maynardcase.co.uk linkfest

I rather like the idea of a bunch of tired scientists and geeks struggling to come up with names for Mars features - my favourite is probably “Engelbert Humperdinck”…

Turn your hamster into a fighting machine

Get yourself an amazingly neat pocket organiser - all you need is a printer and some scissors…

Mathematics can be interesting, particularly when you can dip into tiny fragments of clear, concise pages like these

Modern Art rendered in Lego

The UK’s first internet-only petrol retailer (cheers Baz)

If you dig a really big hole, where do you get to?

Yet another link explaining cricket for novices

Odd Names

“You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he is out. When they are all out, the side that’s been out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.

When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out, he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who are all out all the time, and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and all the men have been out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game.”

– as stolen from somewhere on the internet. If you are looking for a more detailed version of the rules, you might find this Wikipedia article helpful…

The experience of two paramedics

Fire crews recruited to hand out leaflets, make Bush look good

Google maps has a before/after satellite view (click between the Satellite and Katrina buttons); more detailed photos from the NOAA

Bruce Schneier: ” The aftermath of this tragedy reflects on how poorly we’ve been spending our homeland security dollars”

BBC reports, including how to repair the levees.

Sunday only, I’m afraid, so no Lemon Jelly or Iron Maiden reviews here. We arrived after a two mile trek from the car park to see All-American Rejects on the main stage, trying desperately hard to warm up the crowd. After a while having someone screaming, “I love LEEEEDS”, at you lessens the impact. They did quite well, though, and there were some good melodic tracks there. After that there was a bit of a gap; we saw some unsigned folks, listened to some crazy metal/trumpets/saxophone band whose name I’ve forgotten, then a spot of Roots Manuva. You can tell there’s a big set of speakers behind that main stage; the bass was pretty impressive. I’ve never had my head actually vibrate before.

We made our way over to watch The Others (singer’s catchphrase: “bless your little cotton socks”), who were rocking pretty hard but I didn’t recognise any tunes. This was followed by Ed Byrne in the comedy tent, who is absolutely brilliant, even if his Carphone Warehouse radio ads are extraordinarily annoying.

Quickly back to the main stage to catch the end of the Charlatans, who were… well, rather uninspiring. They managed to leave the stage before anyone noticed, which is pretty impressive. We then had Razorlight who was pretty good - some good performances of some catchy tracks. Kings of Leon were on next, who I’m not so keen on but had more songs that I recognised than I had expected. Finally, the headliners: the mighty Foo Fighters.

This band was essentially why we’d forked out for tickets. They played a blinder, a great set with a few of the new tracks but mostly the old favourites re-worked for a great live show. Dave Grohl chatted amiably to the audience, was genuinely concerned that people didn’t get stomped in the mosh pit, and gave a lot of energy out to the crowd who responded in kind.

All in all, it was even worth waiting an hour in the car to get out of the car park at the end of the night…

Relativity, Uncertainty, Incompleteness and Undecidability is an interesting article giving a laymans overview of some of the fundamental limitations of observation and logic. There’s some discussion of an earlier version of the article at Kuro5hin.