Zombie

... and cheapskate rivets that pop like bubblegum when the replica ship hits the replica iceberg ...

So you're more interested in the players than the game Okay, here's some of the teams to perk you up Mike Phillips - Wales Luke McLean - Italy Dimitri Szarzewski - France Simon Zebo - Ireland [sadly out of the tournament after he broke his foot in the first game] Ross Rennie - Scotland You can order calendars of the French Stade Francais Paris rugby team [many of whom play on the French national team] from the official club site http://boutique.stade.fr/boutique_us/liste_produits.cfm?type=13 which includes back issues e.g. the 2011 calendar

The whole thing seems in very bad taste. I can see the cruise line stopping the ship at the spot Titanic hit the 'berg and offering extra cost night time "excursions" in "our luxuriously appointed heated lifeboats fitted with 5.1 Stereo Surround Sound so you can experience the horror and hear the screams of drowning passengers while you look back at the fully lit ship and imagine it plunging to its doom!!", maybe with a few paid actors splashing around in the sea trying to clamber on board the lifeboats so passengers can enjoy the thrill of shoving them back in the sea ...

Hapless TV interviewer: "Haven't you run before?" Mo Farah [double 2012 Olympic Gold medalist 5,000 and 10,000 metres]: stunned look Hapless TV interviewer [looking worried, confused and digging herself deeper into the hole she's started]: "This is not your first time?" TV company later apologises for its "unfortunate phrasing". Er, no that's not "unfortunate phrasing" - that would be an incompetent interview http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/athletics/9897804/Mo-Farah-issued-with-apology-from-US-television-station-for-unfortunate-phrasing-during-New-Orleans-interview.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7049275.stm Nope. People will always want to gather and gossip and staff will always email to cover their backs

Didn't watch it. Maybe they should have got this guy

The problem with this device - whatever you think of it - is batteries. Spec wearers know that lightness is key that's why titanium is so popular. Who wants to wear specs-with-batteries Or specs-with-wires connected to batteries. Nope, not me

Another great weekend's rugby ! Wales v Italy was a bit scrappy to start but the Welsh livened up in the second half and the Taffies went home happy Scotland v Ireland was a mystery thriller - it was exciting, but how did Scotland win?? Ireland had possession for 75% of the game! France could have beaten England. This was not the team that Italy trounced, and gave England a real fright 30 mins into the game with a succession of brilliantly executed passes ending with Wesley Fofana who touched down for a really classy try England were lucky with the ref not picking up on the forward kick that set up Manu's try, and maybe another possible foul that could have been a penalty to France, but at 23-13 England would still have won. What scuppered France was the weird bench substitutions which took out some of their best players when Eng were looking shaky, while the English substitutions all came good Which means Les Frogs went home with their tails between their legs and .... :Vic2: :Vic2: England are top of the board !!! :Vic2: :Vic2:

That's one sturdy camera!

Daniel Day-Lewis's third Best Actor Oscar - amazing. He's been in some excellent films including the 1985 gay love story My Beautiful Launderette. This is a significant early gay movie and has a happy ending If you've not seen it you should, although US members will probably want the subtitles on

Great for that über-cool cyborg look, allowing you to nod your head to the mother-in-law's jaw flapping while you secretly check out the football results ...

1/ Google - beats all others for me and being able to use it to search for keywords on individual sites is a powerful tool [but I hate what they did with Youtube privacy - below] 2/ Wiki - first "goto" site for an overview 3/ BBC - catchup TV, plus incredible archive of radio and TV programmes freely available 4/ Youtube - but I had to cancel my account because Google kept bullying me to reveal my identity with threatening popups with no option to tell them to get lost. Why should I? I lost any trust in Google to treat my details as private so now I just log on anonymously. 5/ Considering the time I spend here it has to be GA Facebook is evil. If people want to spend 6 hours a day on it that's their problem. What I take issue with is their reckless and irresponsible attitude to data security. Kids post the most intimate personal details and overlook security. I've tried working through the security screens and subscreens and it's a Byzantine mess so I gave up. I suspect they've made it difficult for a reason or they can't be bothered. Either is unforgiveable. All the initial defaults should be "no access to anyone" with clear instructions to open up each individual parameter and red warning popup screens of the consequences of opening up access through the various levels. I also hate the clunky user interface. It's time for another more responsible social networking site with a better user interface to crush them As for Twitter it can be fun having it on watching X-Factor with a tub of ice cream, a fizzy drink and a big bowl of cheesy puffs ...

No, not now that we have setups like the Catalina Sky Survey but, as I said, amateurs "have" played a very important role in the past. Optical astronomy using telescopes is still a main tool of professional astronomers for observing, including finding near-Earth objects. Distortions caused by atmospheric turbulence have been largely countered by deformable mirror adaptive-optics technologies, and modern software and imaging systems for existing telescopes, which means that ground based optical telescopes can now deliver images as good as space based telescopes. An Earth launched nuke would just be too late - if it was, say, a half kilometre sized object [currently undetectable] all you'd do is break it into several smaller-but-still-devastating pieces to devastate many areas instead of one, with all the tracking problems and population evacuation problems multiplied. And imagine the international issues if countries that would not have been impacted by a single strike were hit because the asteroid or comet was split into several pieces by another nation's nuke. If there was a simple cheap solution using today's technology I think it's unlikely anyone here is going to find it if none of the professionals and government agencies haven't already.

Problem is even if the Russian meteor had been detected, say, a few weeks before impact there's nothing we could have done except calculate the impact zone and evacuate the population. Current technology would allow us to send a probe to an asteroid or comet on collision course but the lead time needed would be years to launch and intercept at sufficient distance from the Earth to be able to nudge it into a slightly different orbit and miss the Earth. Radar only works at shorter distances where there would not be enough time. There was actually an early Star Trek episode on this - the original series

No, that's wrong. Astronomy is a very popular hobby for amateurs and modern compact telescopes with "GOTO" and tracking drives, high res CCDs and imaging software enable serious work to be done for modest cost. It's one of the few sciences where amateurs can still contribute useful data and be recognised ["Amateur Achievement Awards" etc]. Many asteroids and comets have been discovered by amateurs like David Levy [Comet Shoemaker-Levy], the Moon mapping by Patrick Moore helped NASA, and loads of useful data is collected on things like variable stars etc which get shared on the web. W_L, on 20 Feb 2013 - 13:20, said: There are more advanced spectrometer that collect data on light and can even assess composition of objects based on reflection. We have the technology to develop an early warning system if space development can be invested in. Currently the only feasible method of detecting asteroids and comets is from their reflected light, like the three telescopes used by the Catalina Sky Survey - and that's only to detect objects 1km in diameter or larger "to an estimated 90% confidence level or better". So it would not spot something like the Tunguska meteor/comet explosion which devastated the region in Central Siberia in 1908 and is estimated only to have been around 100m in diameter! So far we don't have anything near the technology we need to spot objects that have the destructive power of several hydrogen bombs, we don't have the political will and we don't have the money

Yeah, I can see that working - the US, Russkies and Chinese taking it in turns to have their fingers on the trigger of, in effect, a planetary annihilation system Never mind whose going to pay for it. Plus it would have been useless for detecting last week's meteor explosion which came out of the sun [current detection of near-earth asteroids is by optical telescopes which are defeated by solar glare] even if it had been big enough to be spotted - which it wasn't

"He who asserts must prove" is a basic rule of evidence which Tim will be familiar with. Tim made an assertion and has, so far, refused or been unable to back it up. You claim something to be a fact you should be able to show it is. It's not rocket science

So Google's to blame for you posting "500 years ago ... there was no ice in Greenland, hence the name 'green land' "

He who asserts must prove. You've produced no evidence

The North Greenland Ice-Core Project [NGRIP] obtained complete ice core samples from the Greenland ice sheet - the deepest core drilling extracted nearly two miles of ice from the surface all the way down to bedrock! This table, released in 2006, shows analysis of these cores in 20 year bands from the top surface layer - most recent 20 years snowfall - down to 2,128 metres - snowfall 41,760 years ago. http://www.gfy.ku.dk/~www-glac/data/GICC05_NGRIP_GRIP_20y_27nov2006.txt If you want more information on the high-resolution record of digital images from 1330 metres down to bedrock [3085 metres] then read this article "Visual stratigraphy of the North Greenland Ice Core Project (NorthGRIP) ice core during the last glacial period" published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, 2005. http://epic.awi.de/12321/1/Sve2005a.pdf "No ice in Greenland 500 years ago". That's unscientific and silly Science doesn't understand everything and it can't explain everything but the modern scientific method has enabled us to understand a lot ,more about the physical world we live on and its planetary history than any system of beliefs. The scientific method works for all branches of scientific study, whether it's finding the Higgs boson, counting tree rings, or analysing ice core samples. You can't pick and choose which bits of science you "accept" and which bits you "reject" because you don't like certain findings. So those that reject science because they don't like what it says should surrender their iPhones, iPads, flat screen TVs and every other modern device that they are able to enjoy only because of the achievements of modern science

You can't write off "most European officials" as being dishonest. Some judges make mistakes. Some make crazy decisions sometimes. And national bias does and will sometimes happen. And I've no doubt Malcolm Morley and other seasoned professionals have a bag of horror stories. Really, it's no different to you shouting at the TV during an NFL or NBA game [whatever floats your boat] and accusing the ref of being a less than honest citizen of questionable parentage

My last post was just to show that the claim that "500 years ago ... there was no ice in Greenland" is simply absurd The "green" thing is a bit of a red herring thanks to Erik the Red. In fact, since 80% of that country is white and has been continuously white for thousands of years, Greenland surely deserves some kind of award for being one of the most inappropriately named countries on the whole planet

Just to clarify, Greenland is a big place. Just as most of Australia is hostile uninhabitable "outback", so too most of Greenland is hostile uninhabitable icesheet. The only bits of Greenland that are settled are a few coastal areas. It was apparently named Grœnland (translated as "Greenland") by an opportunistic Viking named Erik the Red in order to sucker settlers into thinking it was a verdant land of milk and honey. It ain't. About 80% of Greenland is covered in an ice sheet about 2,400 kilometres (1,500 miles) long by about 1,100 kilometres (680 miles) at its widest and the average thickness is about 2 km (1.24 miles) and over 3 km (1.86 miles) at its thickest point. That's a LOT of Slush Puppie! So we're not talking about the accumulated snow of a few winters. Not even 500 winters. A lot of scientific research has been done into the Greenland ice sheet including analysis of core samples [The Greenland Ice Sheet Project]. It's estimated that the Greenland ice sheet has been around for something like 110,000 years. Hey, isn't Google a wonderful thing - when it's not being evil

Ouch! Well, the least we can ask for is some independent verification, or readers might think you're making a sweeping fact-free swipe at "European officials" which - despite being separated by the English Channel and despite the claims of euro-refuseniks - I guess is intended also to include officials from this green and pleasant land of cricket and fair play

So, according to Tim, "most European officials" are not honest. Glad to see he's maintaining the same quality standards that we enjoyed so much in "another place" *peace and blessings be upon it ... may it rest in peace*