Stories about the health benefits of chocolate roll around every so often. This article in Scientific American cites a study of elderly Dutch men that suggests that high levels of cocoa consumption (from ordinary foods including chocolate bars and spreads) can lower the risk of cardiovascular and other diseases by as much as 50 per [...]

Some time last year, Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, otherwise known as Red Ken, got into a tiff with a reporter from the Evening Standard. The reporter happened to be Jewish, yet Livingstone’s insult of choice was to liken him to a guard in a Nazi concentration camp.
Okay, so that’s bad. Its an arrogant [...]

Iraq is on the verge of civil war and no one seems to care - the Chelsea game makes bigger news. There has been some reporting of this and if you type ‘Iraq’ and ‘civil war’ into a search engine there’s certainly plenty of info out there but it doesn’t seem to be getting the [...]

I haven’t checked this out yet so apologies if any of it is based on wrong information. Boing Boing is carrying a story that the Australian Copyright Agency wants to collect money from schools for use of the web. Boing Boing has already described some of the reasons why this is wrong and unworkable. Firstly, [...]

I recently wrote a review of Resurrection Blues, an Arthur Miller play staged at the Old Vic. One of my chief criticisms was that the main character fluffed his lines several times. A friend has just informed me that the play was in preview at the time, which may partly explain this. I have since [...]

I am so proud of myself right now! Yesterday I skated 8.1 miles around Kensington and Chelsea (see the route here). I didn’t bail out at the half way point like I thought I might - I actually made it all the way to the end. My legs were like jelly when I was done [...]

It might appear that I’ve been ignoring my blog for a few days but that’s not true. I’ve been hard at work generating raw material for the blog so I can write about my life rather than relying on snippets from the newspaper. Okay, so the reality is I didn’t feel inspired to blog but [...]

Do chickens have teeth? Well according to Scientific American some of them do - alligator teeth specifically.

I blogged recently about the discovery of long-lost minutes from the Royal Society from the days of Isaac Newtown and Robert Hooke but the minutes were expected to fetch £1m at auction and the Royal Society was trying to raise last-minute funds to buy them. I said at the time that I couldn’t figure out [...]

Britain started converting to metric in 1965 and never finished. Road signs were meant to be converted to metric by 1973 but never were. Everything is a weird hybrid system: temperature is celcius but windspeed is miles per hour; you can choose whether to buy your milk in litres or pints but you buy your [...]