In a coincidence little short of astonishing, last night I came across the cover for an issue of New Scientist published 25 years ago to the week, while this morning on the train I read an article from last week's Economist. The link? Fish. And more specifically, how scientists generally do a bett...

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Romans in general don't seem to be big on charity shops, or second hand. Of course, the Church is the charity, and there are big yellow bins on the streets that harvest used clothing for redistribution.1 For non-clothes, however, there's not much in the way of options to recycle. There is, howev...

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As part of my continuing effort to make myself, rather than advertisers who covet my eyeballs and purchasing power, the customer, I took out a premium subscription to Newsblur. It's an RSS reader that claims to offer "Visual feed reading with intelligence" and I want it to replace Google Reader. Not that there's anything wrong with GReader, apart from the fact that it is from the Don't Be Evil boys themselves. I just like the idea of paying for service, which then gives me a full-on right to demand more of it. That's why I use Pinboard and Instapaper rather than alternatives.

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In my yoof, I do believe I was the only person I knew who knew and liked both Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman. Not merely liked, but was extremely fond of. So I read this young man's take on what he (or a sub) called L.A. Weirdos with great pleasure, and not a little envy at his perspicaciousness....

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Chicken timer Ever a sucker for new productivity porn that will make me effective, successful and attractive to small animals, I'm kicking the tyres of The Pomodoro Technique. In a nutshell: work at something for 25 minutes, resisting all distractions; take a 3-5 minute break; repeat. Every four sessions, take a long break.

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