“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