Dithyramb

The impact NASA has had on different fields

William Shatner gives a fascinating small presentation of the impact NASA has had on different fields and on how that improves life here on earth.

Untappd

Untappd is to beer, what Foursquare is to locations...

It's a great app for getting to know beers and breweries, and interact with your drinking buddies.

You can also, similarly to Foursquare earn badges. All in all a fun site and app.

 

All roads lead to...

...ROME!!!

ORBIS - The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World. Using modern technology to understand premodern history.

Why people lie...

...an exceedingly interesting question. This topic is covered by the well-renown professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, Dan Ariely in an article in  WSJ - Why we lie

I'm currently reading his fascinating, highly original and thought-provoking book Predicably Irrational. His WSJ article on lying covers some of the themes of his new book, which I'm also looking forward to reading, entitled The Honest Truth about Dishonesty: How we lie to everyone - especially ourselves

Bounty II

Today I went to see the ship that was used in the 1962 movie "Mutiny on the Bounty" with Marlon Brandon. The ship was anchored in the Oslo Harbour.

The ship is about 1/3 larger than the original and has some exceedingly beautiful lines as she lay still in the water. The ship was also feautured in the movies Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. It's hard to fathom that these ships appear so much bigger in movies than they actually were. I remember when I was young and first saw a replica of Francis Drake's The Golden Hind at St Mary Overie Dock and thought how exceedingly brave and courageous these men were to circumnavigate the world in such a tiny, yet astonisighly beautiful ship.

 

Pictures of a flowery downtown Oslo

These are some photos that I took walking in downtown Oslo earlier today.

The Henrik Ibsen statue outside the Ibsen Museum

Outside the Town Hall

...and in most buildings flowers are put into every nook and cranny...

Spikersuppa

 

Oslo Domkirke


  Youngstorget

Flower in the Crannied Wall

Alfred Lord Tennyson, (1809-1892)

                                Flower in the crannied wall,
                                I pluck you out of the crannies,
                                I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
                                Little flower -but if I could understand
                                What you are, root and all, and all in all,
                                I should know what God and man is.

Join the...

A classic form Not the Nine O'Clock News

 

A Capella version of Rammsteins Du Hast

Via Izismile

 

Delightful and ingenius

Fight of the century: Keynes vs Hayek round 2

Quite enjoyable, even though I hate rap!

BBCs list of top 100 must read books

In answer to the meme going around.

The BBC reckons that people have normally only read 6 of these books.

Put in bold those works that you have read. Italicize those that you have started. and then tag other nerds to do the same...

Well here's my list.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series –
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Not too bad I reckon...plenty of childrens books to add to my score :-)

 

Quiz time again...the Steampunk style test...

Your result for The Steampunk Style Test...

The Aristocrat

46% Elegant, 45% Technological, 17% Historical, 36% Adventurous and 43% Playful!

You are the Aristocrat, the embodiment of steampunk elegance and poise. For you, dressing steampunk is first and foremost about simply looking good, with accessories and details to follow. However, this does not mean that you ignore the demands of creating a “steampunk look.” Your outfits weave together a balance between technology and style, and between period accuracy and beautiful anachronism. While your fashion inspiration may come from anywhere across the Victorian social spectrum, you always find a way to make your outfit beautiful. You will probably be found in the clothes of the steam age elite simply because of the greater elegance available to them. Chances are you dress this way because you like it, and you would still dress in this manner even if steampunk was not a popular interest.

Try our other Steampunk test here.

Take The Steampunk Style Test at HelloQuizzy

Charles Darwin

Bulletproof corsets...? Anyone...

via Boing Boing

...fancy a bulletproof corset?

Speed limits and how to enforce them...

You got to love this...hopefully...coming to a town near you...

The End is neigh or is it?

On the election

Feeling a bit depressed. There were no acceptable, semi-decent candidates for president of the USA. There are no winners, only losers: America and the rest of the free world.

My condolences

On that note:

It's the final countdown (Cello-style)

Radikalen

There is a new swedish e-zine for fans of Ayn Rand, Radikalen. The first issue is available now. (PDF)

The Financial Crisis

The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights has a web page with a collection of  articles, op-eds and videos relating to the financial crisis.

Interview with Tore Boeckmann

Via Noodlefood

An Interview with Tore Boeckmann: Ayn Rand's Creativity

Akershus Fortress

The fine weather continues. Yesterday I spent some time at Akershus Fortress, (Oslo, Norway) a castle that was first buildt in the 1290s and is still "used" by the Norwegian army.

View Larger Map

Priestly ascension - reaching "heaven" by balloon?

Brazil priest carried aloft by 100s of ballons disappear

Watch out!...

Penis-snatchers about!

As Buffy says "Note to self.:Religion: Freaky"

The New Opera House in Oslo

The new opera house in Norway has finally opened.
Here are some photos of the building that I took today.

Still hope for Firefly-fans?

Via Noodlefood: an interview with josh wheedon.

Tintin to be censured

Herge's Tintin the classic Belgian cartoon is to be censured due to its racist "slurs".

"Until last week, we were unaware of the existence of Tintin in the Congo, first published in 1931, but are now keen to read it. A trawl of London bookshops failed to turn up a copy, for a simple reason: a statement from the Commission for Racial Equality, calling the book “racist claptrap” which should be removed from bookshops, has made Tintin in the Congo into a bestseller."