WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?

We use thermos flasks a great deal at work - we could spend £250 on a single, fragile glass vacuum dewar or we could buy ten moderately priced camping thermos flasks - the extra efficiency in liquid nitrogen is not worth the outlay. But I digress. The latest batch are platic-coated metal, and the top/cap/mug bits are also in use in the lab ( Read more... )

So, superheroes.

I've had a few thoughts about them of late. weebleflip and I watched Painkiller Jane recently. It's a very, very low budget film which is effectively a superheroine origin story. As a film, it's a wee bit crap. As a feature-length pilot for a pretty damned decent TV series, it was promising, and indeed had all the hallmarks right down ( Read more... )

I have luggage once more! This is a good thing.

My first impressions of Québec City (after a night's sleep) are chiefly that it is very cold and very wet. I say that as a Scot currently living in Manchester. Very cold. Very wet. Probably unfair of me, I know, but bloody hell was today unpleasant. We did the walk to the conference centre today to make sure we could find it and work out how long ( Read more... )

Wow, an LJ post. Work has sent me to Québec City, and here I have arrived. My luggage remains in boody Heathrow, however. The trip out was, on the whole, a farce. We arrived at the airport only for my travelling companion to realise that he had left all his plastic money at home, with no time to go back and get it. Cue a mad plan to get a ( Read more... )

One of my most recent acquisitions is Henley's Formulas(sic) for Home and Workshop, a book which may essentially be described as a recipe book for everything you might ever need living in an isolated community in a post-industrial society. Specifically, it assumes that you can in fact acquire all those useful chemicals which used to be stocked ( Read more... )

For many years now the ultimate question has, contrary to Adams, been known: What is beer? Curiously, it falls to an American marketing campaign to tell us.

I have recently upgraded my mobile phone. Well, what I actually did was dither about between my two choices (The HTC One X and the Samsung Galaxy S II) and then eventually click on box to ( Read more... )

In a recent report on the use of iPads by MPs (see the BBC here), the conclusion was that this had saved "several thousand pounds" because "they could circulate information electronically rather than in hard copy." These are the MPs who already have an allowance of five computers, but are incapable of circulating files electronically ( Read more... )

Well, another day, another flat story. Today, I woke to no hot water. A plumber was dispatched after I called the agents after a fair while of banging my head against it trying to work out what was wrong. It turned out there were two problems - the first and most serious was that the pressure in the system was too low and so it wouldn't turn on ( Read more... )