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I ventured into Sheffield city centre today for the second year in succession to watch the Tour of Britain stage finish. The weather was much worse than last time - wet and not very warm - but there were still good crowds, plus they were giving out free hats which kept the thick off 
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I managed to get a better vantage point this year, very close to the finish line. It's a shame that the shutter speed on my camera wasn't quick enough to cope with the rapid riders in the dull conditions, but my photo gallery is available for your persual nonetheless.
The stage was won by Quickstep rider Filippo Pozzato, with CSC's Martin Pedersen retaining the yellow jersey.
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To make the day even better, cycling commentating legend David Duffield was at the finish, providing the commentary for the spectators. I couldn't pass up the opportunity so I went and asked for an autograph after he finished his duties. Despite him having literally just finished his work, he was as friendly and polite as he always is on TV, a great man indeed. I will keep my Tour programme safe from now on!
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I was somewhat bemused to see a TV advert tonight for some crappy 50p weekly gossip mag (I forget the name) - featuring Jeffrey Archer in a embarrassing scene where he's wired up to someone feeding him conversation lines from the aforementioned magazine.
You'd have thought that the man would have had his fill of cringe-worthy public humiliation by now, wouldn't you? His book sales must be on the slide…
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I was most pleased to read last week that new research (funded by the Tea Council but still apparently independant) showed that drinking three to four cups of tea a day can in fact be very good for you. The flavonoids in the tea apparently help to protect against heart disease and may also protect against some cancers.
Like many others I had always been a bit concerned about the supposed diuretic effect of tea, whilst not really believing it. This research shows that, even with very strong tea and coffee, you will still experience a net effect of rehydration.
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I've found some pretty geeky ways to waste time over the years, but this takes the biscuit.
The Stardust@Home project, run by the University of California at Berkeley, aims to find a small number of star dust particles which (may) have become embedded in an aerogel collector on the Stardust spacecraft as it passed through the tail of the Wild 2 comet. Since this task would take many years if they analysed the data themselves, they have invited members of the public to help. Having viewed a short introduction and taken a test, one can view slides from microscope images of the collector and report if there looks to be a possible particle present.
Obviously the vast majority of people would find the prospect of this sort of analysis incredibly boring and mind-numbing, but I'm a strange person and I'm sticking with it. I've viewed about 200 slides over the past four days - but the current leading participant has viewed nearly 10,000 slides in the two weeks the project has been running! Whilst this is impressive, it's unlikely that these were all viewed by a single person, as many people can login using the same details simultaneously (to allow a team effort).
If you're feeling…brave and very very geeky, then wander over to http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu to see it for yourself.
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Does anyone else spot the flaw in this excerpt from an article printed by my local newspaper today:
The mother of a motorcyclist killed in a high-speed smash at a Sheffield accident blackspot has called on the council to improve safety at the junction. Jobless Robert Foster, aged 36, who was speeding and over the drink-drive limit, died on April 24 after he hit a Vauxhall Astra at the junction of Arundel Road and Station Road, Chapeltown. His mother Doreen Foster, of Station Road, said the junction was a well-known blackspot and she did not want other families to lose loved ones. "I think the council should do something about it," she said.
I'm sure it seems like a heartless point of view to the family, but even if the junction isn't as safe as it could be then this unfortunate person didn't exactly give themselves the best possible chance did they? Sometimes people just have to admit that their accident was no-one else's fault but their own - despite what the TV might say, you can't find someone to sue for every mistake you make. We're not quite the USA yet…
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No, I don't mean "latex"…
For those who don't know, LaTeX is a typesetting program, what the uninitiated might call a word processor. This isn't really a good time to have a discussion on the relative merits of LaTeX compared to Word - go here to enter that discussion…
Anyhoo - on my idle trawling of the net I noticed that there seems to be a dearth of LaTeX-related geeky t-shirts available, where the discussions that take place on the PhD Comics forum suggest that there might be a bit of demand for them. Hence I felt it would only be polite to oblige:
Click here to visit my LaTeX merchandise store at cafepress.com!
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