Then post something online about your grandma. I'm serious: why not? People may appreciate a chance to contribute their memories.

As regards the Patrick Moore story, you assume people neither met nor knew him, but in this case you may be wrong. I've come across the guy now and then due to my own interest in astronomy, and I'm nothing more than a rank amateur. In his younger and sprightlier days the gentleman in question would've been moderately hard for a keen amateur astronomer not to encounter at some time or another. It is sometimes forgotten that people on TV also exist IRL.

I bought a DX from amazon.com (delivered to the UK). It has the same setup as the International version of the standard Kindle used to have before they decided they'd sell those on Amazon UK - Whispernet from anywhere, and I think once they started selling Kindles on Amazon UK they did give the opportunity to move to the UK service overall.

I found the DX to be great for reading A4 PDFs, even the ACM-style two-column layouts. For reading novels and so forth it is merely acceptable; comically oversized, really, like the iPad.

You're pretty much right about PDFs, pragmatically at least, although some reflow more easily than others. Authors do have the option to tag PDFs, indicating what can be reflowed and in what order - it's an accessibility feature. However, since very few people have any idea that this option even exists and most PDF creation workflows don't really provide the option, the feature isn't, practically, much of a game changer.

Publishing on the internet is the popular suggestion, yes. It has one major problem, which is the aforementioned REF. If you're after an academic career, then you have to create the type of research outputs that the system requires and rewards.

There already exist large-ish semi-academic parallel subcultures within UK universities, call them 'academic related' if you like. These result in streams of publications that, although they attract international interest/kudos, won't get you a 'real' academic career any time soon, because the venues in which they appear just don't get that sort of rating. JISC funded activities, for example, are prone to causing academic-related career blight for exactly this reason. 'Publishing on the internet' won't help your research achieve a 4* rating, as evidence seems to indicate that 4* results are mostly handed out to papers that appear in discipline-leading journals. Perhaps that's because all the best work is published in said journals -- but frankly I doubt it.

Yeah, it could, but if you read the Finch report, you'll find that they're recommending what's known as gold open access. Researchers will be expected to pay an preposterously high per-article fee during the publication process -- a fee that they will be expected to write into their proposal for funding. This means that shedloads of funding will be going from research groups to publishers. A 2,000 UKP per publication 'article processing fee' has been proposed, although with gloomy predictability, higher-profile publishers with better impact factors have generally made it known that their article processing costs, seeing as how they're Quality and all, may (alas) be somewhat higher. They can get away with it.

This, incidentally, means that people who happen to do research and receive public funding, but don't happen to have any project funding (and this is far from rare), are going to find it very difficult to afford to publish. We're going from a situation in which the general public can't afford to access/read research to a situation in which only a subsection of academics will be able to afford to publish, thus privileging themselves on the REF (latest incarnation of the research evaluation exercise) and denying the stragglers. Publishers are content with this because they're on the gravy train for life. Many academics aren't unduly concerned because they have project funding and it's just another system of fees. And hey, screw the riffraff, right? They can stay in the low impact factor ghetto where they belong.

Open access is a good idea. This, on the other hand, is just your typical everyday lunatic you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours moneywasting. The actual solution is within the government's reach (hint: it involves privileging legit open access journals in the REF, rather than paying wodges of cash to Nature), but that won't get anyone invited to any dinner-parties at all, so we'll just keep throwing money at publishers instead.

I'm in a situation right now where my own funder both mandates open access and refuses to pay for it, which, regrettably, is the sort of laughably schitzophrenic thinking I have come to expect from them. In the words of Douglas Adams, 'They're all a load of useless bloody loonies.'

The AI-course was used for recruitment purposes (ie. the top 1k students were invited to apply to Google), which I'm sure made many of the top 1k students very happy.

That said, someone less squeaky-clean than Google might take the approach slightly further, deciding to run a carefully targeted education project, retain data from student use of virtual learning environments and, in the long run, use it to screen out sub-standard potential recruits. However, that would be kind of evil - so I'm sure nobody would ever seriously consider deploying a Trojan course.

Greenfield actually was made redundant from her directorship at the Royal Institution in 2010.

It was suggested at the time that, "She became a bit too convinced of her own infallibility" and whilst, "She is an intelligent, lively and interesting person [...] the level of recognition is a bit out of proportion to what she has actually achieved in science." Her love for designer clothes and appearing in places like Vogue raised a few eyebrows.

"Self-promoting celebrity" is not an unusual description. If you were starting a collection of crackpots, you could do worse than starting here.
 

It's because they employ a lot of very smart, creative patent trolls.

First thing that came to mind on reading this article was "1998 called, they want their suggestion back".

Back in 1998 when the Web was new and cool, Swatch were attempting to market a metric alternative to the 24 hour clock, which they excitingly referred to as 'Internet Time'. It divided the day into 1,000 'beats', and was based around the Central European timezone (GMT + 1) on the basis that Swatch's headquarters are in Biel. Unsurprisingly, the concept went down like a lead balloon.

FWIW, you'd have to think about different timezones anyway. No amount of universally-shared timezones are going to change the physical reality, so they may as well reflect it.

And then you discover that the iPad is out of battery or is for some other reason b0rked.

Manuals are a good idea. Manuals that don't require a battery are an excellent idea. I can see benefits to having both, but I can't understand at all why one would actually stop carrying the dead-tree version.

It's not just the Internet. Spanish press published the identity of said soccer player weeks ago. We must eradicate the teaching of foreign languages in Britain!

Actually it is fair to say that the last decade or so of educational policy already did a pretty good job of that, but at least now we know it's a good thing.

You want to know what is posted on twitter? Ask Google: 'football super injunction'. For me, the first link returned was something called 'CaughtOffside.com', who obviously need to be sued in England until the pips squeak.

maybe in some parallel universe those items still radioactive are indeed stored, but not in this reality.

To be fair, technetium emissions from Sellafield have recently been greatly reduced. Apparently Sellafield launched a new trial treatment in 2003, in which technetium is removed from the liquid waste and, wait for it, stored as medium-level solid radioactive waste. Apparently this led to a 95% reduction in Tc-99 during trials. As a result of this, this cleaning technology was adopted on a permanent basis.

I agree that the Wikipedia article does not contain this factoid. Wikipedia is not the only source of information on the Web.

Modern nuclear age? What?

The Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant began construction in 1966 (Fukushima Dai-ichi dates from 1971). Furthermore, both use General Electric boiling water reactors. The major difference seems to be that Browns Ferry is/was expected to continue to operate until 2033.

Similarly designed technology dating from a similar time has similar flaws. In most areas engineers learn from their mistakes and upgrade regularly for precisely this reason. Then we actually would be in the 'modern nuclear age', and discovering a new flaw would be disturbing news as opposed to being a wholly predictable consequence of expecting to keep dodgy, ancient crap running for well over half a century.

Completely agree with you about the sensationalism of the media, and the vulture lobbies, who are treating this as though everybody's ideological Christmas has come early. The whole feeding frenzy is in very poor taste, foul and dehumanising. Plenty of time for zOMG NUCULAR! once this situation has been resolved. I finally blew a fuse last night and put the BBC, Telegraph, Guardian and Independent in my hosts file underneath the entry identifying the Daily Mail as 127.0.0.1. In the short term, turning off the TV is probably the best move, but perhaps it would be worth sending a complaint to the BBC. The coverage of this has hit rock bottom in quality.

Be all that as it may, I wish you all the best - that all goes well, that your wife's family and friends are OK, and that the area recovers quickly from the earthquake damage and everything else that has happened since.

Chicken.