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