I know I shouldn't read the comments on the BBC blogs (especially Robert Peston's), but there's a certain car-crash fascination with watching logical fallacies colliding with the real world. I keep my mouth shut, laugh a little and move on to the rest of the internet.

However there's one big howler that keeps recurring and that I'm starting to find (a) annoying and (b) extremely worrying.

The main thrust of this so-called argument is that Gordon Brown was never voted for as Prime Minister, and so has no mandate for governing the country. I'm really astounded by this, as it implies a complete lack of understanding of the British political system, and of just how the country is governed. Of course this basic ignorance might explain why a sizeable number of them believe that one BBC journalist's reports are responsible for much the current economic morass...

This then leads me to ask the obvious question: do these people know how a parliamentary representative democracy like Britain (and much of the Commonwealth) actually works? It also leads on to the sadder question: if they don't, how did they get to voting age without knowing anything about the political system that governs their day-to-day lives?

Britain isn't a presidential state like the USA or Eire or France. We don't vote for a President on top of our elected local representative. Instead we vote for a Member of Parliament, and the leader of the majority grouping in Parliament becomes the Prime Minister. We don't vote for a party slate or for a party leader - we vote for the person we believe will do the best for our constituency. If you voted for your MP believing that you were voting for Tony Blair or David Cameron or whoever, well, your mistake. But just because you don't know how the world works isn't an excuse for it not working the way you want it to.

If the majority party changes leader, well, they just go on to become Prime Minister, with no need for a general election. We may even get the rare situation where minority parties go into coalition and completely replace the majority government. Again, there's no need for an election. While these changes may mean a new person at the top, the person you voted for is still in Parliament - and still answerable to you for their actions.

I suspect it's time for a mass civics lesson, and a pointer to They Work For You.

It's enough to make me want to scream.

However I have a blog, so I'll just rant there instead.

I've been blogging about my first experiences with the iPhone 2.0 software over at IT Pro:

I've been spending some time with the iPhone 2.0 software, and I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised with many of the new enterprise features.

Setting up an iPhone to connect to an Exchange server was quick, and relatively painless. Apple's implementation of ActiveSync supports self-issued server certificates directly, and so smaller businesses can work the CEO's iPhone without having to set up an expensive third-part certificate. Each phone will have to be set up by hand, so you may prefer to stick with Blackberry or Windows Mobile for ease of management.

I've added plenty of images so you can see just what it all looks like. Here are a couple just to whet your appetites:





Go read the rest of the piece for the rest of the images!

Meanwhile Mary looked at one possible reason for buying an iPhone 3G - increased blocking of social networks inside the corporate firewall:

Sure the iPhone is cool, but how many people are buying a smartphone just to get Web access at work?

A lot of our friends who blog using LiveJournal (probably the most community-oriented blogging platform) have commented recently that they’re losing access to LiveJournal and other sites at work - so they’re buying a smartphone so they can carry on accessing them.

I keep wondering how much of the recent jump in smartphone Web browsing is down to phones being almost good enough, networks being almost fast enough and data plans being almost cheap enough - and how much of it is annoyed or paranoid people being forced to put their social network in their pocket to stay in touch during the working day.

Remember to make any comments over there!

(Oh yes, and the new iPhone software makes it easy to take screenshots - just hold down the home button and tap the power switch. The screen will fade for a moment and you'll find the image in the device's camera roll.)

Here's another round-up of links to our blog over at IT Pro (now with a nice shiny redesign). We tend to put a couple of pieces up there a week, and if you want to read them as soon as they're published, it's also syndicated on LJ as itpro_sandm.

Click on the titles to see the full posts, and please make any comments over there. Oh, and rate the posts too, please!

Green if but for the licenses

Getting IT folk to agree is like herding squirrels, but there’s one thing we do seem to agree on, and that’s that virtualisation is a good thing. It saves money, it saves space, and above all, it saves energy. Throw in a bunch of offload processing for complex applications (a Tesla box or some Azul hardware) and you’re well on the way to a shiny green data centre.

With so many companies investing so much in virtualisation you’d think that software companies would be falling over themselves to develop licensing tools to support dynamic, flexible IT infrastructures. It’s surprising then to see that not only are they singularly failing to do so, but they’re also making it hard to justify installing software on a virtualised server. Microsoft has tried to appear to be a poster child for virtualisation licensing, but once you start drilling down into just what you can and can’t do with Hyper-V and the Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition you’re in for an unpleasant surprise. Unless you’re ready to lock yourself into an Oracle-style site license there’s just no way to run your internal IT as a utility.

Intel predicts an all IA future, consigns CUDA to the footnotes

With Intel’s 40th birthday on the horizon (and with it the 40th anniversary of the microprocessor), Intel’s Pat Gelsinger took a few minutes yesterday to ruminate on the past, present and future - and to take a few questions.

Beginning with a look back to the i386, and the shift from 16 to 32-bit computing, Gelsinger pointed to a time of technical and industry transition, much like today. It was the point where Compaq moved ahead of IBM, and Windows and Microsoft began to shape the software industry. We’re in the middle of another shift at the moment, what Gelsinger called the “third era of Moore’s Law”.

O2: business iPhone 3G will sync to Exchange without iTunes

But you’ll still need iTunes on every desktop to install applications. Would you put that in your organization?
We spent Friday with Telefonica at their new headquarters in Madrid, a campus laid out around a lake to deal with the climate; solar panels, vanes that push the heat up, a tower in each corner and wide roofs to add shade plus wireless antenna sprouting in the flowerbeds like candelabra. Telefonica has technology plans for the networks it runs as well, which includes O2.

Even Telefonica can’t actually show off the new iPhone yet: O2’s Steve Alder kept his in his pocket and described it instead. What he did show off was the price: free if you pay £45 or £75 a month for the tariff or £99 if you want the cheapest £30 a month plan. Existing iPhone owners get the same deal, although you have to sign up for the full 18 month contract again. None of the plans let you use the iPhone as a modem with your laptop and the price for international roaming is a hefty £50 for 50MB of data.

Beyond the valley of the CPU

The white heat of technology in the 1980s was focussed on the BBC Micro. Not only was it the heftiest 8-bit machines around, its open bus made it possible to add more processing power. With everything from music machines to Z-80s running CP/M, the BBC Micro could share its keyboard with many different CPUs.

Those days are on their way back.

A nation of snoops and gossips

You have no privacy, Larry Ellison said a few years ago; get over it. Is that because of governments and security agencies keeping track of you - or because of how much personal information you hand out yourself? If you want to break into someone’s bank account, most of the ’secret questions’ used for security are probably answered on their Facebook account. And how about the information you give away when you sign up for a special offer or fill in a survey?

If you don’t remember to go tick the box to say it can’t go to third parties, some marketing companies will happily pass along anything they know about your religious beliefs (one in ten), ethnic background (one in seven) and sexual orientation (one in fourteen). And your mobile phone number and marital status… And if you don’t care who knows that, are you happy that one in four pass along your credit card details? Only 3% would hand over your national ID number if they had it - and they would keep secret your job performance, your biometrics - and possibly in light of the Facebook Beacon debacle, what movies you’ve rented.

The case of the disappearing disk space

Where has 32GB of disk space gone and how do I make Vista give it back, or there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

When we’re on the road at conferences I take a fair few photographs, and I copy a lot of PowerPoints and PDFs onto my notebook, not to mention photographing products I’m reviewing, and then there’s recordings of interviews… It all takes up space, so when I got an 8 megapixel camera the day we drove into Death Valley I did wonder if disk space on my notebook might be a problem.

Join the (beta) community

TechEd is Microsoft’s instant university, a place where developers and IT pros go to get information about the current state of all things Microsoft. It’s not really a place for big announcements - though the odd one sneaks out.

Most of the news from this year’s event has been about software moving from one stage of beta to the next. Whether it’s a new beta (like Silverlight 2) or a long running upgrade saga finally getting close to release (like SQL Server 2008) it’s not like a new release of Windows or a new Visual Studio. If anything we’re quickly moving into a world where the big bang launch is a thing of the past. Apple may be still spinning its “one more thing”, but even Snow Leopard will just be an evolutionary move. Instead public betas and community previews will become the way things get done, and the Web 2.0 perpetual beta will be the way of the rest of the IT business works.

Behind the scenes with the BallmerBot

The BallmerBot joined Bill Gates on stage at his last public keynote here at TechEd 2008 Developers in Orlando earlier this week. Waving an XBox Live lifetime subscription (Bill’s leaving gift from a grateful Microsoft, according to the latest version of the “Bill’s Last Day” video Microsoft first showed at CES), the robot waddled out of the wings looking like a cross between Johnny 5 and a Segway.

U-Bot 5’s new name may not be what the developers expected, but underneath the humour and the hype is a fascinating story of how PC technology and modern developer tools have simplified the development of what until recently would have been a very complex and very expensive piece of hardware.

In and out of the browser - how Microsoft and Google think differently

For years, I’ve been saying that Google would be mad to build its own operating system. It should leave the thankless task to Microsoft and Apple and Linux distributions; you can debate how good a job they do, turn and turn about, but the scale of what a desktop OS needs to do and the range of devices it needs to support is far broader than what you need to do in a browser or on a smartphone. I still don’t think Google has any plans to create its own OS, but it’s pushing beyond the browser as a development platform with Gears and App Engine and the like. Microsoft has a whole range of platforms in the browser, out of the browser and around the browser, from Windows and WPF to Silverlight to SharePoint to Office to SQL Server – to name just a few of the platforms Bill Gates touched on in his last ever keynote at Microsoft TechEd this morning.

...as Google managed to detect one of its own blogs as a spam blog, before handing over the URL to all and sundry. A good job that the spoof blogger that took it over wasn't a spam blogger...

Can we say "Ooops"? I thought we could...

Here's an interesting tree map graph of this page's structure, mapping the HTML that makes up everything you can see. Go here to make your own. The nodes are colour coded as follows:

What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Quite fascinating. I obviously have quite a complex template in play! That and the tables I occasionally use...

Original linkage from Chris Green

On our IT PRO blog a review with a difference: conference bags.

You can tell I'm a technology journalist. It's not the perpetually dishevelled look, the scrawled notebook, the geeky t-shirts, or the laptop covered in stickers, though I'm sure they're clues.

No, it's the regularly changing collection of backpacks that really gives things away. Nearly every big event you go to, there's a new bag to take away. Some people might be satisfied with that, but I'm always on the lookout for the bag that I can use every day. Most I try for a while, but then go back to one of the old standbys. In my case those are a battered old Intel IDF back pack and a Microsoft PDC shoulder bag.

I'm sure our local Oxfam dreads our arrival with a car load of conference bags from all over the world. However, if we didn't pass them on to charity our office would quickly fill with unwanted bags. So how do we decide what to keep, especially in these days of ever decreasing baggage allowances. I tend to classify them as good (worth trying for a while), bad (straight out the door - sometimes into the fabric recycling bins), and indifferent (which wait for the next charity shop run).

Read on to find out why I'm using the bag I'm using, and just where it came from (and why marypcb is using the bag she's recently picked up).

So what's your favourite conference bag?

It's time to gather up some links to recent blog posts on marypcb's and my blog at IT Pro . It's been a while since I've done this - so there's plenty for you to read.

• "Mini USB - it's not just a good idea, it's the law!" China standardises on mini-USB. That'll simplify the power supplies under my desk and in my luggage.
• "A Virtual Archive" Do you have problems with obsolete file formats? You're not alone - the team at the National Archive have an even a bigger version of the very same problem!
• "Why are you still using the post office?" There's a strike on today - so it's the perfect time to give up your paper habit.
• "Take the tablet, just not as it comes" Shiny new laptop; scuffed old Norton uninstaller - and the utility that does the job
• "Free Wi-Fi, free security holes" I'm not hacking the network, I'm trying to fix it... lucky for the hotel
• "How simple is too simple?" There's easy and there's deceptively simple; only one isn't a con
• "Women in Technology at Microsoft" Women in IT - want a job at Microsoft? Go for it…
• "The commoditisation of IT hits new highs" Next up - the Lego machine room!
• "Microsoft goes back to the future at TechEd" Few new announcements, and a non-vision vision set the scene for a week with 10,000 IT pros in Orlando
• "The wrong Dayton airport" Driving through the dawn to Dayton, Ohio for the flight to Orlando, we reach the airport in plenty of time. Shame it's the wrong one.

Enjoy!

Over at IT Pro I've been writing about Danyel Fisher's "How we watch the city" paper. It's a fascinating look at how we can use geographical search data to see how places grab our attention. I'm becoming more and more fascinated by the idea of "attention", and how we can work with collections of attention data. I suspect it's going to become one of the key approaches to understanding interaction context.

I've been reading a fascinating paper by Danyel Fisher, of Microsoft Research. He's one of the folk behind the SNARF email triage tool, and is currently looking at how people use online maps.

"How we watch the City" is surprisingly beautiful (in the way many computer-mediated visualisations are). To show how people and searches gravitate to specific places he's created an application that draws a heat map over Microsoft's Virtual Earth, letting him zoom into the "hottest" searches, bright clusters that illuminate the virtual space of the search engine. With access to the services search logs, he can show just how searches relate to geography.

Here's one of his images, a look at how map searches of Las Vegas focus on the Strip.



Our eyes are bright in the digital world.

The online Miieditor can save out Miis as 100 x 100 jpegs.

So I had a go with it, and ended up like this:



Oh dear... I'm not sure if it's convincing, but it's certainly fun, tweaking all the options to try and get the right image!

So how quickly will having a mii become a miime?

In all the hectic and inevitable chaos of the last few weeks I seem to have missed this here blog's fifth birthday.

So that means in all, I've been blogging for seven years or so in various places (and writing about using and building your own blogs for eight!). Not bad when you consider that what's probably the original blog just celebrated its tenth anniversary.

In other news, I seem to be 18 entries away from my 3000^th. I wonder what it'll be about...

A fascinating map of the link interconnections between blogs over a six-week period, from Discover Magazine. It's an extension of the work detailed in Matthew Hurst's Data Mining Blog, which I've linked to in the past.

The blogosphere is the most explosive social network you’ll never see. Recent studies suggest that nearly 60 million blogs exist online, and about 175,000 more crop up daily (that’s about 2 every second). Even though the vast majority of blogs are either abandoned or isolated, many bloggers like to link to other Web sites. These links allow analysts to track trends in blogs and identify the most popular topics of data exchange. Social media expert Matthew Hurst recently collected link data for six weeks and produced this plot of the most active and interconnected parts of the blogosphere.

I'm actually not too sure about the conclusion drawn about LJ:

3 SHOW ME YOUR FRIENDS This isolated, close-knit online community of bloggers uses LiveJournal, an online host that primarily serves as a social networking site. This blogging island is just barely in touch with the rest of the blogworld.

Of course I may just have a more outgoing reading list than many people here...

[Update: pulling out a useful comment by del_c that succinctly makes the point I was trying to make: "I bet that cluster is by definition the live journals that are linked to each other and not the blogs. I bet the live journals that are heavily linked to the blogs, and linked by them, are in the pack where they don't stand out like the cluster does. The existence of the cluster with a gap tells us that there is a difference between the two types of live journals, not that there is a difference between all live journals and all blogs."]

Over on our other blog at IT Pro I get a little ranty about bad UI and lousy installers...

You know the feeling. You've just installed a piece of software, and you're ready to get on with your work when you discover something like this:



It's the dialogue that won't go away - with the radio button that doesn't do anything.

Pop over there and add to the list of annoying technology "features"...

I've been playing with Scrapblog, a rather nifty tool for producing online scrapbooks.

It links to most popular web photohosting sites and imports your images ready for use, and uses a Flash UI to lay out your presentation pages, with custom photo frames and text - just like a scrapbook or a photo album. You can resize and rotate images. You can add extra pages to Scrapblogs as you go, so you're not limited by a single page - and of course published pages aren't locked down, so you can update and edit them any time you want.

The UI is impressive - it's currently built in Flex, so does a lot more than your average Flash application. There's an Apollo port out there too, so you won't be limited to working through web pages.

I wouldn't see this as a replacement for Flickr or any other site like that - this is more a way of quickly selecting a group of images, and then sharing them with friends and family who wouldn't normally spend time delving through a Flickr photostream...

Here's my Scrapblog

My one quibble: for some reason the application defaults to US keyboard settings

I missed yesterday's news of Cisco's purchase of WebEx. When I came across it on various news sites this morning it gave me something to think about - something I turned into quite a long piece over at IT Pro.

This week has seen duelling green policies from both sides of the political spectrum. One thing they all seem to agree on: air travel is a bad thing, and it needs to become more expensive. Putting the rights and the wrongs of the argument to one side, it's likely we'll see a significant increase in the cost of business travel over the next few years.

So how are we going to cope?

The answer's been with us for a while, and Cisco is now putting its money on the table to link the solution's market leader with its networking equipment. Web conferencing has been around a good few years now, and WebEx and its competitors (like Adobe Connect and Microsoft's Live Meeting) have grown by offering tools to help businesses share information over the Internet. WebEx's investment in what it calls its MediaTone network has been considerable, giving it a hefty private backbone for bandwidth-intensive services - and a hefty advantage over its competition.

Read the rest here.

Now that LJ supports HTML in free text sidebar components, I've been tweaking the design of my blog a little.

A recent addition is a scriptless and Flashless Twitter badge. Found at BunnyHeroLabs, the badge creator generates an image with your latest twittering, and adds some HTML that links to your Twitter page. I tweaked the colours, and some of the badge HTML...

It's not perfect, but it'll do for now. Now if only LJ would let me link to Flash...

We're back in London for a few days to catch up on things before swinging over the pond for CES.

So it's a chance for a quick round up of 2006...

Travels

Four continents and four months away from home, taking us to all four corners of the USA (and some stops in the middle), to the beauties of New Zealand, to the bustling streets of Hong Kong, and the depths underneath Switzerland. Cities visited included Hong Kong, Seattle, New York, San Francisco, Dallas, Fort Lauderdale, San Jose, Campbell, San Diego, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Wellington, Christchurch, Geneva, and Munich.

We drove the whale-watching twists and turns of Highway One from San Francisco to LA, went to Death Valley in the rain, sat in our own hot springs on Hot Water Beach, and watched dolphins swim up the coast of the Coramandel Peninsula. It is a wonderful world.

Books

Best read of the year was by far Sean Williams' "Books of the Cataclysm" series, which wrapped his earlier "Books of the Change" YA series in a set of adult novels that expanded on the earlier themes, to unfold one of the more innovative fantasies of the last twenty years. If fantasy is inherently conservative, the final volume The Devoured Earth turned that meme soundly on its head, with characters who not only thought about the choices they were making, but used the time carefully to find a true alternative path that offered progress and growth. Wonderful stuff that needs a wider audience beyond the southern Australian landscapes that inspired so much of the story. Yes, Pyr is publishing the series in the US, but their version will miss the crucial three "Books of the Change" - which I luckily found on our first trip to the side of the world.

Other good reads included finishing Elizabeth Bear's Jenny Casey trilogy, being encouraged by marypcb to try Kerry Greenwood's detective fiction, Chris Roberson's post-modern planetary-romance Paragea, and the final part of Nancy Kress' Quaker military space opera duology Crucible.

Literary Pilgrimages

Slip F8 at the Baia Mar marina in Fort Lauderdale. Travis is long gone, and there are no Rolls Royce pickup truck or house boat to be seen...

Music

The highlight here was finally seeing Thomas Dolby live, at one of the warm up gigs for his tour in San Francisco, and at an enthusiastic homecoming at the Scala here in London. With more tours to come, and new music, I suspect I'll be seeing him playing again somewhere soon. Other gigs included seeing regular favourite Billy Bragg and a blast from the past with the original line up of prog rock supergroup Asia.

Sport

Two baseball games - watching the Cubs shut out Barry Bonds as he tried for Babe Ruth's record, and seeing the Mariners run in a grand slam against the Orioles.

One football match - the opening of the World Cup in Munich. The massed oompah bad was most peculiar...

Technology

CERN took us to the largest physics experiment we've seen, and to the first web server. Closer to home we've been writing for more magazines and web sites, including our regular tech blog at IT Pro, where you'll find my tech round-up of 2006.

...over at IT Pro.

Ready for ReadyBoost.

One of my favourite things about Windows Vista is its ReadyBoost disk cache technology which uses off-the-shelf USB flash drives to speed up operations and extend laptop battery life.

One of my least favourite things about Windows Vista is trying to find a USB flash disk that will actually work with ReadyBoost.

Read More.

Putting Backup in the Fast Lane

Like many small businesses, Mary and I keep our email and files on a small server running Small Business Server 2003. It's a useful little OS, and its built-in backup tools simplify archiving your data and your email. We're also backing up volume shadow copy data, so lost files can be retrieved from Windows' often ignored file system snapshots.

(If you've not turned it on Shadow Copies yet, go do it now. Yes, you'll lose some free disk space, but you'll gain a lot of peace of mind. Right click on a volume, and open the properties dialog. In the Shadow Copies tab, click “Enable”. Shadow Copies may not be as pretty as Apple's Time Machine, but it does the same job, and it's here now. If you're trying out a business edition of Vista, you can turn it on there too...)

We currently do nightly backups onto a NAS appliance, a Buffalo Terastation Pro, shifting around 50 GB from the server to the NAS store. With 2 TB of disk space, configured as RAID 5, there's plenty of space for several days worth of backups. There was only one fly in the ointment: the backup was taking far too long.

Read More.

I spotted a little unusual traffic on one of my pictures on Flickr. It had suddenly gone from the usual 10 or 20 views I get for an unlinked picture to over 2800 - in less than a day! This was quite surprising, as it wasn't even the best of the photos that I took that day...

So I did a little ego-surfing on Technorati to find out why, and I discovered that it seems to have become an internet meme in Argentina. Several popular blogs are linking to it, including a Spanish language site, Meneame, that seems to be a bit of a cross between Metafilter and Digg.

It's interesting to explore a whole new side of the web, one in a language I can only just tease out some meaning from basic French, rudimentary Portuguese and a pile of context. It makes you realise that there's a lot more to the online world than out little anglophone corner.

Big in Buenos Aires...

I've created an LJ feed for IT Pro's blogs: itproblogs

It's a single feed for all the blogs - including jonhoneyball, Davey Winder, marypcb, and me...

marypcb and I've just put up our first posts at our brand spanking new blog at IT Pro...

So try my "VMware's vision of the next server OS":

I spent much of this morning talking to VMware's Raghu Raghuram, its VP in charge of Data Centre and Desktop Platform Products. A long job title, but one that means he's the man to talk about when you want to find about the future of the data centre - and of the server operating system.

...and Mary's "Montecito - not as much of a gamble?":

Simon and I are fans of Las Vegas - the city and the show. For one thing it's where Simon was when I proposed. By text message (why yes, we are geeks). He was in a keynote with a Palm Treo 650, I was at home in London with a Blackberry. Where else can you see lions, eat sushi, watch a volcano, take a gondola down the Grand Canal, go up the Eiffel Tower, hurtle past the Empire State Building and finish the day by taking a limo into the desert? And Vegas is one of the most advanced consumers of technology outside the military and adult entertainment sites.

Keep coming back for more!

There's been some turmoil in parts of the blogosphere recently over people trying to find a name for sites like MySpace, FaceBook, Microsoft's Live Spaces and Yahoo 360.

They're obviously not blogs, though they do have some similarities.

So what are they for? They're web pages and sites that have some element of social networking, but they're also places to put details of who you are, what you do, what you like. You can may be add some media, and links to friends and sites you like.

Now, I know I've been around online longer than many bloggers have been alive, but there's one thing I remember back in the days when we were building the first ISPs, and setting up user public web space soon after.

We had an idea, and we had the tools to help build them.

They were web pages that had places to put details of who you were, what you did, what you liked. You could even add some media (once Netscape invented the object tag), and put in links to friends and sites you like. You could even link them into social networks.

Sounds familiar?

We called them "Home Pages".

Maybe it's a term we need to bring back.

I still kind of like it, even if it is a little "Web 0.2"...

I came across this neologism today (from Human Being Curious via Creating Passionate Users and marypcb).

The human brain has a function built into it that’s helped us survive for many thousands of years, and unfortunately, it’s also a function that tends to resist trying new things as well. Your brain tends to make up, and live out worst case scenarios before trying something new, to see what might happen if you were to try this new thing. It’s what’s known as awfulizing. When faced with something that’s different from what we’re used to, our brain awfulizes all of the terrible things that may become of this new situation, and in many cases, believes what it makes up to be true, then responds to what it makes up, as opposed to what is known as objective reality. Let me give you two examples. These examples are quite different, and at the same time, the brain tends to come to the same conclusion for both of these situations.

It made a lot of sense. It's something I do a lot, rolling scenarios over and over and trying to work out what the worst possible thing that could happen would be. When faced with a decision, and something new, I'm still back on those long ago African plains, trying to avoid the hungry leopards.

Now I have a name for it, it could be easier to deal with.

And of course, I should still be able to avoid my metaphorical night-time leopards.

And of course, Human Being Curious becomes another candidate for the ever-growing blogroll

Surgeons from Great Ormond Street Hospital are working with Ferrari's pit crew, to see if the high-speed surgery of the Formula 1 team can help them improve their emergency room procedures.

The Ferrari people filmed the doctors at work, then dissected the images with them. "For years we've been convinced that we were doing things pretty well, but seeing the tape it was shocking to notice our lack of coordination", says Nick Pigott of the intensive-care unit.

TEDBlog also mentions how IDEO have been taking US emergency room surgeons to NASCAR pits:

Time is of essence in both the ER and a car race, and "doctors were impressed by the high level of preparation and coordination of the pit team". Tom explained that while the Nascar teams are perfectly synchronized and approach the car from planned directions and carrying all the necessary tools and parts on them, doctors often enter the ER just to start asking nurses to gather, every time anew, the necessary tools and machines and drugs.

Fascinating stuff, and a look at just how we can learn from many difference places.

TEDblog has gone straight onto my blogroll.

It's been a while since I've done anything to the look and feel of this ole blog. So, I've switched theme to something that gives it a look that's a bit more like my other blog.

With the launch of the new CSS-based Expressive style today, I've switched to using its London Cityscape theme from the grey Component theme I was using. I've quite liked the idea of a London cityscape look, and as this is a London-based blog. There are some nice touches too, including a Tag browser and proper permalinks for each entry, so you don't have to go prying through the comment HTML to link to an entry.

There will be some CSS tweaks to come (I want to change some of the fonts to start with).