Lovely Rude Brit­ish Place Names, ganked from antiminke.

So. I’ve had offi­cial word now: Astrid, my scooter, is a total loss. Bye, Astrid. It was fun while it lasted. I’ll be look­ing at get­ting a Gran Tur­ismo 200 now, but I might just get another ET4. We’ll see how much the insur­ance determ­ines her market value to be…

Well, sjkas­abi, Wiki­pe­dia agrees with me: Note that the solidus and vir­gule are dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent typo­graphic sym­bols with decidedly dif­fer­ent uses. The solidus is sig­ni­fic­antly more oblique than the vir­gule. The char­ac­ter found on stand­ard key­boards is the virgule…

I can’t believe John Brodgen tried to kill him­self. Sure, you just trashed any hope you had of a polit­ical career, but you’re 36, you have a wife that loves you and you have a young baby at home. Get a grip, man.

Sorry for the late­ness of this post, I wanted to see how I was doing first. I ven­tured out briefly last night to hermia8 and spunk­art’s fun­draiser for Art Murder: The Pic­ture of Dorian Gray, their Fringe play, and man­aged to sur­vive sit­ting on the couch and conversing…

Two Reu­ters media crew have been shot by US forces. One died, becom­ing the 66th reporter or assist­ant to die in Iraq since 2003, accord­ing to Report­ers without Bor­ders. That three more than died in the Viet­nam War over 20 years. Oh, and Bro­g­den? You’re a toad and a…

Have I men­tioned I love my friends? My insanely awe­some friend, Max Bourke, was the cine­ma­to­grapher on a new doco series that will air on SBS in Octo­ber. The series, Swap­ping Lives, is the brainchild of David Goldie and Sohail Dahdal who I met at x|media|lab. (You…

[ganked from dr_nic and Neil Gaiman] This creep’s site boasts his skill in making models look ‘beau­ti­ful’. Actu­ally, he’s at the fore­front of the trend to digit­ally air­brush women so that they look unnat­ur­ally sym­met­rical, blem­ish-free, pert and slim. He and his…

Hmmm. CENTCOM is appar­ently unhappy with how the PR war is going, so they’re send­ing out let­ters to high-pro­file blog­gers to encour­age more pos­it­ive cov­er­age of the war. Pesky thing, free­dom of speech. I love this guy’s response to the e‑mail.

[ganked from mizchalmers feed from her other blog yatima_feed] Seth had writ­ten an art­icle about Rus­tic­a­tio Cali­for­ni­ana for Annalee’s magazine Other. Danny: I liked how the art­icle was pitched to the magazine’s target audi­ence. Lots of Lat­in­ate per­ver­sion. A: It’s so…

Wow, this is really cool! An ori­ginal 1924 manu­script of Ein­stein’s 1925 paper on “Quantum theory of the mon­atomic ideal gas” has just been found at the Uni­ver­sity of Leiden (which just hap­pens to be where Matt is right now for his astro­phys­ics con­fer­ence… wonder if…