Status-Q

John’s musings about his old cars, and Sean and Nicci’s post about double-declutching, reminded me of something my father taught me many years ago which few people probably know: that you can change gears without using the clutch, as long as you get the engine speeds right. You shift into neutral, rev the engine (or let it slow down) to the right point for your speed, and then shift into the next gear. It takes some practice, but if you know the car well enough, it is perfectly possible.

Since I’ve been married I’ve been driving automatics (which, I remember being horrified to first discover, you can’t even bump-start!) But growing up with a sequence of elderly second-hand cars, techniques like these were often of real practical use. I remember driving one of my first cars several miles back home after the clutch cable had broken.

There is a real problem, though, with this technique. Because it’s dependent on matching engine speed to road speed, the one thing you can’t do is to stop, or you’ll never get out of neutral again. Fortunately, I realised what had happened to the cable while I was still moving, and so could plan a route home that involved very few traffic lights and where the majority of other places I might have to stop were on downhill slopes…

There’s a post on Sean and Nicci’s site about the family Morris Traveller.

Well, the earliest car I can remember was also, I think, half-timbered. When when we first came back from Africa in 1970 my mother had a Mini Traveller. I was three years old at the time, but amazingly, I can remember its registration number: TBB 571G.

The brain works in mysterious ways…

This has been doing the rounds for a while but I’ve only just come across it (thanks to Jason Perlow). Wonderful stuff.

Well, it should be, certainly for all science journalists, and probably for all science undergrads too. Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science is an enjoyable but very well-informed rant about how the media gets science stories wrong, and how to look for the real facts behind the reports.

Ben has a few chips on his shoulder – perhaps a few too many – but that doesn’t stop this from being a very important book. Recommended.

…to discover that the Childwickbury goats’ cheese made by my step-sister Elizabeth was served as the vegetarian starter for the G20 leaders last night.

Glad to know Jamie approves of it…

We’re very proud too!…

On the Today program this morning, someone was saying that ISPs should be held partly responsible for movie and music piracy by their users, in the same way that a house owner should be responsible if the house was being used as a drug den.

But surely that’s the wrong analogy. People don’t in general upload the pirated material to the ISPs’ servers – they have it on their own PCs. Holding the ISP responsible is like blaming the local council because their roads were used to transport the drugs. Why not blame the electricity company that powers the PC?

The culpable ones, if any, are those who share material from their PCs. The media industries can’t sue all of them, though, so they have to find another scapegoat.

Last week a British vehicle set a new land speed record for wind-powered vehicles. 126.1mph.

Not the easiest thing to park at Waitrose, perhaps, but very pretty.

From the RosenblumTV blog:

Media Life reports this week that the average American now spends 8.5 hours a day staring at some kind of screen, whether its television, computer or cellphone.
…
This means that screenwatching has now become the number one human activity, surpassing even sleep. We will spend more of our lives staring at screens than doing anything else.

Screenwatching has become the seminal and defining act of our culture.

• My tweets are cross-posted to Facebook because I know they’ll fit. It doesn’t work the other way around.
• My blog posts can be any size, and are posted to Twitter as URLs, so the links end up on Facebook as well.
• I guess my Facebook entries could be cross-posted to Twitter as URLs but they aren’t usually worth a click! And it could create a feedback loop which would cause my social world to implode.
• Some of my friends reply on Twitter, some on Facebook, and some on the blog.
• I get email notifications about blog and Facebook responses. Twitter replies I often miss. I’d like emails from Twitter but am worried that it would be a bit…well… curmudgeonly, like those people who supposedly could only read emails after their secretary had printed them out.
• Most of my important communications are in Skype IM anyway, which doesn’t link to anything!

I wonder what this will look like in three years’ time…

I’m a huge fan of Google docs – especially where several people need to collaborate on a document. But sometimes the formatting capabilities can be a little restricting – margins, line spacing, etc – you have little control over those.

Or so I thought, until this morning I discovered the ‘Edit CSS’ menu option:

With a little bit of CSS you can change the appearance in all sorts of ways. My needs are mostly simple, though.

Similarly, you can edit the HTML in various ways. I needed a line break as opposed to a paragraph break. Right click and you can Insert HTML at Selection. Type <br /> and you’re done.

I hope they teach raw HTML and CSS in schools these days. It’s the punctuation of the future. Not that they teach punctuation any more…