Steve Litchfield

Ever imagined what the human race looks like from space? This is in that vein, it's an animation based on real data, showing all the commercial air flights in the world over a 24 hour period. Wow. Had you ever realised how many people were up in the air at the same time?

Gulp.

Coverage of the story that German nude hikers were being arrested in Switzerland got me thinking. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not all for widespread nudity across the world - for three reasons: 99.9% of people look far better with their clothes on Many people would get too cold for most of the year All sorts of socially embarrassing situations would routinely crop up (to say the least!) However, what sort of society are we when we're so opposed to the sight (shock horror) of the standard, imperfect but biologically whole human body that we're ready to seek and arrest those who choose to occasionally disrobe away from towns and other centres of population? The argument is usually given that children should be protected from the 'sight' - in my experience (giggling apart), children are usually a lot less offended by the sight of others' bodies than prudish adults. I've never been to a nudist beach or resort and don't really want to - maybe the UK...

The best TV theme tune EVER. The best replica radio controlled aircraft EVER. And possibly flown by the best R/C pilot EVER. Quite superb and lovingly done. I'm in awe....

Despite having 'green' issues thrust at them from all angles at school and at home, I have observed over and over again that the current generation of children simply don't seem to be aware of putting what they're taught into practice. My own daughter's not too bad at turning off lights when leaving a room, turning off the TV, keeping outside doors closed, etc - but some of her friends are appalling. But some of her contemporaries get all of the above 'wrong'. On a small scale, the energy savings are trivial, of course, and I'm certainly not picking on any specific individual. But multiply this up by 100s of millions of children across the Western world and then multiply this again by a decade or two of energy neglect and it's clear that, however bad an energy hole we're currently in, things are going to get a whole lot worse unless the current generation of children and teenagers start acting more reponsibly towards finite resources. Of course, ...

I was going to put in a much longer blog post about this, but Ewan Spence has beaten me to it.... See his version . With Christmas on a Thursday, you've then got Boxing Day and the weekend and - crucially - New Year's Day also on a Thursday. Chances are that very little work gets done on the 29th, 30th and 31st Dec in any offices, assuming they're still open at all. And then it's Jan 1st and people recovering from their celebrations on Jan 2nd still and then it's the weekend..... As Ewan points out , the country just lost almost 3 weeks of potential up-time through these compulsory celebrations.... BAH HUMBUG! 8-)

For personal reasons, we've ended up having our Christmas Day today, the 23rd December. Just for a change. Interestingly, it turns out that there are some pros and cons with this arrangement: Pros: 1) The supermarkets are all OPEN all day, should anything be needed! 2) No deciding 'do we open presents before, or AFTER church'! 3) If a present is wrong, it can be opened, taken back and exchanged before the actual official Christmas Day... 4) It's less time for impatient offspring to wait between end of term and present-giving day! Cons: 1) Bit of a sense of anti-climax on the 25th. 2) Have to rewrite most of the carols: "On the 23rd, the 23rd, .... etc." 3) Others might expect me to work....

I know, I know, I always go for the singers who can pull off the 'chill down your spine' big notes.... and they never win. But here goes... I really hope Ruth Lorenzo wins X-Factor this year (2008), she is 'all woman' (as observed by Simon Cowel et al) and has a fabulously mature and powerful voice when she really lets rip. Last year I was tipping Rhydian - who fell at the final hurdle. This time it's Ruth. See for yourself, here she is in action from last week's show:

Am I so unusual? I see the people of the world spending tens of hours each week and significant proportions of their income on console and desktop games, locking themselves into virtual worlds and out of the real world. What, exactly, is the point of gaming? To become more unfit? To waste time that you could spend with family or work? To waste money that could be spent on reducing your household debt and avoiding the 'credit crunch'? To let your social skills wane? Compelling, it ain't. Now, to be fair, I'm not talking about kids or even teenagers. They have time to spare. And probably pocket money as well. I'm talking here about grown-up adults who should know better. Life is short enough as it is without wasting it locked away in a darkened living room fighting virtual opponents. Halo? World of Warcraft? From a grown-up's point of view, what a complete waste of time, energy, money and space. Switch off those consoles and get out in the fresh air, get a job, ta...

So I get on a bus and sit down. At the next stop, a little old lady gets on, complete with doddery legs and zimme-style shopping trolley. She pays and starts to totter down the bus's aisle. Does the driver stop and wait for her to find a seat before accelerating away? Of course not, he mashes the accelerator and the little old lady is literally thrown five feet horizontally, slamming her - fortunately - into a waiting seat. We checked and she was OK, but I bet she was shaken. The company involved was Reading Buses and I've seen similar near-injuries almost every time I travel with them. RB, if you're reading this, please train your drivers better. Or maybe next time, you'll be defending them in court...

As someone writing in a version of SGML back in 1988, I instantly recognised HTML when it appeared in the early 1990s and was able to be quite productive. The essential idea, that of separating content from formatting, was much the same. You wrote text, added structure in the form of headings, lists and tables and then it was up to whatever you sent it to, to render it in appropriate fonts, typefaces and so on. All very neat. But bit by bit the language became corrupted, with Netscape starting the rot, as I recall. From the earliest 'font' tags to later table madness and then finally HTML being bastardised into a page layout tool by people who had spectacularly missed the point of a 'Mark up Language' in the first place. The end result is HTML which is nigh on unreadable to the naked eye. And a job for a computer to render reliably, which is partly why web sites look different in different browsers, even now in 2008. Thankfully, the common sense that is CSS came along t...

OK, I'm bound to annoy a few Linux fans with this, but hey, I need to vent. After having numerous frustrations with Windows Vista (perhaps exacerbated by a failing hard disk, admittedly) and a frustrating lack of speed, I borrowed an Apple MacBook for a while. Very pretty, fabulous hardware and terrific for most ordinary people. Except that I'm not ordinary, wanting to manage lots of files in lots of projects, use FTP and advanced image editing and much more. I found ways to do everything on the MacBook but it wasn't all plain sailing. And Apple's hardware costs a fortune. So I turned, out of curiosity, to the Asus Eee PC, picking a 701 up from eBay. Great little toy, I thought. Except that with Firefox, Skype and OpenOffice pre-installed, it was quite a bit more than a toy. Maybe Linux really can start to get more into people's homes, I thought.... The trouble is that as soon as something goes wrong, in my case a 'broken' pre-installed game and needing to i...

Just got this in Apple's iTunes. How can the error be 'unknown' if the software knows to put the error dialog up and knows the error code? Can't it just look up what this code MEANS? It's idiocies like this that make me despair of the computer world sometimes.....

Well, it's all relative, anyway. Never mind corporate business practices, at least the big M deserve a bouquet for the way in which they treat children's food. Here's the current menu, snapped at my local restaurant: Note the way grapes and cucumber sticks are now promoted as alternatives to chips (yuck) and note even more impressively the way the healthy fruit juices, smoothies and water are promoted far more heavily than the incredibly unhealthy 'small soft drinks'. Good on you, McDonalds, you've deserved the custom of my family at least for the next year!