“A while ago, I wrote something that attempted to define what was or wasn’t a sport by a set of rules with which any sane and rational person in the universe would concur. For instance, it’s not a sport if it carries the prefix ‘ultimate’, if you can smoke while you’re doing it, or if the outcome is based upon points from judges. Or if it’s quite obviously a pastime, such as golf. As I say, there was very little controversial in the piece, though one reader did take offence at the description of gymnastics as child abuse with points.”

The Guardian / Ruffle a few feathers, support our pigeons

From the Daily Mail headline generator.

“Four members of an underground “cultural guerrilla” movement known as the Untergunther, whose purpose is to restore France’s cultural heritage, were cleared on Friday of breaking into the 18th-century monument in a plot worthy of Dan Brown or Umberto Eco.

“For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon’s unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid ‘illegal restorers’ set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building’s famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves.”

Guardian / Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark's clock

Image: Wikipedia / Panthéon (Paris)

More Beck-inspired mapping. Not sure what it all means, but it looks very pretty.

Information Architects / Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0

The digestive system rendered in the style of Harry Beck:

logspace / Bringing a new meaning to the phrase “tube map”

A compelling case against “biometric” passports and ID cards:

Tsutomu Matsumoto is a Japanese mathematician, a cryptographer who works on security, and he decided to see if he could fool the machines which identify you by your fingerprint. This home science project costs about £20. Take a finger and make a cast with the moulding plastic sold in hobby shops. Then pour some liquid gelatin (ordinary food gelatin) into that mould and let it harden. Stick this over your finger pad: it fools fingerprint detectors about 80% of the time. The joy is, once you’ve fooled the machine, your fake fingerprint is made of the same stuff as fruit pastilles, so you can simply eat the evidence.

And to make matters worse, the data “encoded” in the chip in new UK passports, is insecure.

Jim Knight MP, the Labour Minister for Schools and Learners, said in July: “it is not possible to recreate a fingerprint using the numbers that are stored. The algorithm generates a unique number, producing no information of any use to identity thieves.” ... Unfortunately, a team of mathematicians published a paper in April this year, showing that they could reconstruct a fingerprint from this data alone. In fact, they printed out the images they made, and then - crucially, completing the circle - used them to fool fingerprint readers.

Bad Science / Make your own ID

My latest Flickr favourite:

Brussels is currently adorned with thousands of Belgian flags - and creative interpretations such as this - hung to show opposition to the Flemish politicians who want to tear the country asunder.

Image courtesy of Michel Clair

You couldn’t make it up:

Opera singing Brit Tony Henry has become a Croatian hero for mispronouncing a line in the country’s national anthem before its team consigned a lamentable England to the dustbin of footballing history on Wednesday night.

The ditty is “written in the old Croat style”, the Telegraph explains, and instead of singing Mila kuda si planina - “You know my dear how we love your mountains” - Henry thundered Mila kura si planina, or “My dear, my penis is a mountain”.

Apparently it helped to relax the team ahead of Wednesday’s dismantling of England and the Croats are calling for him to be appointed the team’s mascot for Euro 2008.

Well England won’t be needing him.

The Register / England flops shafted by enormous todger

Steven Wells on the kowtowing - and in the US, casual racism - that passes for much of sports journalism. Clearly he’s been reading the rubbish that his colleague Richard Williams foists onto The Guardian’s sports pages.

Everton fan John Sugden teaches a 100-strong sports journalism class at the University of Brighton. Which means there are at least 100 kids in Britain who want to be sports journalists. Which begs the question - why?

Do they really want to end up one of the dead-eyed “chaps” of the mainstream British press, relentlessly hunting down brain-cell slaughtering non-story after non-story in a joylessly monomaniacal pack?

The Guardian / It's time the dancing monkeys of journalism found their own tune

I’m embarrassed to say that I’m a bit of a latecomer to Stephen Fry’s blog, in which he’s invented two quite wonderful - and at the same time horrible - words: blessay and blissertation.

Stephen Fry / Let Fame & I Give Up

Doherty-infested supermodel Kate Moss thought the Tory leader might actually have a purpose in life.

Appearing on tonight’s Parkinson show, the Old Etonian Conservative leader explains how the Croydon-born model thought he was “something to do with drainage” when they met recently.

The pair, who besides healthy bank balances also share a past dogged by headlines linking them with drugs, were introduced by Top Shop owner Sir Philip Green at a charity dinner.

Mr Cameron told Michael Parkinson he had been a little starstruck. Scrambling for something to say, he recalled that the model had a house in his Oxfordshire constituency.

“We’d had these terrible floods in West Oxfordshire and so I said, ‘Very nice to meet you, very sorry about the flooding in your house. I know your local pub has been flooded, I’ve been to see the publican and I know you like to go to the pub and so I know it’s going to reopen in six months’,” he said.

“So I went on like this, twittering on, and she turned around and said, ‘God, you sound like a really useful guy, can I have your phone number?’”

The Guardian / How Kate Moss met Cameron - and thought he was a plumber

Ian Fogg, blogging for Jupiter Research:

“The iPhone is a really astonishing phone. How Apple differentiates from the competition is not through a long list of features as loved by other handset makers, but instead through the way in which the iPhone does the things it can do. It's not what the iPhone does but how it does them that is revolutionary.

“Other handset makers must learn that ‘the end’ feature cannot justify an ugly arcane interface ‘means’ to get there.”

Via Technovia / What the iPhone means to the mobile phone industry

Journalist, author and one-time Orange Juice drummer Steven Daly once described the National Lottery - as Lotto was known then - as a stupidity tax. It seems he wasn’t wrong.

“A lottery scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot - because players couldn't understand it.

“The Cool Cash game - launched on Monday - was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won.

“To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.

“But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.”

Manchester Evening / ‘Cool Cash’ card confusion

A good day for legitimate music and video downloading:

Baseball blogger's pitch wins DRM reprieve
eMusic sees 20% increase in subscriber numbers
Classics and Jazz label embraces MP3

...sound like the sort of people who would complain about the price of bananas because they’re being charged for the skin.

And, said Gareth Bourne (via IM), “and they know a shop where they are cheaper, and come skin free, they just can’t actually tell you where it is, or what it’s called, but their mate went there once, and got a cracking deal on some apples.”

So Google thinks that it’s possible to innovate by committee.

Not according to Steven Franks:

“A 34-company committee couldn’t create a successful ham sandwich, much less a mobile application suite. It’s going to be some half-baked turd undoubtedly based on GPE since that’s, you know, better than starting from scratch, right? (Wrong.)

“For heaven’s sake: Find someone, ONE person, with a unique vision. Lock them in a room with some programmers and a graphic designer. Twenty people, tops. Change the world. Quit re-hashing the same old bullshit and telling me it’s new, exciting, or in any way innovative. Be ready to fail, many times, but for love of all that is holy take a stand on something.

“You have NO CLUE why the iPhone is successful and highly sought after, do you? You think it’s all some sort of weird fluke.”

It’s hard to disagree with that. Fake Steve doesn’t and suggests that Google is running out of ideas:

“Companies don’t form alliances and consortia when they’re winning. Also, whenever you see companies start talking about being ‘open’, it means they’re getting their ass kicked. You think Google will be forming an OpenSearch alliance any time soon, to help also-rans in search get a share of the spoils? Me neither.”

Want evidence that Google is drying up? Just take a look at the once busy Google Labs page.

New Undertones album.

Also available from the iTunes Store and in shops.

I’d like to think that this will stimulate an intelligent debate. Somehow I doubt it. As ever, it is children who suffer from the selfishness of their parents.

The Guardian / Jehovah's Witness mother dies after refusing blood transfusion

Yes I use a Mac, I've always used a Mac. I believe is a more powerful system that delivers better software and a better experience. But what it delivers more than anything is respect for its users, not the contempt, over-pricing and failure to deliver on its promises that is Vista.

Roughly Drafted / What you expected; what you got

A new album and a new single from the pop punk genius that is Helen Love.

New Zealand's Croucher Brewing Company offers 12 bottles per month for the rest of the life of whoever returns a stolen portable.

A reminder of the first three rules of computing: backup, backup and backup.

BBC / NZ brewery offers beer for laptop

...but even he is more agreeable that the selfish idiots who think they know what we should be allowed to see and hear. Interesting that they don't complain about books - is it because they can't read?

“A note of dissent, however, came from Crystal Madison, representing a body called the Parents TV Council. She complained that prime-time drama series on News Corp's Fox television network showed inappropriate content at peak times, listing several shows as regular offenders - Family Guy, American Dad, Bones and Dirt.

“Ms Madison said there was regular humour about prostitution, masturbation, and infidelity, adding that Bones recently showed a maggot-infested dead body with its feet severed at prime time: ‘Is this entertainment, Mr Murdoch?’

“The News Corp chairman replied that ‘a lot of people think so’, adding: ‘People have a couple of hundred channels to choose from - they don't have to watch this.’”

The Guardian / Murdoch faces investor rebellion

This is the full version of the edited story that I wrote for PC Pro.

Anyone can download Radiohead's latest record without paying a penny after the band invited listeners to pay whatever they wanted for In Rainbows. You might have thought then, that no-on would bother using p2p to grab a copy. You'd be wrong.

Big Champagne, a leading p2p analyst, recorded 240,000 BitTorrent downloads of In Rainbows on the day it was released and with 100,000 new torrent downloads each day, unauthorised copies of the record will soon exceed the 1.2 million acquired from the band's official website.

Big Champagne's chief executive Eric Garland said that is not unusual for p2p downloads to exceed sales, but he was somewhat surprised that this was the case with the Radiohead album. And he can only put it down to habit.

“People don't know Radiohead's site,” he said. “They do know their favourite BitTorrent site and they use it every day. It's quite simply easier for folks to get the illegal version than the legal version.”

He added that price does not appear to be a factor that affects how much an album is swapped over p2p - contrary to the popular argument that record companies could eliminate file sharing simply by cutting the price of CDs and downloads.

Others have noted that by letting users pay nothing, Radiohead have inadvertently devalued their music and legitimised file sharing.

Professor Ed Felten of Princeton University, a digital content and DRM expert, notes on his Freedom to Tinker blog, that the “clunkiness” of Radiohead's website is partly to blame.

“Radiohead’s site makes you click and click to get the music,” he writes. “First you have to click through a nearly content-free splash screen. Then you click through another splash screen telling you things you probably already knew. Then you click an “ORDER” button, and click away a dialog box telling you something you already knew. Then after some head scratching, you realise you need to click the “VIEW BASKET” button...,” and so on. You get the picture. What it all amounts to is getting the downloaders details so that they can later be sold concert tickets and merchandise, which is where most bands make their real money since record labels have no claim to a share.

Faced with that, p2p does look a lot more attractive.

“If people normally choose p2p over authorised channels because p2p is cheaper, we would expect customers to shift toward the authorised channel when it offers a zero price,” Felten writes. “But if people choose p2p for convenience, then we’d expect a shift toward more p2p use for this album, because people have fewer moral qualms about p2p downloading this album than they would for a normal album.”

The building site next door that very kindly wakes us a 7am each weekday morning with the sound of drilling and hammering which then continues throughout the day. I do kind of hope this toilet crashes to the ground and showers shit on them all.

Appearing in Brussels on December 6.

“The globe was thrown into a major political and economic crisis last night following the shock decision of Sir Menzies Campbell to resign the leadership of Britain’s Liberal Democrat Party.

“Eleven billion dollars were wiped off the value of shares in Wall Street before trading was suspended, while other world markets were kept closed to avoid panic and possible financial meltdown. George Bush and Vladimir Putin spoke in emergency session and later issued a joint statement urging for calmness during this period of uncertainty. But the resignation leaves Britain’s third party utterly leaderless, and marks the political demise of an inspiration and an icon who spoke for a whole generation.”

NewsBiscuit / World thrown into crisis as Menzies Campbell resigns

“Every edition of the Guardian and Observer newspapers is to be made available via a newly launched online digital archive.

“The first phase of the Guardian News & Media archive, containing the Guardian from 1821 to 1975 and The Observer from 1900 to 1975, will launch on November 3.

“It will contain exact replicas of the original newspapers, both as full pages and individual articles, and will be fully searchable.

“The rest of the archive will launch early in 2008, making more than 1.2m pages of digitised news content available, with Observer content available from its launch as the world's first Sunday newspaper in 1791.

“New reports featured in the archive cover events including the 1793 execution of Louis XVI, the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, and the 1833 abolition of the slave trade, the first and second world wars and the assassination of the US president, John F Kennedy.”

The Guardian / Guardian and Observer to launch online archive

..another 40 DRM-free, high bitrate tracks at €0.32 (less than 25p) each:

The Retro Spankees / Vowel Play
Charles Caldwell / Hadn't I been good to you
Foetus / The only good christian is a dead christian
Bricolage / The Waltzers
The Retro Spankees / I Know Who You Are But What Am I?
The Retro Spankees / Mr Brilliant & Easy squeezy
Booka Shade / In white rooms
The Piney Gir Country Roadshow / Hold Yer Horses
Kimya Dawson / Being cool, Hadlock padlock & The beer
EZ T / Goodbye Little Doll

I’m on the front page of Ask and Google for “palais stoclet brussels”.

Becs and I came across this patch of beautiful mushrooms and/or toadstools on a Belgian campsite yesterday. Becs took these beautiful pictures: Flickr / Funghi.

“A possum has set an enviable record for doing absolutely nothing. After stuffing itself full of food in a laboratory, one curled up and hibernated for a record 367 days,” reports NewScientist.

[image from Wikimedia Commons]

Rebecca said, “I think this must the be the cutest collection of photos I have ever seen.”

I think it probably is.

Flickr / Tiny Animals On Fingers

These links (should) work for the UK store:
Klaxons / Magick
The Long Blondes / Once and never again
Lost Penguin / I believe I can fly
The Playing Fields / Hello new world

Vitamin String Quartet's String Quartet Tribute to New Order & Joy Division.

British Airways Culinary Map [no apostrophe, sic]

Er, BA, the Grand'Place is a place, not a restaurant. It's also just about the last place* I would send anyone to find somewhere good to eat. Mind you, this comes from an industry happy to describe Charleroi Airport - 50km away with no direct public transport link - as Brussels South Charleroi.

*The last place would be 'Kebab Street'.

'Toe pads have patterns on the surface, it's not a smooth layer. Underneath these patterns, there are fluid vessels, glands and blood vessels,' according to Animangsu Ghatak, an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur.

'Sticky tape gets contaminated with dust and you only use it once or twice. But lizards and toads use their toes all the time. They don't get contaminated and they create very strong adhesion. We are trying to mimic that by creating this material.'

Reuters / Tree-frog inspires new super glue

Jesus is back and living in a caravan.

Simon + Becs | brussels 14

I'm not around here very often, as I can usually be found hanging out elsewhere in the Net, on Facebook, Flickr or at work.

The latest collection of snaps taken while out and about in the capital of Europe:

Simon + Becs | brussels 13

Closed for several years to have its aluminium cladding replaced with stainless steel, Brussels' finest post-war building (there isn't much competition) reopened last year. Then closed again because some of the new panels had to be replaced. Happily all is well now, though the long queues (one to pay and one to get in!) and fine weather meant we restricted our visit to the outside, amid the rubble and cement mixers of the incomplete landscaping:

Simon + Becs | brussels | atomium | re-clad | april 2007

And this is what it looked like in November 2002 and May 2005:

Simon + Becs | brussels | atomium | november 2002 + may 2005

Two Macs, one mixing desk, playing Bontempi versions of pop classics from the likes of Madness and The Proclaimers.

Spend your Friday evening dressed as Zombie invading an Apple retail store:

Zombies? No Problem

Spend your Sunday on an exercise bike in a cage in a Brussels park:

Caged cyclist

Oh why:

iPod Amnesty Bin

Apparently Microsoft has 'sold' - corporate speak for shipped, which is not the same thing - one million Zune music players. In six months. If the willingness of its own employess to shed their iPods en masse is any indication, it will take them another six months to sell the next million. It takes Apple a mean of five to six days to sell - as in sell - a million iPods.

I'm happy to admit that I take malevolent pleasure in Microsoft's failure to convince the US public to buy a product it doesn't even seem to believe in itself - why else would they not make it available worldwide like Apple did from day one with the iPod? But I do feel justified in my animosity, because Zune is such a poor product that pretends to be much more than it is.

I learnt a cool new word today, encomium, meaning 'a speech or piece of writing that praises someone or something highly'.

In fact you could say that this blog posting is an encomium for encomium.

...better late than never.

We went to Venice in March and took loads of pics, many with the new camera (more on that later). As you will see, the weather was fantastic. We timed our visit well, not only because of the cloudless skies but also the relative lack of other tourists.

Reputed to be the first of Auguste Rodin's Thinker scupltures, this one adorns the grave of art critic Jef Dillens in Brussels' Cimetière de Laeken.

We took this picture despite being told that photography is not permitted in the cemetary. This Wikipedia article suggests that this ban is not rigidly enforced.

Hours of miserable fun:
[findagrave.com]

An amazing hodgepodge of headstones, statues and bas-reliefs commemorating famous and not-so famous Belgians, as well as those who died defending the country in two world wars.

RogerINtheUSA commenting on a pro-charge article in The Guardian:

The congestion charge is of course a problem for lower-income people who are therefore dissuaded from driving their miserable little cars into London, but by keeping the riff-raff out you reduce congestion and allow the better people to drive their Bentleys and Jags to their important destinations without having to endure traffic jams.

[Resistance is 4x4 futile]

There are plenty of ways of reducing car use without disproportionately penalising those on lower incomes, such as closing roads to all but essential and service vehicles; priority cycle lanes (and I mean lanes, not just a narrow section of the road); reintroducing buses that people actually want to use; banning over-sized cars such as 4x4s; and running US-style school buses.

Of course, all these would cost money, while the congestion tax is a nice little earner. I'll get my coat.

I take never-ending pleasure from Microsoft's pathetic attempts to talk up their over-priced, underfeatured 'new' Windows Vista, led by their idiot CEO Steve Ballmer.

Would you let this man babysit your children:
[ntk.net/media/developers.mpg]
[stenstad.net/storage/ballmer_dance.mpg]

I've posted a collection of pics taken around Brussels over the past few months on the Simon + Becs website. The one on the left is a painting on the wall of Le Corbeau, a bar on the edge of the city centre with a unique line in beer glasses.

*not a regular feature

...is this my final dressing gown?

The Becster bought some new pyjamas from The Gap, made from the ultimate cotton. Are these Half Man Half Biscuit's 'ultimate pyjamas'.

The Becster and I visited Eat-cetera, one of the best reaturants close to our apartment in St-Gilles, last night. The modern interior has been refurbished and the new colours and table cloths make it warmer and more 'comfortable' then before. One thing that doesn't need refurbishing is the food, which is vibrant and original (without being whacky) and makes a big change from the predictable Belgian fayre on offer at too many of Brussels' restaurants and cafés.

From The Guardian:

It contains more iron than spinach, more vitamin C than oranges and more calcium than milk. Watercress may be better known as a decorative garnish, but a study published yesterday said the salad leaf could significantly cut the risk of cancer.

The study suggested that eating 85g of watercress a day could inhibit the growth of cancer cells and even kill them. Scientists at Ulster University found that the watercress reduced the damage caused by cancer cells to white blood cells by 22.9%. Watercress also raised levels of antioxidants which absorb so-called "free radicals", molecules which some experts believe damage the body's tissues.

[A bagful of cress a day may keep cancer cells at bay, study suggests]

Only the second time in two years that it has snowed and settled, so I took a trip to the top of Parking 58 to grab some snaps and posted them here.