Lipstick's a bugger to shift off a UV filter.

Try methylated spirits or something similar.

Some luke warm water, a cotton bud, some Caloclear and a lens cloth have worked marvels.
I'm still not convinced all the glitter's off, so I may need to repeat as necessary.

bought verbatim 25gb blu ray discs ages ago they never worked tried burning some photos with rubbish cheap freeware software and it appears to be working perfect

Most men only need to worry about collars and wine glasses.

Is the story behind this as interesting as it sounds?

How to overclock my iphone.

Road grit is actually mostly sugar.

I always thought it looked "sticky" that would explain it!

Electricity in Denmark is approx 2.4x more expensive than the UK.

Better start eating more carrots.

That the Aliens: Colonial Marines game has been put back again until the end of March - I'll get using my hundreds of pounds of vouchers and credit yet!

Aretha Franklyn sings "Give me my propers when you get home" and "Take care, TCB"

Will Smith sings "shooting some b-ball outside of school"

not shooting some meatball

If the Universe was your Christmas Tree:

We now know more planets beyond the solar system than there are Christmas balls on your tree. The current count is at 358 exoplanets, and counting.
If the planet was shrinked to the size of a Christmas ball, it would be an even smoother ball than the others.
Geometrically: Mount Everest (8 km) or the Marianas Trench (11km) are small imperfections relative to the planet’s 12,000 km diameter. It’s an imperfection of less than 0,01%

“Earth is not spherical, it’s an oblate spheroid”, some Grinch may say. Indeed, it’s wider in the equator, but even then the deviation from a perfect sphere is of less than 0,04%

Still with the Christmas ball: if an 8 centimeters one represented Earth and the nearest ball represented the nearest known exoplanet – Epsilon Eridani b, 10.5 light-years away – then for the distance between them to be represented in the same scale as the size of Earth’s Christmas ball, the other one should be at approximately 630,000 km. Almost double the distance from Earth to the Moon. Epsilon Eridani b is quite far from here

Now, if the star at the top of the tree represented our Sun, 1,392,000 km in diameter, and the star at the top of your neighbor’s tree – say, 50 meters away – represented the nerest star system, Alpha Centauri at 4 light-years of distance; then the size of our Sun-star to be on the same scale it would have to be 0,74 micrometers large. From 1,4 million kilometers to more than 100 times smaller than the width of a hair, that’s how small the star should be for it to be in the same scale as the distance between it and the neighbor’s Christmas star.
It’s a very big Universe. It’s also a very old one:

Let’s say your big, nice Christmas tree took ten years to grow. If the moment in which it was sown was the Big Bang, 13,7 billion years ago, and the rest of its history was compressed to present day, then the Christmas tree would have known the first primates only in the last few hours, and all our recorded history would have ocurred in the last minute. Ten years growing from a seed, and all our human adventures would have been instants played in a tiny little part of this huge tree full of balls and stars.

via Forgetomori

The Chrismas Tree analogy is essentially a rehash of stuff already put into other forms (eg earth the size of a ping-pong ball or golf ball). My fave is the fact that our solar system cannot be put to any reasonable scale. Will post this up once I find the info I'm after.

Still interesting nonetheless.



Which is why I'm largely not convinced by global warming. The earth would be ten years old and in a single minute, we can alter its climate?

Bryson, B (2003). A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York: Random House. 24.