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Announcement!

August 30, 2010 //

Next Sunday, September 5th, The 365 Days of Astronomy website will be broadcasting my second podcast.

It’s all about two gigantic meteor craters in the heart of Europe. I talk about how they were created, what they look like today and how their discovery has changed the way we look at our planet. I will be backing up the podcast with pictures and further details here on this blog.

Please take a listen in and let me know what you think.

(Oh, and if you never heard my first podcast for 365DOA, you can find it here).

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It's World Homeopathy Awareness Week!

April 13, 2010 //

A few oldies and goodies.

First up, Homeopathic A&E. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen this.

Next, Crispian Jago gives us an out-of-body experience.

Brian Brushwood gives a talk on Homeopathy and magnet therapies

.. and not forgetting Dara O’Briain’s famous video on Homeopathy

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Categories stuff, Uncategorized

Minister calls for new bullshit limits

November 13, 2009 //
Dimitri Dempsey

Spot the difference? Me neither.

The Irish Minister for Transport, Mr. Noel Dempsey, announced yesterday that he is determined to press ahead with tough new bullshit limits in the face of a backbench revolt.

Mr Dempsey, who works every second night as the President of Russia, announced that new gulags would be built in Siberia for public personalities who were caught with over 5 miligrams of bullshit in their public utterances. Up to now, the limit has been set at 8 miligrams, which is far higher than all other EU countries excluding the UK.

At a party meeting last week, representatives within Dempsey’s own party forcefully expressed their opposition to this move. Some are threatening to vote against the legislation when it appears before parliament. Mattie McGrath, from Tipperary, said that bullshit could relax jumpy parliamentarians and that he was partial to a bit of bullshit himself on occasion to make any of his public utterances even halfway coherent.

The most vociferous comments came from Jackie Healy-Rae in Kerry, who said that high levels of bullshit should be a mandatory requirement for all parliamentarians. “I’ve often used plenty of bullshit in my speeches, and it never did me a bit of harm”. He cites former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, “who was well known to use 90 miligrams of bullshit any chance he could get, and did they lock him up for it? Not a chance.”

Sources believe that Minister Dempsey has a difficult road ahead of him. According to one source, the legislation is dead at the starting blocks. “The level of bullshit in public use these days is so bad that it won’t happen without massive investment in Garda resources”, she said. “Gardai will need to invest in state of the art bullshit detectors while the number of random bullshit tests will need to be doubled, or even tripled. Who is going to pay for that?”. It currently believed that the new limits won’t become law before 2011.

The minister himself was unable for comment this morning. He was was in Vladivostok opening a new missile defense installation.

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Thousands of pilgrims witness Nothing at Knock

October 29, 2009 //
Knock Shrine

via Declan McAleese (Flickr - creative commons licensed)

KNOCK, Co. Mayo – 31 October 2009

Fifty thousand people from around Ireland turned up the town of Knock, Co. Mayo, today to see a glorious display of Nothing. The anticipation had been building up for weeks after clairvoyant Joe Coleman successfully predicted at least two displays of Nothing over the past months, with this day expected to be the best display of Nothing in fifty years. Bus-loads of pilgrims began to arrive into Knock since last Wednesday. Hotel rooms and guest-houses were booked up as far afield as Ballina and Tuam. James O’Shaughnessy from Rosslare arrived in Knock the night before, having walked in his bare feet from Wexford. All the pilgims spoke in feverish terms about their anticipation of today’s event. “It’s about time that the people of Ireland woke up, cast off our material desires and realised that all out problems would be solved if we moped around looking at bugger all for a while”, said Micheal Foley from Moate, Co. Westmeath.

The day lived up to expectations right from the start. “It was amazing”, said Bill O’Rourke from Prosperous, Co. Kildare. “As soon as we got there we immediately started seeing Nothing, and for the entire time we were there we continued to see Very Little Happen on a regular basis. We must have been there four hours. I’ve never experienced so much Nothingness on a single occasion before”.

Mary Kelleher from Ennis, was slightly more skeptical. “Well, I’m sure I saw a flock of crows at one stage, so saying we saw Nothing is a bit too strong. But it might have been a trick of the eyes. God acts in mysterious ways, you know”. However Martin O’Carroll from Gort was far more insistent. “Praise be! It was an incredible experience! There were thousands of us there, and we all witnessed directly the complete absence of anything interesting at all! You can’t put that down to chance”.

At 3pm on the day , a slight wind blew from the west, but it soon died down again. Some in the crowd immediately fainted from sheer wonderment. Around 3.15, the sun was momentarily seen from behind the grey clouds. “I definitely saw it shining”, said Pat McGarrigle from Roscommon. “It was there in the sky, and it was shining down. The locality suddenly brightened up around us. We could feel the sun’s rays on our faces. We all burst into prayer”.

As the crowd began to disperse around 7pm, a great light appeared in the sky. The Aer Arann flight from Dublin had arrived on time.

Joe Coleman declared the occasion a great success. “By the end of the day, everyone was completely bored. Our traditional values are obviously still strong. Let this be a warning to the politicians and the Church hierarchy. If you believe in your heart that Nothing will happen, then it can come true despite what the authorities might tell you”. He is currently organising a pilgimage to Lourdes, “where a great Non-Event is due to take place before the assembled multitudes during December”.

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The Downturn that dare not speak its name..

April 1, 2009 //

Most people will agree that we are now going through a period of time that will be remembered for a long time, like World War II, 9/11 or The Great Depression. It’s probably the first time in world history when the entire globe has been caught in the grip of a sudden and calamitous economic crisis. No country has been untouched. Governments,  businesses and households worldwide are desperately fighting to shore up their reserves while avoiding financial meltdown. The problem is far from over and recovery will take many years.

Last month, Dominique Strauss Kahn of the IMF gave the current economic crisis the rather unimaginative appellation “The Great Recession“. Given that we still don’t know how long this crisis will last, or how deep it will be, events might yet consign this name to history.

Doing a quick trawl of the web, I have discovered a few potential alternatives.

  • The Great Deception (*)
  • The Bush Kaboom (*)
  • Depression 2.0 (*)
  • The Flump (*)
  • The Clump (*)
  • The Not So Great Depression (*)
  • The Repression (*)
  • The Econopocalypse (*)
  • World Crash I 
  • The De-Hummerization (*)
  • The Great Uh-Oh (*)
  • The Boomer Bust (*) 
  • Econorrhea (*)

And what would you call the young people who will be shaped by these events? Generation OMG.

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Things they never told me about my workplace: The Coffee Laws

March 4, 2009 //

800px-a_small_cup_of_coffee

In our main cafeteria, a sachet of instant coffee costs 10 cent. In the coffee docks the very same sachets are free. There are two coffee machines in our cafeteria. One machine brews a 30 cent mocha. The machine right beside it brews a mocha for 1 euro 20 cent. Not to be outdone, beside these two machines is a brand new coffee bar, where you can now buy a mocha for a whopping 2 euros 10 cent. Meanwhile, the best coffees come from an espresso maker right beside our general manager’s office. This coffee is free. The coffee in the smaller canteen is free, but if you want an extra large coffee, it costs a euro.

And if you can understand the economics of all that, you deserve a cup of coffee.

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Man survives two plane crashes in eight days

February 27, 2009 //
Turkish Plane Crash

Image from Boston.com

The chances of you being involved in an air accident are about 1 in 11 million plane journeys. So this guy must be considered to be one of the unluckiest (or luckiest) people on the planet. Two aircraft accidents in just over a week, a probability factor of 121 trillion to one..

“Last Thursday De Knecht was on his way from Istanbul to north Iraq for his work when the plane he was on hit a lamp post while taxi-ing to the runway and had to be evacuated. And now he has been left with four broken ribs and a head wound after this week’s crash near Schiphol.”

From DutchNews.nl

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Proximity sensing: the next big thing?

January 2, 2009 //

In the last few years, some delightful technologies have become available to consumers, driving a new boom in electronics sales. These technologies include touch-screen, wireless Internet, accelerometers and global positioning systems to mention the key ones. I happen to be writing this blog entry on a device that has all of these and more.

But what is next? Have we reached some sort of technological pinnacle now? I think not.

I’m eagerly awaiting one big technology to arrive soon. Proximity sensing.

I’m slightly myopic, but most people don’t realize this. They never see me with glasses on. The mundane reason is that I have an amazing propensity to lose glasses. Most glasses I have ever had take their leave from me after a few months, with the last set disappearing forever on a plane back from the US. What I would love is a device that monitors their position and alerts me if they are no longer in my immediate viscinity.

I can conceive of other applications immediately. Finding golf-balls when they get lost in the rough. Keeping tags on errant toddlers or pets. Finding the car in the car park. Maybe even finding partners to all the odd socks in the house..

The key to such a technology is a thingy known as a RFID tag. It’s a small transmitter that can be attached to any object, so that its location can be determined by an appropriate detection device.

RFID’s are still somewhat expensive, which explains why we don’t see them in the shops just yet. They are already being used in certain specialist industries and their size and cost is reducing yearly. I can concieve a time, however, when rolls of tiny, machine washable or transparent RFIDs will be bought in shops for just a few pence each, or that they will already be embedded in most items bought in the shops.

The detection devices are also relatively straightforward, using simple triangulation to pinpoint objects. Indeed a small pocket device such as a mobile phone should be more than adequate to find missing things quicky.

Add in some some software to determine specific rules, associate items to the tags and enable specific applications and those missing socks will be a thing of the past.

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Categories digital products, stuff, technology

And the goose is getting fat

December 24, 2008 //

I guess for a lot of people it’s been a rather strange run up to Christmas. Things are a lot more subdued this year and judging by the intensity of the last minute rush to the shops and the noticeable lack of outdoor lighting this year, it’s as if people put off thinking about it until the last possible moment.

I am no exception. Last year, I managed to get all my Christmas cards written in plenty of time, but this year the postal deadlines came and went without me putting pen to paper, and I feel more than a little embarrassed about it. Even so, all the presents have been bought and I’m looking forward to a day of relaxation tomorrow, followed by a walk up the mountains the following day.

I have nothing else to say but to thank you all for sharing a little bit of my life, my interests and my half-baked thoughts over the past year. I wish you all the very best over the holiday season.

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How screwed up is this?

December 15, 2008 //

A typical night out..

We Irish are a nation of piss-heads.

First a few facts.

We Irish top the European binge-drinking league by a country mile. 

Drinking per capita has increased 17% from 1995 to 2006. 

In 2003, it was reported that chronic liver disease and cirrhosis was the cause of death of half a million Irish people.

Alcohol is a factor in one in three deaths on Irish roads. 

Over one in four of all injury attendances in the accident and emergency departments are alcohol related.

Enough for ya?

As I was saying: We Irish are a nation of piss-heads.

So, guess who Irish Government relies on to convince the nation that we are drinking too much? 

The Drinks Industry.

Screwed up, isn’t it?

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Categories Ireland, stuff
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