Status-Q

It's 25 years since we started seeing footage of the space shuttle taking off - during which time the whole World Wide Web thing has happened - but it still makes for impressive viewing.

This is a pretty high quality video clip (on my broadband connection at least). Plug some good speakers or headphones in, turn up the volume, and watch as those rockets kick in. It's hard not to be impressed at what man hath wrought.

The tragedy is, of course, that it took a cold war to get us to the moon, and nothing has quite lived up to that - it's the rash but inspirational decisions that can perhaps only be made in wartime that often lead to mankind's greatest achievements.

Will it take another war to get us beyond orbit once again?

The Monty Python channel on YouTube. Wonderful stuff, from Bicycle Repairman to the Ministry of Silly Walks. And I've always loved Every Sperm is Sacred.

Anyway, it's all official and above-board and released by the Pythons themselves.

Bonnie Tyler as you've never seen her before.

From Jeannie Harrell.

Many people think of Richard Dawkins as a strident, aggressive figure. I think this comes mostly from passages in The God Delusion where he's deliberately mischievous, in a way that is decidedly uncomfortable to those of a religious persuasion.

I read The God Delusion and then moved on to several of his other books, like The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene - all brilliant books, by the way, which transformed my understanding of many aspects of science - but the thing that got me started was really YouTube. Hearing and seeing him speak made me realise he was a very smart, very thoughtful guy, who wasn't just out to poke fun at religion. He doesn't always give that impression in his writing, especially to those who have only read small excerpts.

Here's a little four-minute example of the man who has been christened "Darwin's Rottweiler":

Above Cotignac, Provence.

If there’s a convenient cave in the cliff next to your house, where better to park your Renault 4?

The U.S. edition of Rose's second novel in the Mary Finch series, The Counterfeit Guest, hits American bookshelves today.

Jeremy Reimer writes a nice Ars Technica piece on why, after more than 20 years of using Microsoft Word, he now almost never uses it.

Is the age of the word-processor drawing to a close?

(Click to find out what's going on...)

This is nice:

Search Google for 'recursion' (and check the 'Did you mean...' option)