Oxymorons A nice list of things like "old news", "paid volunteer" and "Microsoft works"

Ah, back again!

A wonderful page, science fiction short stories, each based on an element, and selectable from a Periodic Table ... note not all elements have stories (yet?) but the underlined ones do and are really quite good (at least the half dozen I've read so far...)
SF Periodic Table

An excellent "Error 404" page, looks pretty normal until you actually read what it says!

UPDATE this page appears to have gone away :-(

Formula 1 team (and Hi-Fi company!) McLaren have just opened their new world domination control centre "Paragon", much of which is underground. I think that James Bond would not look out of place here ...


It includes things like a wind tunnel, an underground tunnel between two circular buildings with a car museum in it, a swimming pool and a restaurant. The main building being in a ying-yang shape with one half being a lake (which also acts as the heat dump for cooling the building)
The technology centre alone is big enough to hold nine jumbo jets ...



BBC report

Official McLaren-Paragon Website

Not posted much recently, so here's a couple of cool sites for gadget freaks!

AdventureKit.com - Lots of cool stuff in the UK! LED lights, swiss army toolkits, survival stuff and a whole lot more, including lots of funky lights! The AdventureKit domain actually just forwards you to the www.sebertool.co.uk site, but it's easier to remember!

CoolWire! string that glows! Great for costuming, marking off areas, raves and 1,001 other applications (ok, I can only think of a few dozen off the top of my head, but I'm sure you'll do better!)

A site that I think is one of the great undiscovered/underpublicised personal sites on the web The War Against Silence. Glenn McDonald is a Cambridge, Massachusetts resident, works in computing (though this is hardly ever mentioned) and writes a weekly music review column, for himself as much as for anyone else reading. His new column is published every week, regular as clockwork and his reviews are more about the human condition and how pop music illuminates or distracts from it than anything else. His taste in music is based on 80's pop music, but from there he can go in many directions. He appears to buy at least an album a day and goes into occasional sprees when he finds an artist that's either obscure or that he had ignored but who, for some reason, has appeared inside his event horizon.
When I first started reading these columns, he was mentioning a lot of bands/artists I'd loved (Kate Bush, Marillion, Tori Amos etc.) plus some I'd heard of but never really followed up (Big Country, Runrig), and a lot I'd either never heard of, or had heard of but not heard (Low, Liz Phair, Buffalo Tom, Emma Townshend, Ian McNabb etc.) and he really hasn't changed much from there. He is (I think) going off on more tangents into related music and to older music (such as the Lloyd Cole stuff he talked about last week and the new Lloyd Cole album this week)

He's up to issue 356 of TWAS, and all of them are still available on line (including his records of the year going back to 1995), just type in the URL (e.g. http://www.furia.com/twas/twas0356.html) and replace the 0356 with any lower number to get that week's issue.

Some weeks he is so obscure and references all bands to other bands I've never heard of, and other weeks he's reviewing the albums I have and love, and I realise that if he loves them as much as I do, and has such interesting and insightful comments on them, that there must be a lot of equally good (or better!) albums out there I've never heard ... highly recommended

How many died at the World Trade Center on September 11th? Initial reports were in the 10-20,000 range, current news stories quote 5-6,500 but an article at CNN.COM says that the latest estimated number is in fact 3,682, and 1,399 of those are still on the "missing presumed dead" list (no death certificate issued yet). And a number of those 1,399 may still be alive because they were reported to have been in the WTC, but in fact may have gone missing or the list just hasn't been updated when they showed up alive and well ... especially residents of foreign countries.CNN.com - Trade center death toll drops below 4,000 - November 21, 2001

EMO - I'd never even heard of this term until a week ago, but here's a great site for finding out what "emo" is (clue 1: it's not the American comedian), how to identify if something is "emo" (clue 2: it's not a type of glue) and how to dress "emo" (clue 3: it's not a doll).

Answer? It's a music-genre (a bit like "punk", in particular "emotionally-charged punk rock" hence "emo".) Though the concept of punk without emotion of some kind worries me (punk, to me, was about energy and personal expression without being restricted by the strictures of having to be able to play an instrument well (it was optional as far as I could tell) or being able to sing well (no way of telling, not many punk-rockers actually "sang" they more shouted in rhythm )) so punk without emotion is like a hand grenade on a piece of elastic ... deadly, energetic, violent but ultimately self-destructive. Emotion should provide both a direction and a destination, even if the destination it shows is actually where the artist is starting from, and it should connect to the audience so that they can see where the artist is and where he/she is going, and the audience can then decide to go along for the ride, or to sit back and watch the artist head for the horizon/off the edge of the precipice...

The What the heck *is* emo, anyway? webpage by andy radin.

I've been reading and following the World Solar Challenge (solar powered vehicle race across Australia, thankfully the short way (top to bottom, Darwin to Adelaide) rather than across!) and I just noticed that the web address for the team is the same university as one of my gaming group is/was working at (she's just in the process of leaving, and double coincidence, I just had a card from her and her husband from where they are on holiday, in Australia!) Spooky!! The UK car crashed but they got it repaired by working through the night, and help was offered by the French car in particular thanks for the UK team helping the French team get their car sorted before the race started. It shows two things, one: that the UK and French can get on just fine thank you very much, and two: that doing good deeds and helping other people is something that is worthwhile doing, not just because it is something you should do, but because no good deed goes unpunished (er... unrewarded!) :-)