where the motor drive / axle resides. $pi = 3.14159265358979; # constant $nfaces

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