Everything is Belgian.

I have long harboured a fondness for the odd little lowland country of Belgium. Half Dutch, half-French, and all weird.

Now news comes that the quintisentially English game, cricket, may have been invented by les Belges.

Such an unassuming place: invents everything but never worries about taking any credit. Cricket, the french fry, the FN self loading rifle, brussels sprouts- "fabrique Belgique" indeed.

Hooray for you, Belgium.

Flame On

I don't patronize chain restaurants as a rule. Aside from any touchy feely reasons, I live on the end of a very long corporate supply chain and thus would rather give my $4 sandwich money to the local bloke who bought haddock caught by boats I can see from my office window rather than industrially produced and stored beef or chicken from thousands of miles distant (Yummmmmm! Fresh...not).

This doesn't mean I can't admire Burger King's absoulutely stellar advertising efforts of late (they even have Arby's trying to copy them: cf the creepy beef hat erection ad the sandwich chain is running). Case in point:

Burger King 'Flame' Cologne for Men

For many English men out there, smelling all beefy used to mean emulating this guy. No longer...

Type n' Sniff

This is only going to distract them from randomly typing the complete works of Shakespeare.
News from South Korea:

Fragrant future beckons for web
"Within a decade the net will be able to deliver smells as fast as it does data, predicts a report. The forecast came in a wide-ranging survey produced by the South Korean government to find out what consumers will want from future technologies...."

I'm still undecided as to the benefits of this. I'm not sure if my investment in the domain name "fatandsweatypeopleinacrowdedroom.com" is going to be a money spinner or dead on arrival.

I'll Be More Impressed When They Manage To Do Wolverines

The end goal
First the Chinese shocked the world by using space missiles to blow up one of their own satellites. Now people's democratic science has made another leap forward:

Chinese Scientists create remote-controlled pigeon
Chinese scientists have succeeded in implanting electrodes in the brain of a pigeon to control the bird’s flight remotely, state media have reported....

Sure Beats a Beer Hat

How have humans lived without these?



To quote the store description:

"...it includes two holsters for tequila, Jack, Jagermeister, whathaveyou (not included); and six molded ammo slots for shotgun shell shot glasses (included). Thermally molded foam liquor carriers and nylon web belt. Adjustable sizing fits most. U.S. made..."

Only $89.99, and so popular it is on back order. Wonders never cease in our technological age!

This Makes Me Happy

One of the problems of the classic British secondary education is that by the time you figure out what you are interested in doing you could well be far down the path of preparation for a completely different career. So at the age of 17 as I swotted up on Bismarck (the man, not the pastry) I could do little but regret biology classes not taken as the urge to become a primatologist washed over me with drenching bathos. Of course, I could have recalibrated my life but I was young, confused, in a hurry to be getting on with my life and massively lazy. So I stuck to history, classics, and French and as a consequence I can barely make myself understood on forays into Quebec, own a copy of Herodotus, and do quite well at pub quizzes. Ho hum. But enough about my squandered dreams, back to the primates:

Ancient chimps 'used stone tools'
Chimpanzees in West Africa used stone tools to crack nuts 4,300 years ago.
The discovery represents the oldest evidence of tool use by our closest evolutionary relative.

The skill could have been inherited from a common ancestor of chimps and humans, the authors say, or learnt from humans by imitation.

Alternatively, humans and chimps may have developed tool use independently, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal reports....(the rest of the story)

Chimps are frigging brilliant.

It is only a matter of time...
(image borrowed from Infinite Chimps)

I Can't Believe I Missed This

I heard about this on Marketplace last night, just as it was drawing to a close: World Usability Day
I think I have found a new web passion.

Engaging The Grand Theft Auto Generation

With the dirtiest stain on the global concience going almost unremarked this election season as we worry about North Korean pop-gun nukes, nefarious Iranians, and bellum uninteruptus in Iraq, I thought I would highlight a story that first emerged last spring about a free video game designed to highlight the ongoing disaster in Darfur.

Working on the theory that in an age of 24 hour ADD news networks and an editorial preference for the purient over the substantial the young and potentially idealistic were lacking opportunities to fully understand the tragic narratives of our times, students at the University of Southern California developed the video game Darfur is Dying in order to offer kids raised on PS2s the means to get engaged. The Darfur game launched last May and was played by more than 700,000 people in its first month online. This lead directly to tens of thousands of emails from players to legislators demanding action on the crisis. The format proved so popular that there is now a game dedicated to the ongoing conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.

The BBC quotes Sheila Moorcroft, a British futures research consultant, as saying these sort of games have a definite impact, noting:

...She (Moorcroft) understood that on one level people could feel that making a game out a conflict situation "trivialises" it. But she added that younger people are not engaged with traditional politics, and additionally get their information about the world in new ways. This actually makes games a good platform for exploring the complexity of an issue, she said.

"An awful lot of what is in the media today is simplistic - it's headlines, it's soundbites," she said. "People don't actually have a chance to explore the complexities of some of the situations of a conflict. In the Darfur Is Dying game, you're someone collecting water and you've just got to use your arrows and space bar to hide from the patrols. Suddenly you realise - as happened, because people started phoning up - this is for real, this is serious."

I'm all in favour of this approach. It is all too easy (and oddly satisfying) to wring one's hands and bemoan the disengagement of youth/the general public/one's neighbours/the media but all that angst does little to change the paradigm one objects to. It is much better to move towards the disengaged with the means of perking interest than try to drag them towards you. Time is too pressing to attack others for not being like you; instead we should surpress our egos a little and keep our eyes on the ultimate goal.