After being continually pestered to put my ‘hilarious’ lecture notes on the web, I’ve put a couple of lectures on here. They’re on as posts for the days we had the lectures, and are also directly linked to under “My Med-School Work” in the bar on the right. Note that these were never intended to be particularly funny, just to amuse me when I was bored, and that I wouldn’t have put them on here if they hadn’t found their way around most of my year group. Enjoy.

Update: Tuesday, 25th January 2005
You can now find the lecture notes under the Med-School work section – they no longer appear in the blog itself.

Huygens sends first Titan images (BBC News)

This is all absolutely fascinating. And there’s some amazing pictures too. Stunning.

Where poverty means living on just £3 a month (Times)

She lives in a shack in a slum on the edge of one of Nairobi’s most affluent suburbs, existing on £3 a month. From her home she can see the Mercedes-Benz and BMW cars of her neighbours — a mixture of government ministers, diplomats and senior UN officials.

How do these government ministers, diplomats and senior UN officials live with themselves? I couldn’t.

Can this service put pub quiz at risk? (Times)

It will, before long, kill the pub quiz, as more devious users have realised. Publicans will be forced to go to draconian and expensive lengths, buying scanners and metal detectors.

I’d be worrying more about the public examination system, but maybe that’s just me.

The very nasty party (Guardian)

Every so often, something happens – an investigative documentary, a social worker’s report into the murder of a child – that lifts up the British carpet to show the stamped-down filth. This is such a moment. While Harry’s costume was shocking, it seems equally astonishing that, in 2005, there is a section of society in which it is not considered odd for a teenager to throw a party with the theme of “colonial or native” and at which, according to some reports, young male guests blacked up their faces.

Once again, you read it here first, several days ago:

What the heck was he, and the second-in-line to the throne, doing attending a ‘Natives and Colonials’ fancy dress party? If ‘Natives and Colonials’ isn’t a perjorative theme for a party, I’m not entirely sure what is.

The similarities between the Guardian brain and my own are actually beginning to frighten me. Could I be any more of a ‘liberal wet’?

Craig Barrett rocks out with Aerosmith… no really (Silicon)

Just…why? Why didn’t Craig Barrett‘s advisers think that this was a bad idea? Because, let me tell you, it was. The image is burned into my mind for ever. Craig Barrett and Steve Tyler. Is there any more unlikely duet?

Yahoo, Microsoft Gain On Google (Techweb)

I told you MSN Search was one to watch… I didn’t realise it would be hitting the headlines quite so quickly, though. I think that it could make serious inroads into Google’s dominance by the end of the year.

On another topic altogether, this is my 200th post. If you’ve been with me from the beginning, then thank you for keeping reading. And if not… well never mind, I’m sure there’ll be another 200 posts for you to read in the future. Or else, have a flick through the archives.

Happy 200th!

Busted have broken up for good (Digital Spy)

I won’t be losing any sleep over this, but it just reminded me of an acquaintance who, when asked what kind of music he liked, said ‘Rock’, citing Busted as his favourite band. This provided much amusement for me, and still does.

I just finished reading this a couple of days ago. It was a fairly enjoyable book, but it certainly wasn’t as fantastic as some of the newspaper reviews would have you believe. There were parts that stretched believability to new lengths, and the whole thing was fairly predictable. Having said that, the mix of fact, superstition, legend, and fiction works surprisingly well, and I did learn a thing or two about art from reading this book. It was just disappointing that the author felt the need to leave so many clues as to the ending that it was hard not to guess.

It is something of a formulaic bestseller, a sentiment beautifully expressed by Mark Lawson:

Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, 450 pages of irritatingly gripping tosh…

It’s certainly worth reading, but don’t expect a masterpiece.

I read the ebook version, since most of the books I read now are in that format. It’s one of the many uses of my Pocket PC. But you can buy the paperback from Amazon.co.uk by clicking on the graphic above.

And if you want to join the sjhoward.co.uk book club (!), or basically just read the same books as me, I’m currently working my way through Shooting History: A Personal Journey by Jon Snow, The Guardian Year 2004 edited by Martin Woollacott, and The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (which is an absolute bargain).

Are the league tables ‘absurd’? (BBC News)

In a word, ‘yes’.

And from now on, anyone who achieves a distinction in the ABC Certificate in cake decoration, for example, will get 55 points, compared to 52 for an A-grade GCSE.

I’m not an expert in cake decorating, so perhaps I’m misjudging this. Perhaps cake decorating is a very difficult skill which requires the same amount of training, learning, and general skill as a two-year mathematics qualification. However, I do know about IT and maths:

One school, for example, reported that the weekly lesson time taken up by GCSE maths, GCSE English and GNVQ information technology was the same: four hours.

Of the students taking them, 25% gained a grade C or above in English and 18% in maths – and 80% in the GNVQ.

Either the GNVQ was four times easier than the maths GCSE or its teachers were four times as good, he concluded.

But – “incredibly” – the GNVQ is worth the equivalent of four higher-grade GCSEs.

“So making the four hours per week studying IT sixteen times as effective in boosting the school’s league table position as the four hours spent studying maths.”

Is there something major I’m missing here, or has the education system in this country gone completely insane? Clearly, Stephen Twigg thinks I’m missing something:

This is a significant step forward in recognising the achievements of all pupils

I think he’d support an ‘Everybody Gets a Trophy Day’, too. I think the Independent Schools Council has got it more spot-on:

This is absurd … This is not even a case of trying to compare apples and pears: it is comparing apples with candy floss.”