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Too few experiments in school science
I’m a science geek – always have been, always will be. When I was a kid I had microscopes, telescopes, chemistry sets – anything that allowed me to do experiments. By the time I went to secondary school I was already pretty practically inclined in the laboratory, having done quite a few of the experiments
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The ‘father’ of home computers dies…
A few days ago one of the pioneers of the home computer revolution of the 1970s died. Ed Roberts, an MD in Georgia, died after a long battle with Pneumonia. Back in the 1970s his company, MITS, moved from model rocket telemetry, to calculators, then to building the first ‘computer kit’ – the Altair 8800
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Dr Who – lazy writing or social engineering?
And so the new incarnation of Dr Who has his first adventure on BBC One, with 27 year old Matt Smith as the latest actor to portray the eponymous Time Lord. The one thing about Doctors these days is that if you don’t like the current one, there’ll probably be another one along in a
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A millstone around their necks
Easter is the holiest time of the year for Christians – this year has been special for all the wrong reasons as well, though. The recent stories around what appears to be institutionalised failings in dealing with accusations of and cases of Child abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in different parts of the world
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And there’s one more thing…
My guilty secret for today – I love ‘Columbo’. No, not Colombo, capital city of Sri Lanka, but Columbo, dishevelled Los Angeles murder squad detective in the 1970s TV detective series of the same name. I’ve just watched an episode this afternoon – it’s sort of comfort TV for me, I have to admit. No
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Happy Customers – banks should have us stuffed and mounted!
It’s 1943 and we’re in Stalag Luft XXIIIb, a prison camp for allied prisoners of war, somewhere in the centre of Germany. In the centre of a hut, allied prisoners sit around a table which has a reasonable amount of food on it. In the corner of the room, a couple of German guards, the Camp Commandant
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A quick guide to blog spam…
I’ll soon be hitting a landmark on Joe’s jottings – 10,000 spam posts caught by the Akismet spam trapping plug-in for WordPress. Not at all bad going – I would advise anyone who runs a WordPress Blog to get their hands on this very useful piece of kit! Anyway – I saw a comment posted
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Why are some Open Source support people so damn rude?
Don’t get me wrong – I love Open Source software and have used some of it fairly widely in various development projects that I’ve done. I’m also aware of the fact that people involved in the development and support of such software are typically volunteers, and on the odd occasion I have called upon people