the corner office

Its huge mine hospital is eerily silent, its long corridors punctured by rays of ­sunlight coming through smashed windows

... that would be the hospital in which I was born.

The world has lost a great man. I find myself put off by both the hagiography and the rending of garments; the real Madiba was more interesting and has more to teach us than the messiah now set before us.

It seems to me that the loss is also symbolic. In his passing, people mourn not only the man, but also the promise of the 90's, long gone. As people honour the stature and dignity of this extraordinary man, it throws into even starker contrast the lack thereof in his successors. Where next?

We weren't much affected by the Big Storm (not The Great Storm but still Big), other than that the trains were out of action and we have a lot more leaves on our patio.

I thought London was mostly unscathed, but there were some scary pictures doing the rounds today. The news was showing pictures of a Jaguar crushed and impaled by a tree - a colleague of mine missed that falling tree by 5 seconds!

For Halloween someone's gotten a Bilbo Baggins costume. So this evening, here I am, sitting with the laptop, and someone comes up, sticks Sting to my throat and says "Surrender..."

The story of Lauren Marbe leaves you torn between being impressed by how a girl with an IQ of 161 could be so down to earth and normal, and wanting to get all totalitarian and insist that her insane processing power be locked in room and harnessed for the good of the planet (or some definition thereof, at least).

But then IQ is an odd thing. Physicist Richard Feynman was arguably one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, and he apparently had an IQ of 125. I'm lucky to be able to work with some ridiculously bright people, and every now and then I go back and take some inspiration (consolation!) from this clip:

An interesting aside: in the clip Feynman talks about how he and mathematician John Tukey had entirely different 'multitasking' abilities while counting to a minute. John Tukey in turn is credited as the person who invented the computing term 'bit'.

So one interesting fact which I'm pretty sure I once knew and since forgot, is that the archaic meaning of the word "slut" was a slovenly and untidy woman, and didn't quite mean what it means today.

Not that it helps Godfrey Bloom, who should've known better, and is probably not the kind of fellow I'd care to invite for tea. Having said that, I'd never vote for UKIP, but by golly they're by far the most entertaining of the lot.

(Update: and actually, Dot Wordsworth at the Spectator weighs in - both meanings are archaic and ran parallel. So there)

I changed the title of my previous post to be less by-the-by. I wondered also if it wasn't more correct (if I was going to nit-pick myself), instead of the seen-vs-unseen reference, to point to the law of unintended consequences. And I know that sentence's grammar is awful, but I can say it in my head in a way that makes it sound just right. I now get recursive.

Speaking of seriously un-freakin'-intended consequences, the Walkie Talkie is an impressive building, but it seems it's a magnifying glass too.

When you say 'atrocities are being committed in Syria, Something Must Be Done', then of course you look like a heartless isolationist to say no. But if you ask 'atrocities are being committed in Syria, would dropping bombs on the place make things better or worse?' then it's not so clear-cut.

I like the idea of going in there and bombing the murderous bastard to hell and back. But I like the idea of lots of things that would not necessarily work out so well in reality.

And I get the argument that letting people get away with using chemical weapons is not a good thing. But again, doing something for the sake of doing something isn't a good thing either, when you don't know what the consequences might be.

Steve Ballmer announces his retirement, Microsoft shares skyrocket. One dude just added $18 billion to Microsoft's value (a pertinent point to make when people huff about how much CEOs are paid).

My first reaction on deciding to blog about this was to find the Dance Monkey Boy Dance YouTube clip. Turns out the BBC had the same idea.

If the picture on the cover of West Cornwall Pasty Co bags is drawn to scale then that's not a pirate eating a pasty, it's a friggin' leprechaun.