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p. I heard an interesting snippet on the “Today”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/ programme yesterday morning. Apparently, a bronze Roman statue had been found in London depicting a Roman with the usual sandals and—this is the important bit—socks. It seems that the Romans went au naturel in the foot department in Italy, but donned the socks in Britain. The gloss on the story was that this shows the heritage of the Britons’ much derided penchant for the socks and sandals look. Cue lots of “What have the Romans ever done for us?” comments… Well, it is the silly season—not that there’s any dearth of serious news at the moment.

p. I would provide a link to the story, but I can’t find one anywhere. I makes me wonder if it was all an elaborate hallucination, brought on by an early morning caffeine deficiency.

p. I’ve always found regular expressions slightly baffling. Since I’ve been learning Perl, I’ve made more of an effort to understand them, but I often find myself bashing my forehead on the table in frustration when a regex pattern refuses to do my bidding. So I was interested in [“this selection of top regex tips(O’Reilly OnLamp article)”:http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/08/21/regexp.html?page=1], which contains some useful pointers to avoid problems. It seems that the author—Tony Stubblebine (a surname worthy of Thomas Hardy)—has published one of the O’Reilly Pocket References on [“Regular Expressions”:http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regexppr/index.html?CMP=IL7015], which I might consider getting. I have the Perl Pocket Reference, and find it handy to carry about for a quick consultation on some syntax matter or other. With Perl, BBEdit, Mailsmith and now Vim, I’ve got plenty of opportunities to practice my regexes for fun and profit. Well, fun anyway…

p. For a while, I’ve been looking for a way to include images of the covers of CDs that I mention or books that I’ve read, without getting in to copyright issues. I heard about the [“Amazon Associates Programme(Amazon.co.uk Associates Programme)”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/subst/associates/join/associates.html/ref=mkash32/026-1401664-4955609], which would allow me to do just this, with the pleasant side-effect that if anyone buys something after following the link to Amazon on my page, I’ll get a small percentage of the selling price of the item. I’m under no illusions that it will make me even slightly rich (particularly given my slightly eccentric taste in music), but it might provide a few quid to offset my hosting fees a little. Unfortunately, it will only work with Amazon.co.uk, which isn’t much use for people outside the UK. I’ve set it up now, so if you’re interested in the Sheila Chandra CD, just click the image to go to Amazon’s site.

p. I’m not into advertising for the sake of it (even if it makes me money), so I won’t be linking to any CDs that I don’t own and listen to, books that I haven’t read or DVDs that I haven’t watched.

p. While I’m on the [“subject of bras”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000410.html], there’s a funny little snippet in today’s “Guardian Society”:http://society.guardian.co.uk/societyguardian/story/0,7843,1021659,00.html from the Romford Recorder:

More than 120 bras have been discarded at a popular pub in Romford, Essex, and now a lost property phoneline has been set up to reunite items with owners. _Romford Recorder, 1/08/03_

p. There has to be a potential novel lurking in there somewhere…

I love Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels so I was delighted by this flow chart with information on the optimal reading order, and the temporal and character links between the books. Looking at the map, I realize that I’ve read almost all of the books. I must really be a fan.

[via BoingBoing]

…but were afraid to ask. This kind of stuff pleases me more than I can possibly say. And some of it is even useful:

If you prepare a letter, you will have to know the weight of the content in order to determine the postal fee. This can be very conveniently calculated with the ISO A series paper sizes. Usual typewriter and laser printer paper weighs 80 g/m². An A0 page has an area of 1 m², and the next smaller A series page has half of this area. Therefore the A4 format has an area of 1/16 m² and weighs with the common paper quality 5 g per page. If we estimate 20 g for a C4 envelope (including some safety margin), then you will be able to put 16 A4 pages into a letter before you reach the 100 g limit for the next higher postal fee.

Isn’t that handy? And my day was made by an offhand remark, a couple of paragraphs down, that German toilet paper is often A6 size.

[via BoingBoing]

…no! It’s Ultra-Fast Flying Squirrel Man! Felix Baumgartner jumped out of a plane 30,000 feet over Dover early this morning, then glided at about 135 mph across the English Channel, to land safely in Calais. He used a small carbon fibre wing strapped to his back to turn a plummet straight down into a slightly more controlled glide.

Logically, I know that you are travelling pretty fast when you’re skydiving, but it really brings it home to you when someone is skydiving horizontally. Felix crossed the Channel in only 14 minutes. Beats taking the ferry, I suppose.

This news seems so weird it must be a fake, but apparently it is now illegal to kill ants in Germany. I would certainly get locked up. After a prolonged campaign of baiting traps with poison, the numbers of my ants declined a bit, but recently they seem to have staged a bit of a comeback, and once again, I’m finding that my sandwiches are ant-garnished.

[via 2lmc.spool]

So there I was, idly wondering what the peloton sounds like, when I see that Radio 4 has broadcast a programme called ‘Bicycle Music’ (no web page for the programme, but there’s a listen again link on this page). It was an interesting—if somewhat odd—programme, with all sorts of musings about music inspired by bikes and the music made by bikes themselves. There was a section on the Tour de France, with an obligatory play of the Kraftwerk song of the same name, and a recording (yes, you’ve guessed it) of the peloton. It’s almost as if the BBC is reading my mind—time for the tin-foil lined hat.

I’m sure everyone in the world must have heard about this by now (even my Mum probably knows about it), but if you haven’t had a look yet, do yourself a favour and try the following:

• Visit Google and type in “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (without the quotes)
• Hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button, rather than the standard search
• Laugh a lot

[via BoingBoing]

Are you tired? Do you need a holiday? Then head on over to quietamerican.org, and go on a one-minute vacation. Every Monday, Aaron Ximm uploads a 60 second recording of somewhere in the world. Put on a good pair of headphones, sit back with a glass of wine and let yourself drift off somewhere.

The recordings are absolutely wonderful. There’s everything from a woman singing in an oil drum in Antarctica, the sound of the London Underground (Northern Line) and the gentle boom of the Baltic Sea at Ahreshoop. I could listen to these recordings for hours.

The Antarctic recording is particularly haunting, and reminds me of an occasion several years ago when I was tagging along with a small group being shown around the Duomo in Pisa, Italy. The tour guide was describing the perfect acoustics; if you know what you are doing, the echoes allow you to sing a harmony with yourself. He started to demonstrate and the beautiful notes cascaded down on us. It was all I could do to stop myself from crying. The Ahrenshoop recording is gorgeous too. I could quite easily fall asleep to it playing on a loop.

[via Antipixel]

I’ve just put up some more Lomo photos at wings open wide. Most were taken in the Covered Market—a wonderful bastion of small independent traders who manage to hold out against the tide of Starbucks and McDonalds outlets.

The light levels are rather low in the market, and there are lots of colourful displays, so the Lomo is the perfect tool for taking shots. As usual, the results were wildly variable and somewhat unexpected, but I was quite pleased with the way that some of them turned out—reflections figured prominently.

Take a look at these fantastic photographs of butterflies. I’m completely in awe of the photographer for getting such beautiful shots. Whenever I try to take photographs of butterflies or moths—even though I’m scrupulously careful not to let my shadow fall across them—the little buggers always fly off before I can release the shutter. Gah.

[via burnt toast]

The latest Joy of Tech is an absolute classic. If you look carefully, you can see category divisions among the cards which read ‘Rebels’, ‘Dark Sides’ and ‘Furballs’.

I’ve just spent an unfeasable amount of time glued to this website: two photographers from Rotterdam have collected and categorised a huge collection of subcultures. The photographs are displayed in groups, and the models are all posed in the same way to emphasise the similarity of dress and hairstyle within each subculture.

The whole thing is totally addictive, even though navigating to specific groups can only be done by clicking on a tiny thumbnail on the main page. As much as anything, the names that the photographers have labelled each group with are brilliant and bizarre—try to find the ‘Gutterbitches’, ‘Toppers’, ‘Teknohippies’ and ‘Speedfreax’.

There’s very little explanation of how the subcultures were identified, so I’m intrigued about how it was worked out. I wonder if the members of each group share anything other than their taste in clothes. Do they have similar interests, a similar outlook on life? Otherwise, the whole enterprise seems totally circular. Also, I think that picking people who have to wear a uniform (for example, the ‘Butchers’) is cheating.

[via BoingBoing]