Ian Robinson’s Soapbox

Little Green Bag by George Baker. As heard in Reservoir Dogs and, more importantly, Coupling. Click Movie to play

This blog entry by P.Z. Myers over on Pharyngula is worth reading. i agree completely. What we have on our hands here is a battle for Enlightenment values. We will need to defend them, and that means confronting and opposing the vendors of superstition and dogma. Comments closed for this post. Please comment over at [...]

From an article about the mobile phone market on The Register, in relation the the forthcoming iPhone: Not everyone agrees the iPhone will be as successful as Jobs hopes, but Apple does seem to make the perfect bogeyman for the mobile phone industry. What could be more scary than an organisation capable of working in [...]

Yeah! New Tori Amos album and tour. Bought the album from iTMS this morning. On first listen I really love some of the tracks. Especially Big Wheel (the new single), Body and Soul and Programmable Soda. There are 24 tracks on the album! Will take a while to dissect the package. There is a whole [...]

It’s getting towards the time when I need to start thinking about the next car I will get. Need to order it about September time to collect in February 2008. At present I drive a Renault Laguna that I rent from a leasing company on a 3 year contract. Basically a company car but rather [...]

I’ve been wearing a Casio G-Shock watch since last August. I bought it in the USA whilst at WWDC 2006 in San Francisco. Big mistake. Looks good (see picture below), but is crap as a watch. Way too hard to read the time with a quick glance. Well for me anyway. Click picture for larger [...]

And the overall intelligence quotient just went up as well. Here’s why. You shouldn’t speak ill etc. But good riddance. Update: SomeWateryTart sums it up well. Update 2: Christopher Hitchens tells it like it was, indeed is in the case of the other kooks he mentions. See YouTube video below:

Made a few minor changes to the WWDC schedule I posted previously. This is probably close to the final session list I’ll attend. Unless there are some late additions after the keynote for super secret stuff. Not long to go now Click picture for larger view

Werner Heisenberg is scheduled to give a lecture at MIT. But he’s running late and so is speeding through town in his rental car on his way to the auditorium. A bike cop pulls him over and asks: “Do you have any idea how fast you were going!” Heisenberg replies brightly: “No! But I know [...]

Just finished Exultant by Stephen Baxter. This is the 2nd book in the Destiny’s Children series, and is nominally a sequel to Coalescent. As outlined in the comments to the previous post about the 1st book Exultant isn’t really a direct sequel. It has none of the characters from the first book in it, and [...]

No, not amongst us humans. But rather as a way for the small hive beetle (Aethina tumida) to infiltrate bees hives. It seams they carry a yeast with them that releases the alarm pheromone that European honeybees use. When the beetles enter the hive, the rising alarm signal disorientates the bees and allows the beetles [...]

Just finished Coalescent by Stephen Baxter. I’ve had this sitting on my bookshelf for a while *. After recently rereading the brilliant Hellstrom’s Hive by Frank Herbert, I was thinking about a sequel to the Herbert book. I’d love to read more about the human colony in HH. What did the Government do about the [...]

These videos by Pat Condell are good. I’ll let them speak for themselves.

At previous Apple WWDC conferences Apple bused the attendees out to the Cupertino campus on Thursday night for food, beer and music. The so called campus bash. I’m glad I went last year because the bash this year will be held in San Francisco. Probably be in the big ground floor hall of Moscone West. [...]