John's posterous

The first use on record of camera surveillance in public space was that of the Metropolitan Police at Trafalgar Square in 1960. They used two temporary cameras to monitor crowds during the arrival of the Thai royal family and on Guy Fawkes Day.

So lemme get this right: the first use of CCTV-like surveillance was on Guy Fawkes Day? The day when more "V for Vendetta" "Governments should be afraid of their people" quotes appear on the internet than the rest of the year combined? Oh, the irony...

TAIPEI - Microsoft has launched a Windows 7-themed restaurant in Taipei to promote its new operating system, an official with the US firm said Monday, on the eve of Asia's biggest IT trade show.

The restaurant previously named "100 Seafood" has been renamed "77 Concept Store" and features seven technology-themed dishes such as "Electronic Beancurd", priced at 77 Taiwan dollars (2.40 US), the official said.

 

A bit more of a "stretch" than the Pantone Hotel, it seems, but it may well have been for the duration of the trade show mentioned (Computex Tapei)

The mystery of how the world's largest living reptile -- the estuarine crocodile -- has come to occupy so many South Pacific islands separated by huge stretches of ocean despite being a poor swimmer has at last been solved by a group of Australian ecologists.

Publishing their new study in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Animal Ecology, they say that like a surfer catching a wave, the crocodiles ride ocean currents to cross large areas of open sea.

I did attempt to resist the world 'gnarly' here. I really did.

“You know, I’m their parent, I’m not their best friend,” Mr. Marzovilla noted. “I have a duty to mold and teach.”

Olivia, the 11-year-old, was looking at the menu. “How does fried rabbit taste?” she asked.

“Very good,” advised Domenico.

SYDNEY — Legendary rocker Lou Reed and artist wife Laurie Anderson will next month bring one of the most bizarre performances to Sydney's Opera House -- a recital for dogs, largely inaudible to human ears.

At a press conference on Friday the pair said their programme for Sydney's Vivid LIVE arts festival includes an eclectic mix of heavy guitar music, martial arts and music for dogs.

Multimedia artist Anderson said the inspiration for the canine performance came while she was backstage before an event and thought: "Wouldn't it be great, if you were playing a concert and you look out and you see all dogs?

That last sentence makes me smile.

The performance has "Top ten YouTube clip" written all over it - as long as they film the audience that is.

DDB China Group took over a busy pedestrian crossing and placed a large canvas featuring a leafless tree on the road. On either side of the crossing were sponge cushions soaked in green environmentally-friendly washable and quick dry paint.

As pedestrians walked towards the crossing they stepped on the sponges and the soles of their feet made footprints on the tree. Each green footprint added to the canvas like leaves growing on a bare tree. By walking they could create a greener environment

Oh the symbolism.

They examined 244,388 U.S. death certificates issued between 1979 and 2006, focusing on fatal medication errors as the recorded primary cause of death. They compared the observed number of deaths in July with the number of expected events in a given month for a given year. They also looked at whether there were any differences between deaths in and out of hospitals in July as well as between counties with and without teaching hospitals.

The authors found that inside medical institutions, fatal medication errors spiked in July and in no other month. This July peak was visible only in counties with teaching hospitals. In these counties, the number of July deaths from medication errors was 10 percent above the expected level. No similar link was observed for other causes of death or for deaths outside hospitals.

So if you're planning on being sick, try to do it in June...

To return to the city's contradictions - did you know that one of its proudest landmarks, the 67-year-old cantilever bridge that spans the Hooghly river is reportedly under threat... from saliva? More than 100,000 vehicles and millions of pedestrians use the bridge every day.

The latter seem to be the culprits. "[The] commuters' collective spit power has reduced the thickness of steel hoods protecting the [bridge's] pillars from six to three millimetres since 2007," a newspaper reports. The tobacco-laced spit, according to a "forensic sciences expert" interviewed by the paper, contains "slaked lime combined with catechu and tannin [that] form an organic compound that acts as a corrosive agent on a steel surface". The Howrah bridge must be the first in the world that is being chewed up by spit.

Blighty is an English slang term for Britain, deriving from the Hindustani word vilāyatī (विलायती) (pronounced bilāti in many Indian dialects and languages) meaning a foreigner, a word which itself is derived from the Arabic word wilayat, meaning a kingdom or ministry.^{[citation needed]}

The term was more common in the latter days of the British Raj, but can now be considered self-consciously archaic and, when used by some speakers younger than the dissolution of the British Empire, can be intended slightly ironically. It is more commonly used as a term of endearment by the expatriate British community, or those on holiday to refer to home.

In their 1886 Anglo-Indian dictionary, Hobson-Jobson, Sir Henry Yule and Arthur C. Burnell explained that the word came to be used in British India for several things the British had brought into the country, such as the tomato (bilayati baingan, whose literal translation is "foreign aubergine") and soda water, which was commonly called bilayati pani ("foreign water").