This week I have been mostly learning…
July 19, 2011
Yet again my blog falls by the wayside. I’ve been struggling to come up with anything to write about despite the major goings-on in the country and world of late with the likes of Greece going broke, Ireland emptying out of young people and rag newspapers in Britain doing truly harrowing things with people’s mobile phones. Truth is I spend my days pouring through Wikipedia where I start the day on the front page picking a news topic such as “The Open Championship” and finish it on a page describing particle physics or ‘Intrinsic Value’ (today’s article of note) forgetting most of what I’ve read along the way. I figure if I’m going to sit at a PC all day slowly decaying my brain and self-esteem in equal measure I might as well learn something along the way.
Things I’ve learned about this week thanks to my incessant clicking include:
Some scientists hid an event in time recently. As in, something happened, but it didn’t happen because time was made skip over it. Whatever they hid lasted only a tiny fraction of a second but anyone remotely interested in how this entire universe works and relates to itself would know this is a pretty big deal. Seeing things like this assures me that there some parts of the human race worth saving given how brilliant a bunch of minds this kind of stuff requires, but then I realise that those same minds will probably just save themselves and most likely cause the deaths of the rest of us brain-dead zombies through one of their scientific breakthroughs.
I learned the M1 and M50 are to get more toll points to raise revenue for the government. I’d actually like to be surprised at this but at this stage nothing about Ireland and the struggling economy surprises me any more. Yet again the thousands driving to work are going to get charged upwards of 10 to 20 a week extra just to do that. Bus companies running the same routes will have to pass on that charge too meaning the taxpayers get shafted again. You take another 80 or so a month off a minimum/low wage worker and I honestly wouldn’t blame them for giving up their jobs, selling their cars and drawing the dole for the next 5 million years it’ll take to fix this mess.
I discovered a very funny comic that perfectly describes meeting that person you almost know, and not having a clue what to say to them or how to get away from them. Me being a guy who finds forced, contrived conversation with my barber the most horrific 15 minutes of my month, I got a good laugh out of this.
This one is very technical and geeky in parts but if you strip that away I actually found the story of Stuxnet to be one of the most intriguing industrial sabotage stories I’ve ever read. What makes this story special is that it’s very real and as a result it scared and fascinated me in equal measure. It reads like a Tom Clancy novel without the ridiculous reams of over-descriptive nonsense but with the insight and genuine feel international espionage that Clancy can bring in spades.
I learned that Heineken tastes like ditchwater in Weatherspoons, Newcastle. I also learned that Newcastle is a helluva place to get drunk for a solid three days but since it was a stag weekend, what happens in Newcastle stays in Newcastle.
Finally I found this video that someone painstakingly made by mixing a huge chunk of a favourite game of mine, a lot of time and a dash of genius that ensure you’ll probably watch it ten times to fully concentrate on each individual character while you laugh your heart out. I’m profoundly jealous that while some dude can come up with something like this in the last few months all I could manage was one poxy little blog. Enjoy.
