Best burger in Britain?

This is actually my TripAdvisor review of The Dandy Lion pub in Bradford-on-Avon but I wanted to try out my new BlogPress App...

We went to The Dandy Lion on a Sunday evening (July 3rd 2011) and were mightily impressed. The place was very calm and relaxed (my brother had his 3 month old baby with him and this was no bother) and the bar staff were friendly and helpful. The menu was excellent and many tasty options were on offer.


I opted for the burger and it was outstanding. A definite contender for best pub burger in Britain IMHO! I asked for the chunky triple-cooked chips instead of the fries and I heartily recommend that option. (It's not a listed menu alternative but they were happy to oblige.) The chips came beautifully presented in a little bucket, adding to the overall charm.

Starter (camembert) and desert (sticky toffee pudding) were also fantastic. The service wasn't the speediest, so perhaps not the place for the impatient, but you can't rush good food, especially at these bargain prices!

Location:The Dandy Lion, Bradford-on-Avon

Death of a Monster

I used to work in a concrete behemoth, named Boldrewood. Over the past
few weeks, mechanical monsters have been nibbling away at this giant,
slowly reducing it to rubble. This picture was taken a couple of weeks
ago. My office was in that massive gap. I'm wondering how much longer it will last! (There's much less left now.)

So long, SETI?

Times are tough and belts are being tightened everywhere with unwelcome consequences and closures. One such closure is some of the telescopes engaged in SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. The iconic dishes scanning the skies for alien messages, so beloved by cheesy Science Fiction filmmakers, will scan the sky no more. Or at least, some of them won't. And perhaps more will be canned without private investment.

But does SETI represent a worthwhile use of money in such tough times? Or would only Hollywood miss SETI? (Not for long - I'm sure they can find some other stereotype to fill that particular niche.) Is SETI really anything than a rather expensive waste of time?

The chances of there being extraterrestrial life close enough to us in both time and space to detect their signals is pretty darn small. And even IF such life exists, they have to be emittng signals. And even IF they are, they have to be using a technology that we can detect and recognise. And even if they are

doing that, we have to be explicitly looking for that specific technology in the right part of the sky. Then, if we find a signal, what then? Presumably they are many light years away and would need all the same ifs in place on their side to see any messages from us, making communication incredibly difficult at best.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of science and endeavour for the sake of knowledge alone, and finding evidence of alien life would be cool, but the also has to be a cost/analysis of some kind. There is too much quality science that can be done on a budget - too many interesting questions to answer - to fritter money on an exercise that is both likely to fail and unlikely to be of any use even if it succeeds. Furthermore, there are too many immediate issues and worthy causes in our world without encouraging philanthropists to direct their cash to an off-world whimsy.

I'm not saying we should scrap SETI completely. It's just that it will probably take years to find anything - if it ever does - and then many more years before anything can be done with the discovery. Given this, slowing things down two-, four- or even ten-fold with a bit of a budget cut is not really the end of the world.

Making Britain shite

So, a bunch of mindless, selfish bastards have decided to join the striking bin men in their attempt to turn Britain into a craphole by looting and burning their way through various bits of the capital.

What are these people thinking?! How can they possibly think that they are doing anything except hurting their communities and, ultimately themselves. It's the average Joe who is going to find themself out of work because their shop's been ransacked, lacking public services because of the cost of the police operation and cleanup, or paying higher insurance premiums etc. because of all the claims.

I hope the little shits involved all get caught and given life sentences of community service. For the rest of their lives, they should be forced back onto the streets to clean, tidy and mend stuff. And burn with shame. (Fat chance.)

iPad therefore I blog (again)

Well, this is my first blog for a while and the first using my new iPad. I had a quick look for a blogging App but, being too cheap to buy one, and failing to find a free one, I soon gave up on that and thought I'd go raw and do it in Safari.

I didn't realise, however, quite how raw I would have to be. It seems that the main blogger "Compose" window does not really like Safari on the iPad, or perhaps visa versa, and so I am limited to writing in raw HTML. Not a big problem - and I'm sure I'll develop good tagging skills - but it does slow down formatting somewhat.

Worse, it seems impossible to add any photos. I tried linking from a URL but that did not work. Perhaps coding the link directly in HTML will work but this is not really desirable. Oh well, here goes...

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Hmmm. Either the Preview has failed or my HTML did - or the Picasa link is not a happy one to use. I guess I will just publish and see. Perhaps I should just stop being so cheap and buy a decent blogging App...

Asimov rules!

So, today's candidate for Great Man of the Day is Isaac Asimov (2(?) January 1920 - 6 April 1992): scientist, science fiction writer, humanist and humorist? I like the fact that he called himself "humanist" because he "atheist" defined what he didn't believe in, rather than what he did.

I was already a fan of the Robot, Foundation and 2001 series but he did loads of other cool stuff that I had no idea about. I never realised he was president of the American Humanist Association, or wrote books of jokes! The thing that really caught my eye, given my original motivation for quest, was that he suggested his own calendar reform “called the World Season Calendar. It divides the year into four seasons (named A–D) of 13 weeks (91 days) each. This allows days to be named, e.g., “D-73” instead of December 1. An extra Year Day is added for a total of 365 days.” [Quoted from Wikipedia.]

I quite like this idea - must look into it some more. (And track down some of his religious jokes!

Happy Erlang Day

2011 is upon us and I feel renewed enthusiasm to embark on an exercise of folly. One such folly is the development of an atheist/rationalist calendar.

I did think such a calendar should really start on December 22/23, following the Winter Solstice. At this time, the tilt of the Earth is such that the days once again begin to get longer. This, of course, is a very Northern-hemisphere-biased view of the world, so maybe it is not so appropriate after all. I am fairly convinced that the calendar should be divided into four quarters, divided at each Solstice and Equinox. (Perhaps an Equinox would be a more neutral start for the year?) But how best to divide the rest of the time is more tricky.

Then we have the problem of what the year should be? It obviously cannot relate to the alleged year of Jesus' birth but what event, which must by definition occur in recorded history, is defining enough to take this place as defining Year 1.

One thing that can be modified quite easily though, is the association of days with Saints. I have therefore decided to look each day for an important non-religious scientific figure. Not sure how long this will last.

Today is the turn of Dane Agner Krarup Erlang (January 1, 1878 – February 3, 1929) who was a big man in the field of communications and is credited with the invention of Queueing Theory (used in everything from telecommunications to hospitals to computer programming) and Traffic Engineering, which is heavily used in communication network designs, including the design of this here internet. He even got a Unit of Measurement named after him - the Erlang - although my brain is not sufficiently awake to make sense of what this is. It has something to do with communication. He also has his own statistical probability distribution and a programming language named after him. That beats three miracles in my book. Well done A. K. Erlang.

Erlang shares this day with St Basil "the Great" of Caesarea who, from his Wikipedia entry, seemed to be quite a nice chap. Basil does also seem to be partially responsible for the Christianity fixing the decision that Christ was divine, which appears to have been a matter of some debate for the preceding three centuries. One cannot help but speculate what subsequent conflicts might have been resolved, and how much easier religious harmony might be, had this decision gone the other way. Oh well. I have a soft spot for people who help poor and underprivileged.