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I’m a very late with this, but I thought it made interesting, funny, illuminating and mildly depressing reading. The Science Learning Centre in London surveyed adolescents on their opinion of science and scientists.

Around 70% of the 11-15 year olds questioned said they did not picture scientists as ‘normal young and attractive men and women’ […] They found around 80% of pupils thought scientists did ‘very important work’ and 70% thought they worked ‘creatively and imaginatively’. Only 40% said they agreed that scientists did ‘boring and repetitive work’.

Among those who said they would not like to be scientists, reasons included: ‘Because you would constantly be depressed and tired and not have time for family’, and ‘because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female’.

[Via Boing Boing]

I just had to get up and take a picture (trying not to look too conspicuous). It’s obviously a joke, but I’m wondering if it’s one of the spoof signs put up by Dave Askwith and Alex Normanton, and featured on the BBC’s website. Wherever it came from, it really cheered me up!

Douglas Johnston has been developing a taxonomy of different archetypes of people who are constantly playing with their productivity systems: Tinkers, Tailors, Soldiers and Spies. It was immediately obvious to me which I was—like Douglas, I am a Tinker. To quote him:

• “The Tinker is the consumate tweaker for tweaking’s sake.” Oh, that’s me all right.
• “…modify existing setups (even if they already work fine)”. Check.
• “Tinkers are far less concerned about using the system than the idea of creating it…”. Check.
• “Fascinated by planners, bags and utensils with multiple uses, hidden compartments…”. Oh my, yes.
• “…the Tinker might also carry a Swiss Army Knife, Leatherman…” Check!

Hey, has he been going through the hidden compartments in my multi-purpose bag?

This made me laugh like a drain this morning. You really have to wonder if the makers of Trivial Pursuit do any actual research at all. However, given the question about feverfew, it’s entirely possible that they think we’re still living in the 18th Century, and that ‘handy’ actually refers to semaphore without the flags.

I owe a huge debt to jb for pointing to this video of Billy Bragg and Bill Bailey singing Bill’s Billy Bragg song, Unisex Chip Shop at Glastonbury. I’m sure that I’ve said so before, but Bill Bailey is a genius. He can be more like Billy Bragg than Billy is, and lines like this are pure comedy gold:

[Previous line concerned him dreaming about Debbie from the chip shop running naked through the woods of Rainham…] If I had some tigers I’d train ‘em To protect her From the sexual fascism that was lurking ‘Round the gherkins

It’s made me smile every time I think of it.

I spotted a link to a site called Liveplasma.com on the Textdrive forum, which claimed that it mapped similarities between bands or artists in a linked-node-and-path-type graphic. I like a lot of rather dissimilar bands, but also some who have particular connections to one another (like Mouthmusic and Talitha MacKenzie and Martyn Bennett, as one example), so I decided to check it out.

I problems with it in Safari, but it worked fine in Firefox. At least, I think it did… Off the top of my head, I decided to start with Kate Bush. She’s had some interesting collaborations over the years, and I thought for sure that it would display Peter Gabriel close to her node.

Gabriel did indeed appear close by, as did some other similar artists like Bryan Ferry and David Bowie, but there was also a band called Krokus quite nearby. I’d never heard of them, so I did a search on Krokus out of curiousity. This image shows the result. How—-in the name of Wuthering Heights—-did Kate end up orbiting Iron Maiden and Mettalica like a small lost moon? Is there some bootleg heavy metal version of the Hounds of Love that I’m not aware of? I tell you, it’s keeping me awake at night.

It was slightly unfortunate that we left Japan about two weeks before the cherry blossom season really kicked in. We saw one or two isolated (but very beautiful) trees, but there’s nothing like the full on effect of blossom en masse to make you feel as if Spring has well and truly sprung.

Anyway, I’ve been really enjoying the flickr tag ‘blossom’ recently, so I thought it was about time to spread some vernal feeling around.

I’m a bit late with this, but the PowerBook 100 made it to number one of Mobile PC magazine’s Top 100 Gadgets of all time. Obviously, I have good taste. I’ve got a PowerBook 100 sitting in a cupboard, and it was the machine —- bought second-hand —- that I wrote my thesis on. I was very fond of it, despite the persistently squeaky trackball that I never managed to silence. I slaved over it, played an inordinate amount of Tetris on it, and it even survived having a terracotta plant pot fall on it —- a tough little machine.

Remember last year, around Valentine’s Day, when I mentioned a rather wonderful geeky Valentine’s poem? Probably not, but as you see from the magnificent image here, you can now get it on a T-shirt at ThinkGeek. I like the fact that the hex codes are visually colour coded. I like the fact that they make it in a women’s fitted-T style. And I really, really want one.

For those of you following the development of my GTD web application, Tracks, I’ve written a long and rambling article (I’m really selling this, aren’t I?) about features I’m thinking about including in the next major version here.

120-year-old tortoise adopts baby hippo:

‘When we released Owen into the enclosure, he lumbered to the tortoise which has a dark gray color similar to grown up hippos,’ Sabine Baer, rehabilitation and ecosystems manager at the park, told Reuters.

I’m ashamed to say that when I first saw the photo, I thought it was a Photoshop job because I hadn’t noted the fact that it’s a baby hippo and a very old (and therefore very large) tortoise. Poor tortoise—at his age he was probably enjoying just pottering around slowing and eating lettuce, and now he’s being pestered by a hippo.

[via Boing Boing]

Matt Henderson has written an interesting entry on Getting Things Done:

According to Peter Drucker, one of the defining aspects of our generation is the fact that, as a society of information workers, many of us are responsible for defining both what we do, and how we get it done. Complicating matters, many of us work in environments (i.e. in front of internet-connected desktop computers) that provide us with a continual barrage of inputs (email, chats, browsing, RSS feeds, phone calls, etc.). Defining what we should do, how should do it, and then getting (the right) things done are some of the biggest challenges we face.

He goes on to describe his system which primarily uses Life Balance in conjunction with Hog Bay Notebook. I find the details of how people manage and organise their lives fascinating. Matt’s implementation of GTD is much more structured than mine, but that’s probably a good way to get into a routine and increases confidence in the security of the system. I’m finding that confidence in the system is almost the most important thing. The minute I think that something might be slipping through the net, the whole system tends to start to fall apart. However, my trusty paper notebook is working out well, and I’m getting into the habit of carrying it all the time.

Maciej is a wonderful writer, and never more so than when he writes about his travels. I’m a complete sucker for writing about Britain by non-residents, and this passage had me rolling around with recognition:

Great Britain is a deceptively small country; it’s very easy to get distracted and find that you’ve overshot it altogether, which is how I found myself standing near a petrochemical plant in Calais just a few hours after boarding a train in Sheffield, a city that I thought was safely removed from the southern coast.

Given the state of our railway system, I’m quite impressed that he managed to get out of Sheffield on a train, let alone make it to Dover to catch a ferry. There’s probably some kind of award available on receipt of proof of such a feat of derring-do. I gather that Visit Britain have had a concerted campaign to encourage more tourists, so apropos of Maciej’s comment, how about this as a marketing slogan: “Britain—blink and you’ll miss it.”

I’ve been meaning to set up a favicon for this site for ages. For the uninitiated, that’s the little image some sites load in the address bar in place of the generic globe, lightning flash or whatever your favourite browser uses. However, every time I tried to make a decent 16 x 16 image, it ended up—not to put too fine a point on it—like a muddy blob. Or a bloody mob. Not attractive, anyway.

Then I came across a link to Chami.com on del.icio.us, and decided to give it a go. You just choose an image on your computer, hit the ‘Generate favicon.ico’ button, and it’s done. I used the same fruitbat image as in my header, and was amazed how well it turned out.

Safari took a bit of persuading to show the icon at first, so if you use Safari, you might need to quit and re-launch it before you see it.

I’ve been trying out another bookmark storage service, which is currently in beta: Hyperlinkomatic. It has a great, slick interface, and a fast and flexible search engine to find what you want, which avoids that tricky problem of deciding what folder/category you’re going to put a bookmark in. It even has an option for specifying a date range for the creation of the bookmark when you search, which is brilliant for those of us who can’t remember anything salient about a bookmark, except that we stored it within the last week.

As with any online bookmark manager, there are big advantages to not having your precious links tied to any one browser or computer, and having them accessible from anywhere. At the moment, you can publish your links to a special page on their domain, but not on your own site. I’ve put in a feature request for an RSS feed of selected links, which would probably be the most flexible way to publish. There’s also a built-in method of sharing bookmarks with your friends (if you have any using the service), which is very neat. It would be difficult for people to abuse as they need to know your username to share with you. You can also block other users if they send you piles of dross.

All in all, it’s a pretty neat service, and seems to scale fairly well. I imported all my Safari bookmarks, and with 545 bookmarks, searches are still nearly instantaneous (well, as near as fairly slow broadband allows). Oh, and it’s also made in the UK. Which is nice.