Calculating Earth's Gravity

Here.

Is a White Christmas Just a Dream?

An answer, from the BBC, here.

Tough-mindedness v meanness and greed

Here.

Wealth census: What are you worth?

Here

Families who can't get by on £100,000 a year

Press Association

This Is Money

Monday 'most common form of sickness'

Read more about the disease here.

Heil Hitler on The Mall!

Click on the picture to see it in full. Extraordinary. More details here.

Why I am So Successful?

Because I am grumpy!

Democracy Live - BBC's Latest New Website

I think I am liking this.

Looks really, really good.

Prix Pictet Environmental Photography Prize 2009

BBC

Prix Picet

Inner Life of a Cell

Yahoo Gets Distructive & Deletes GeoCities

I understand Yahoo taking a commercial decision and stopping the addition of new GeoCities sites. I can understand why they should even stop the editing of existing pages. I cannot understand why they are just casually deleting the whole lot. It is history that they are getting rid of in one fell swoop. I think it's a bad precedent; other companies who are considering doing the same will now be able to pull the plug with little or no shame. Not every decision even in a business need be based on commercial value alone; there can and must be consideration for non-commercial value as well. Yahoo is a big company and they won't go under through preserving this web heritage.

Shame on them.

Marital Bliss

Make sure she is younger and cleverer.

For more point your browser here.

David McCandless

Want to find out more about this blog, its author, his new book etc. Will try to find some time this week to investigate.

Take a look at this.

Oh, and I've just read on his site that he is based in London. I took it for granted that he is from the USA.

A quotation

Einstein supposedly said:

"It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely."

Harry Reid

Harry Reid. An interesting life. Would like to know more

And here in The Economist.

A great line in that Economist article - describing Mr Reid as 'tough on crime, yet understanding of sin.'

Get Over it - You've Won!

The battle to insure that supply side economics has been incorporated into mainstream economic thinking has been won. It is over. Future battles must be about other aspects of economics.

Those campaigning for a further entrenching of SSE concepts to sort out our economies are wrong - it has simply become dogma totally disconnected from reality.

A must read post by Bruce Bratlett.

And see the man debate here.

Physical problems 'often mental'

Many physical problems have their roots in mental difficulties.

Address the latter and we forestall the former.

And listen here.

Language or Dialect

When is a language a' language' and when is it merely a 'dialect'.

There are no simple answers.

Here something about Yiddish by David Schneider.

And is Glaswegian possibly a 'language'? Listen here.

Zero Tolerance

Zero tolerance is a concept championed by idiots, who find it too difficult or are too lazy to think through an idea to its logical conclusions.

Nice example here; on the bbc here.

French Suicides v Suffering Brits

France, the country that prides itself on its joie de vivre, has more people taking their lives as a share of the population than anywhere in western Europe bar Finland and Belgium.

What is going on?

The Economist suggests that a country that idealises the good life, the reality of drudgery and waiting for the monthly pay check or of solitude in retirement may be harder to accept.

Read the article here.

The French should cheer up though, Britain is the worst place to live in Europe!