A wandering monk

A wandering monk walked barefoot everywhere he went, to the point that the soles of his feet eventually became quite thick and leathery. And because he ate very little, he gradually became very frail. Several days often passed between opportunities to brush his teeth, so he usually had bad breath. Therefore, throughout the region, he came to be known as the super-calloused fragile mystic plagued with halitosis.

Found in many places, including: http://www.talkingtospirit.com/rec57.html

(I'm just spring-cleaning an ancient collection of files dating back to a time when the web was just a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee's eye and jokes used to arrive by e-mail)

Science Versus Magic -- Is There a Difference in the World of Fiction?

"One of the biggest debates among people who like scifi — aside from the Star Wars vs. Star Trek thing — is where to draw the line between science and magic. Some adhere to the idea that magic is simply science that we don't yet understand, others feel that magic represents an essential mystery that can't be understood rationally"



http://io9.com/5021701/science-versus-magic-++-is-there-a-difference-in-the-world-of-fiction

Show Us a Better Way

"Tell us what you'd build with public information and we could help fund your idea!"





http://www.showusabetterway.co.uk/call/

Secret gardens will sit above the bustle of shoppers

"A series of “secret” rooftop gardens will be created in the heart of the capital.
But only those who have paid upwards of £110,000 for a luxury apartment above the new St David’s 2 shopping centre in Cardiff will get to enjoy the chic oases."


http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2008/07/10/secret-gardens-will-sit-above-the-bustle-of-shoppers-91466-21314366/

Multicolr Search Lab

Search Flickr by Colour





http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr/

Fed-up Employees Can Be Fierce Innovation Force

"Rogow advises collecting the most hacked-off and vocal-about-it workers and spinning them out as a company competitor."

http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/tve/?p=354&nr=ABG

Use international date format (ISO)

"How does one write a date on the Web? There are so many formats available, most of them incompatible with others, that it can be a usability nightmare to choose a date representation when writing for an international, cross-cultural audience, as is the case on the web. Fortunately, there is one solution in the ISO-developed international date format."

http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/iso-date

Google Promotes Offline Google Docs

"Google promoted on the homepage the offline support for Google Docs: "Get your documents whenever, wherever". If you have the Gears plug-in for Internet Explorer and Firefox, you can backup your documents, spreadsheets and presentations on your computer and view them offline in your browser. The documents can be edited and the changes are sent to Google's servers when you go back online."

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-promotes-offline-google-docs.html

Electric cars given official green light to boost climate change goals

"Electric cars could play a major role in the shift to environmentally friendly transport, the government will reveal this week. As part of its long-awaited renewable energy strategy, to be published on Thursday, it will argue that there is massive potential in the UK for plug-in hybrids, for car batteries charged on grid electricity and for vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/22/travelandtransport.carbonemissions

Schedule a restart operation with Windows XP’s Shutdown utility

"To help you automate this type of restart operation, Microsoft Windows XP comes with a command-line utility called Shutdown.exe, which can restart your system. To make this happen automatically, you can configure it to run at a specified time with the Scheduled Tasks tool."

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/window-on-windows/?p=734&tag=nl.e064

The Myth of Multitasking

"In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.” To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one’s time; it was a mark of intelligence. “This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.”"

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-myth-of-multitasking

Interactive Autopsy

http://www.deathonline.net/movies/mm/autopsy.cfm

Glass Breakthrough May Lead to New Sustainable Materials

"Glass is a Molecular Traffic Jam

Is glass a liquid or a solid? An article published today in Nature Materials provides evidence that glass is actually more like a 'traffic jam'. It turns out the atoms in a glassy solid would 'like' to form a crystalline solid, or regular structure, but just aren't able to get organized enough. Instead the atoms loosely organize themselves into groups or relationships shaped like an icosahedron."

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/06/glass-research-breakthrough-material.php

CherryPal: A 2-Watt Computer the Size of a Paperback

"Many people only use their computers to check email, browse the web, do word processing, spreadsheets, etc. For them, many of today's PCs are overkill, but it's not clear what a good alternative would be, especially if they want low energy consumption. Enter stage left: The CherryPal, a tiny PC based on a Freescale CPU and the Linux (Debian) operating system. It's about the size of a paperback book and uses 80% fewer components than a regular PC. To make the trade-off acceptable, the CherryPal will use "cloud computing", meaning that many applications will run on an online server (same basic concept as web-based email)."

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/06/cherrypal-2-watt-green-computer.php

British Government Unveils Ambitious Renewable Energy Agenda

"After several false starts, the British government is set to finally unveil its renewable energy strategy next week, The Guardian's John Vidal reports. The UK will need to invest £100 billion (roughly $197 billion) to build up its clean technology infrastructure if it is to successfully meet EU-imposed guidelines to produce 15 percent of the country's energy from renewable sources by 2020."

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/06/british-renewable-plan.php

Doublemarks - Bookmarking Two URLs at Once

"The idea is this: many times I've bookmarked one page/URL that is contained within/appears on another page (right click, "Favourite this link" in Flock...). With a dblmark, not only do you bookmark the link on the page, you also bookmark the page the link appeared on..."

http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/014889.html

The Cost of Meetings - How Much Return on Investment Do YOU Get?

"Meeting accounter...

Customise your counter via the URL: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/clock/mtgAcct.php?num=7&sal=25000&expenses=100

• num: number of meeting participants;


• sal: average salary (whole pounds/dollars);


• expenses: should be "overheads", really (in whole pounds/dollars); any immediate/direct costs covered by the meeting (travel expenses, coffee and biscuits etc. etc.)."

http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/014885.html

Kudos to openSUSE 11.0

"openSUSE 11.0 is a fabulous release. The pretty new graphics set the stage for significant improvements under the surface. All the time and energy put into the package management system has paid off. Including KDE 4 is not as big of a risk for openSUSE as it might be for other major distributions because of the conservative and intuitive way KDE 4 is set up. openSUSE has given me hope that I could actually like KDE 4."

http://www.linux.com/feature/139073

New look for city's bus terminal

"The design for Cardiff's new £800,000 central bus and coach station has been unveiled, with demolition work set to start on the old building.

The new-look terminal will feature a sail-like structure, as part of a new plaza next to new bus bays.

The 50-year-old Terminus House on Wood Street is set to be turned into 3,000 tonnes of rubble by the end of July. "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7465704.stm

Talking your language

"There's a popular rumour that locals only start speaking Welsh in the pub when the English turn up. Dylan Llyr from Caernarfon thinks it's time it was exposed as a myth once and for all."



http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/northwest/sites/voices/pages/pubwelsh.shtml

Microsoft: 'ODF Has Clearly Won'

"ODF has clearly won. We sell software for a living. The ability to implement ODF in the middle of our ship cycle was just not possible. We couldn't do that during the release of Office 2007. We're looking forward and committed to doing more than [ODF-to-OOXML] translators."

http://www.osnews.com/story/19893/Microsoft:_ODF_Has_Clearly_Won