http://homepage.mac.com/simon_aughton/belgium/atomium/4/

Pics from our trip to LA, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, San Francisco and Alcatraz: homepage.mac.com/simon_aughton/usa.

“ForceThemToRealizeWhoYouAreWithSuperViagra”

The pavement and bushes outside our apartments are no more.

...is funnier.



garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com

Great band; great video.



myspace.com/bearsuit

Inexplicable excavations have closed the square in front of our apartment. In the evening and at weekends the absence of traffic noise is a delight, but during the day it’s bang, crash, drill and this morning they started sawing the tarmac to dig a new hole. It’s like living in a very noisy and very dusty Louis Sachar novel.

Bionics made real. Incredible: spectrum.ieee.org/video?id=221

A great piece on water fadism by Dominic Lawson, brother of “domestic goddess” Nigella. The whole article is well worth reading, but this is my favourite bit:

“She is a self-confessed ‘aquaholic’, drinking up to three litres of water before retiring for the night. Ever since she admitted the fact, ‘alternative’ health writers have claimed that her bladder-testing nightcap is the secret of her lustrous complexion – a typically far-fetched claim by the advocates of ‘8x8’. Nigella is much too sensible to believe this nonsense, attributing her skin-tone instead to a mixture of genetic good fortune and a high dietary fat intake.”

The Independent / Dominic Lawson: Bottled or tap, we drink far too much water

Another from Becs’ Flickrlogue:

Bought one of these iPhones-without-a-phone while in that London on Saturday. Can’t see what all the fuss us about ;)

I have nothing to add to Becs’ comments.

A new image gallery: our local football team beaten 2-1 at the weekend

Not only does it have a revolting taste, but decaffeinated coffee also poses a threat to health. Why do I want to laugh?

“A study presented to the American Heart Association two years ago by Dr Robert Superko, chair of molecular and preventative cardiology at the Fuqua Heart Centre, Atlanta, found that decaf coffee increased blood pressure and harmful LDL cholesterol. After three months, drinkers of decaf in the trial experienced a rise in fatty acids and cholesterol by 8 per cent. ‘It’s not caffeinated but decaf that might promote risk factors associated with metabolic syndrome,’ Superko says. ‘People should think twice about drinking it.’”

Not to mention that decaffeination is an industrial process - with the environmental impact that may cause - and not a particularly effective one.

“Professor Bruce Goldberger, the study’s co-author, says decaf should not be mistaken for ‘caffeine-free’. ‘If someone drinks five to ten cups of decaf coffee, the dose of caffeine could easily reach the level present in two cups of regular, caffeinated coffee,’ Goldberger says. ‘This is of particular concern to people advised to cut their caffeine intake.’”

Times Online / How do you drink yours?

Designed and built myself.

The Dominican - now there at least two bars in Brussels city centre where you can get a decent glass of wine.

David Lanham’s beautiful icons for Leopard available from the IconFactory.

Any ideas? (Yes, I know, it looks like the Canon is on the way out)

Drawn half a century afterwards by Charles Joseph Minard, this diagram tells the story of Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812. Edward Tufte, whose book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a key text on statistics (apparently), called it “the best statistical graphic ever drawn”.

“Minard’s chart shows six types of information: geography, time, temperature, the course and direction of the army’s movement, and the number of troops remaining. The widths of the gold (outward) and black (returning) paths represent the size of the force, one millimetre to 10,000 men. Geographical features and major battles are marked and named, and plummeting temperatures on the return journey are shown along the bottom.

“The chart tells the dreadful story with painful clarity: in 1812, the Grand Army set out from Poland with a force of 422,000; only 100,000 reached Moscow; and only 10,000 returned. The detail and understatement with which such horrifying loss is represented combine to bring a lump to the throat. As men tried, and mostly failed, to cross the Bérézina river under heavy attack, the width of the black line halves: another 20,000 or so gone. The French now use the expression ‘C’est la Bérézina’ to describe a total disaster.”

The Economist / Worth a thousand words

What else is there to say?

The previous post on “infographics” brings to mind the Moscow underground map, the second version of which takes Harry Beck’s London Underground design to its extreme.

Infographics - horrible word but producing some fascinating art such as this and the many more examples at Smashing Magazine.

Weird Converter, where one Jennifer Aniston is equal to 0.6470588235294 kegs of beer.

Fantastic graffito close to Gare de Bruxelles-Central, courtesy of Becs’ Flickr collection.

A lovely Francis Francis machine for Illy - and the first cup.

Red Kelly's the “B” side blog - as the name suggests, b-sides as downloadable MP3s. What could be better? Apart from owning the records themselves, natch.

Mark Steel on Blair’s “conversion” to Roman Catholicism:

“So at that point Blair seems to have looked at Catholicism, with its insistence that we're all born with stained souls due to Eve being persuaded to eat an apple by a talking snake, and its belief that through a weekly offering you're accepting the blood and body of Jesus, and he's said: ‘The problem with this religion is it's not mad enough for me.’.”

Independent / Mark Steel: When Mayan rebirthing just isn’t mad enough

Steven Wells’ reminds me of a a strip from Andy Riley’s genius Roasted cartoons, where the male character deliberately hates golf in order to slow the ageing process.

“For suburbanite ageing punks like me, foxhunting is a mere abstraction - a distant battlefield where self-righteous vermin-loving vegan hedgemonkeys get the crap kicked out of them by inbred toffs and their ape-like supporters. Golfers, on the other hand, are what people like me become when they stop trying. They’re the pod people from Invasion of The Body Snatchers whispering: ‘Stop trying to stay awake, give in, surrender, wear Pringle.’

“Golf is the quicksand at the end of the existentialist rainbow, sucking the unwary ageing hipster into a half-life of gin-pissed conversations about house prices, airport car parking and immigrants.

“But there are those...who have tried to square the circle. Golf Punk magazine has been injecting the sport with monkey glands for years. Has it made golf any punker? Sadly no. Rather it has acted as a gateway to sporting senility, tempting thousands of unwary groovesters into the first stages of irreversible Alan Partridgedom.”

Steven Wells in The Guardian/ Forget foxhunting - urban golf is the new gateway to culture death