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More from OBJECTIVE: Christian Ministries, this time something for the kids. Lambuel is a lamb who is devoted to God and knows that Jesus loves him, and he also knows that the world is only 10,000 years old – it’s true, honest, it says so right there on the webpage!

There’s also some useful tips about how to handle grumpy athiests like Mr Gruff who say “Bah! I don’t believe in anything! I’m staying at home on Sunday!” (Avoid talking to them because they’re very grumpy and bitter)

Oh, and they’ve also got an accountant who gives a 10% discount to non-Christians willing to convert on the spot – bargain!

This – OBJECTIVE: Creation Education: Dinosaur Expedition 2002 – is parody as artform. Dr Richard Paley, teacher of Divinity and Theobiology relates the tale of his expedition to Africa to track down evidence of “man/dinosaur contemporaneity”.

Quite why this would unseat the theory of evolution and prove to us it was God wot did it isn’t clear, but that’s not going to stop them trying – neither is the fact that previous expeditions have been less than successful, due to “the difficult conditions of the region, dinosaurian wiliness and God’s Will”.

So off they went, Dr Paley and his team, including Dr Helmut von Stoffen – chief curator of the Dusseldorf Centre for Creation Research – and Nigel Stubbingwicke, who is a British professional hunter and expert on tracking large animals who was hired on the basis of his advertisement in the back of African Hunter Magazine. I promise you, I’m not making this up.

Off they went, looking like “much like any other Creation research expedition you may be familiar with from your kid’s Sunday School science classes”. Sadly, I’m not familiar with too many Creation research expeditions personally, but even I can picture Mr Stubbingwicke, described as standing out due to his “ignorantly boisterous nature” and his “trademark pith helmet”. In fact Stubbingwicke was a bit of a disappointment to the rest of the group – they “were not entirely sure [he] was even Christian, much less knowledgeable about Creation Science” – understandable when you consider that their “budget was constrained and his needed tracking expertise came cheap”.

I could go on, but I’m afraid I was laughing too hard, and I wouldn’t want to spoil the pleasure of reading it for yourself. However, it’s worth a visit just to see the photographic “evidence” of the Apatosaurus – not something that is going to be giving Richard Dawkins sleepless nights…

For the first time in far too long, I went out for a run today. I would have gone down my usual route, out along the towpath towards the bridge where the M1 goes overhead, but as I got alongside the Royal Armouries I got stopped by the police who where wandering around. Supposedly a suspect package had been left outside the Museum building, although if it was that suspect they probably wouldn’t have been standing around.

So instead I had to turn around and do something that I’ve not done before, which is run towards the city centre, again along the towpath. It was a bit of a pain because the path doesn’t always go underneath the bridges – sometimes there’s places where you have to climb up the steps, over the roadbridge and down the other side. It kind of breaks your pace (assuming you’ve got into one). I’d got as far as the place where the canal and the river dive underneath the station, and I was thinking about turning back because I didn’t really know where I was going – but then I got overtaken by a straggling group of runner who were coming in the same direction. I’ve no idea where they came from, because to be honest I was past the being-able-to-speak stage at that point, but I ran along with them for a while.

Too long a while, probably, because they went a fair way out – far further than I’d have gone on my own. By the time I got to the point where they turned around and headed back into the city I was beginning to feel the distance, but the point about running with other runners is that pride comes before a fall, or at least a “collapse in a slobbering heap” point. By the time I got back I’d been out about an hour, which was probably longer than it should have been, given how creaky certain bits of me have got over the last few months. And I’ve been suffering a bit for the rest of the day, which suggests that I’ll be as stiff as a board by the morning…

Once upon a time, Tetrakpaks were sealed bricks with glued down flaps that you unglued and tore (or snipped) off to open. You got to choose the size of the orifice – a wide slash across if the contents were going to get dumped in a bowl, a dainty snip if you wanted millilitre-perfect drip control.

Now the buggers have changed the design. There’s a little plastic lid that you flip up, and a tear-off silver foil strip glued across the hole in the top. Opening a Tetrabrick (2003-style) involves breaking a fingernail to flip up the lid, tearing off the loose bit of the silver foil leaving the rest sealed in place, bodging a hole with a knife and slopping the contents all over your trousers as the liquid inside glops through a hole that’s too small. Once you’ve finished pouring, dribbles of liquid get trapped inside the plastic lid so they squirt out as you flip the lid closed again.

HOW IS THIS AN IMPROVEMENT, TETRAPAK??? Didn’t you do any product testing before you let this loose on the world? A classic example of how a perfectly good product gets buggered about with in the name of innovation, and I end up with orance juice all over the kitchen floor…

fabrica.it – interactive – toy

Including me, I suppose, for posting this…

Nose

Suddenly occurred to me (prompted by a Register story about Microsoft DRM) – anyone attempting to implement DRM is up against the hacker equivilent of an infinite number of monkeys. I’m trying to think of a DRM scheme that hasn’t been hacked, bu I’m struggling.

I’ve just finished watching Alien, and it reminded me of him.

I’ve been lurking on the outskirts of ukbloggers-discuss and others similar for a while, and there’s there’s a question at the back of my mind for sometime that I haven’t spotted an obvious answer for yet.

Blogging has gone mainstream – at least as far as measurement by media hype and topic of discussion amongst the chattering classes is concerned – but I’ve around long enough to remember having heard similar things said about Usenet. Which was great for about 10 minutes in 1996, but my impression is that it eventually succumbed under its own weight as the signal-to-noise ratio got steadily worse.

On the face of it, blogging seems like only a marginal technical improvement on usenet or homepages, but it seems to have caught imaginations in a different way. My question(s) then is(are) this(these): in what way (other than the obvious technical enhacements) does blogging differ from usenet or personal homepages? Why has blogging caught the imagination of people in the way that it has? Is it that the technology has caught up with a latent need for self-expression amongst those with something to say, or is this a genuine social trend?