Geek alert: this is something I've been paying attention to for a few years now. I get fascinated by the care and planning that goes into all these little systems that no-one normally notices. When this kicks off on the Tube I get terrifyingly close to trainspotting *shudder*. Anyway:

In the UK there's a fairly even mixture of working and non-working buttons.

Our pelican and puffin crossings (great names, huh?) are button-operated crossings that span a road, nowhere near a junction. When you press the button they stop the traffic and signal pedestrians to cross. Most have limits on how often they'll stop traffic in a given time period, so the button press is often followed by a delay while the timer runs out. They never stop traffic unless the button is pressed. After some experimentation, I've found some which change only if the button is pressed and when a nearby junction is in a specific lighting state.

At junctions, especially crossroads, the traffic lights usually follow a fixed pattern to make traffic flow interact nicely with other junctions nearby. These crossings often do have buttons, but they're just for show; the safe crossing times are dictated by the changing traffic flow through the junction. If you need to cross more than one road there's usually a preferred direction to walk around the junction. A junction I cross regularly is timed so that if pedestrians go walk around it anticlockwise, each lane of traffic they need to cross will be stopped in the right sequence. Walking around anticlockwise is far, far slower because after crossing each lane you have to wait for an almost complete cycle of the junction before your next lane is safe to cross.

A town planner friend of mine also once told me that in Kent (in southern England) there's at least one long road where all the pedestrian crossings and junctions are timed together. The idea is that if you drive along the road between 25 - 30mph, you'll only get stopped at one crossing. After you're released from the first one, the others should change to green just as you get to them. I've no idea how well it works but it's a cool idea.

Pitching my hat in with the grumpy old men, I'm sick of this sort of thing too. Seriously, I have a £10 pair of headphones that sound great.

I did once actually ask a guy on a bus to turn his (terrible and tinny) music down or at least switch to headphones. He gave me a 5 minute angry rant about how a bus is a public space so he can do whatever he f'ing wants. Also that we, the other passengers, had no right to ask him to stop.

I tried pointing out that if he has the right to listen to music then we had the right not to, but I'm not sure he heard it much less thought about it.

I've always wanted to know whether
a) it genuinely doesn't occur to a given kid that their music irritates almost everyone subjected to it
b) They know but don't care
c) They know and love it

Like most other antisocial behaviour, it's not the behaviour itself that gets to me so much as the fact that I just can't wrap my head around the thought process behind it.

I know several people who've had bikes stolen from under CCTV cameras here in London. In every case the police either refused to check the footage or said that they checked it and it's useless.

Apparrently criminals tend to hide their faces from cameras. Who could've seen that coming?

I'm still fairly freaked out after visiting the Cardiff central police CCTV room nearly ten years ago. One wall was a massive bank of monitors, arranged around two big screens. As a demonstration of their ability, we picked a person at random and followed him halfway across the city until we got bored. At the end of that time we'd seen what model phone he had, who he banked with (by fluke we saw his cash card when zoomed in) and two digits of the PIN he typed into a cash machine (ATM). We also saw the faces of a couple of people he met and seemed friendly with. Maybe I'm paranoid, but that was scary stuff. To add fun, a friend in Manchester tells me that they now have police CCTV cameras with microphones and speakers.

Even then the officers admitted that they were beginning to have a problem with troublemakers wearing hoods and hats. Their focus was much more on spotting accidents and assaults so they could get ambulances and police there faster.

@JONATHAN V

Good point, I hadn't thought of that. Here in London though, there is a huge and growing gap between the prices of paper and Oyster tickets. Paper tickets have been climbing steadily in price since the introduction of Oyster cards; it's now at the stage that a single Tube journey costs 1.50 on Oyster or 4.00 for a paper ticket.(http://www.ukstudentlife.com/Travel/Transport/London/Underground.htm#TicketPrices2008) This does seem to be a push to get peopl to switch to Oyster as an Oyster card costs 3.00 (refundable). As you say though, I guess it's wrong to guess their motives without without knowing how much money the Oyster system saves them.

@MINAMISAN
Oyster cards are unregistered by default. You can pick them up for 3.00 pounds from ticket offices or little vending machines. You also have the option to top up using cash at a vending machine or in some shops. You're encouraged to register the card to protect against loss or theft, but it isn't compulsory.

I don't know about the Tokyo system, but our Oyster system is exactly like the Octopus system in parts of China, if you've ever used it.

@NIL

The card works out cheaper than paper tickets because they want everyone to use Oyster. It isn't some innate feature of the card, it's a deliberate policy to get as many people on the database as possible. The only advantage of the card for users is reduced queues at the ticket machines. Admittedly, this is a biggie.

As for "they're not a form of ID": many thousands of them actually are. All student, "young person" and other discounted oyster cards bear the owner's name and photo and must be registered to their home address. I have a student card, so it's registered to my parents' address (despite the fact that I'm in my mid-20s and haven't lived there for years), my address and my college.

Additionally, if you buy a season ticket (monthly or annual) you're strongly encouraged to link the card to your bank account and to register the card to your name and address in case it's lost or stolen. I've been told that registration is compulsory for annual tickets, but I've never looked it up.

This could all be perfectly benign, but does mean that anyone with access to the Oyster system can type my name into a computer to produce a list of everywhere I've been on public transport during the last three years, accurate to the minute. Similarly, anyone who happens to get hold of my card can take it to a top-up machine and see the same information. The only way to break this trail is to forfeit my discounted travel, which I can't currently afford to do.

Anti-terrorism stuff: Recently, there has been talk of systematically trawling the Oyster database for "suspicious behaviour". They're making the step from the police needing a warrant to access a specific suspect's details to automatically watching everyone who uses the system. Of course, if you want to get up to something illegal all you need to do is swap to an unregistered card or pay extra for a paper ticket.

The comparison with the CCTV cameras is meaningless. CCTV cameras can't yet automatically recognise someone and follow them around a city (although big money is going into this). Monitoring someone on CCTV takes expensive investment of man-hours. Monitoring people's movements on the Oyster system can be totally automatic. Or, if they're after you specifically, your travel records can be retrieved within seconds. This makes i much more likely that a given innocent person's movements will be monitored.

Besides, just because the govt already have one way of watching us all doesn't mean we should be happy to give them another one.

As for why I object to this stuff: it ranges all the way from worries about Big Secret Conspiracies (you may trust this govt, but what about when some nutter gets in charge of this surveillance infrastructure in 20 years' time?) down to the simple fact that what I do and where I go is none of their damn business.

You can learn everything important about British drinking culture from the fact that over here "glass" and "bottle" are verbs.

The idea of a standardised pint glass is nothing new. Selling alcohol in accurate quantities has always been a part of the weights and measures act, which dates back something like 200 years (although has been regularly updated, of course). For much of that time, pint glasses have been standardised within the UK and borne an official seal (I think it's some sort of royal crest, but I've never looked it up) to denote that.

That's why very cheap pint glasses sold on the high street are marked as "beer glasses" or similar; selling them as "pint glasses" without very tight quality control is getting into dodgy ground.

So the standardisation is nothing new. As all weights and measures are being standardised ("harmonised") across Europe it's hardly surprising that they've provided their own specifications.

I love that the "Warrany void if broken" is left perfectly intact.

However, I don't really understand why this is any better than putting a few nails through it or subjecting it to high temperatures or a couple of EMPs.

On the womenswear, a scrolling marquee across the chest saying "Stop staring at my boobs".

I think that some sections of the deaf community feel that "curing" their condition by giving them implants suggests that they are incomplete as people. It's percieved as a statement that their experience of the world is less valid and worthwhile than non-deaf people.

I disagree, but I can see their point. Noone wants to think that they've been born flawed, or that their life experiences have less meaning than other people's. Offering or accepting a cure like this could be interpreted as saying that.

I've heard similar rumblings from autistic people and their families. A fairly small number of people are quite vocal in their argument that autistics have a different view of the world but not necessarily a less valid one. As such, they find attempts to find a cure for the condition (or even that it could be called a "cure") insulting. Comparisons have been made to the attempts to find a cure for the "inferior" world-view that is homosexuality.

And yes, I'm too lazy to find good links. Sorry, but it's Friday, I'm tired and the pub is calling me!
/typical Brit.

I'd love to find a way of ruining the RFID chip in my new debit card while leaving the contact-read chip intact.

By holding my card against a reader, anyone who happens to get hold of it can make an unlimited number of transactions up to about £20 each. No PIN, signature or any other security check required. I assume it could be cloned fairly quickly, so I wouldn't necessarily realise I had a problem until my statement arrives at the end of the month.

Needless to say, I spoke to my bank about this, who helpfully:
1) Refused to give me a card without this moronic security flaw
2) Spent just under five minutes trying to browbeat me into getting a credit card with a truly horrifying interest rate.

I particularly enjoyed the part when he cautiously looked into the flamethrower nozzle.

Has this boy never seen a Wile E. Coyote cartoon?

This is something I'd been wondering about actually. What is the law regarding buying expensive toys outside Europe? I get the impression that if I ordered an expensie toy online from the USA I'd have to pay an import tax roughly equivalent to V.A.T.

Is the law different if I fly out there myself to buy one? Why does binning the packaging matter?

I have a slightly technophobic friend who works on a container ship. He clumsily types his emails and loses games of patience -- or when he's feeling particularly exciting, minesweeper -- on the most powerful and toe-curlingly envy-inducing laptop I've ever seen, bought for almost nothing at the Taiwan docks. It's a beautiful machine, but I live in fear of the import taxes. He ends up declaring everything brought home because for him getting caught breaching import laws would be a career-ending move.

W000T - Whether or not it kills the bacteria, anything acidic will denature the proteins in meat, thus at least making it look cooked. You can show it at home - dice some chicken and leave it to marinade in lemon juice for 20 minutes. The outside of the pieces will at least look cooked.

Although I've never tested it as a cooking method for chicken, the inside of any normal-looking muscle should be pretty free from any nasty bugs. All of the bacteria we worry about are on the skin, feathers and to a lesser exetent in the digestive tract.

Given hygenic preparation (which I'm not saying that the solar shack above has) raw chicken should be as safe as sushi. Steak tartare and a similar dish I tried in Italy (it was ground beef steak with lemon juice, oil and herbs - delicious!) rely on the same idea.

Note: I know a bit about micobiology but I'm neither a doctor nor a chef. If any adventurous souls decide to try lemon-cooked chicken, I'm not guarrunteeing that you'll be fine!

I've never tried to grow tissues like this but I'm pretty sure that they'd have the same basic growth requirements as the human cells regularly grown in labs.

Mammalian cells have all sorts of complex systems evolved to make sure that they only propagate when the body requires them to. After all, unrestricted propagation is what we call cancer. So to persuade a cell to grow, you need to provide it with all sorts of growth hormones and cytokines in addition to nutrients. Without these signals non-cancerous cells will either become quiescent or kill themselves.

Many of those systems are poorly understood, so most labs use "Foetal Calf Serum" or something similar. It's basically a soup of nutrients and hormoones extracted from, in this case, a calf foetus.

Which is a very long way of saying that even if we can grow muscles for use as meat in the lab by 2012, we'll almost certainly still have to kill animals to do it.

I have a GP2X (a wonderful toy) and have been idly following the Pandora's development. It's a fairly open design project - everythng you might want to know about it is on the boards at www.gp32x.com.

That's a render made by one of the board members based on a fairly recent, near-final design. The internals have been built -- at least properly printed and assembled developers' boards -- but I think the casing is still in progress.

Thw QWERTY keyboard was insisted on by a lot of GP2X fans for use instead of fiddly virtual keboards. Emulating C64, Apple, Amstrads etc etc is much easier with these, not to mention minor office apps.

As for emulators, the GP2X has a very strong emulator scene and this looks to be transferring well to the Pandora. SNES, playstation, genesis and a few others have already been reported as being near-perfect. Hopefully the GP2X's homebrew software, which includes some real gems, will be ported across too. The main weakness will probably the same as the GP2X - little interest from commercial developers.

I don't need and cabling at the moment, but I'm tempted to order something from Blue Jeans on general principle. Awesome stuff.

Boeing have patented a type of lunar fly-by? Awesome. I've just submitted a patent application to cover driving along the M25 when you want to traverse London at night.

Drinks are on me lads and ladies, I'll be a millionaire by the end of the week.

Aargh, a huge reply was swallowed because the "text entered was wrong". Ideologically or factually? We may never know what offended the comment system. Oh well, hope this fares better.

@15 - Takuan

In a healthy human, bacterial cells outnumber human cells by approx 10:1 (I've seen estimates between 8:1 and 11:1). The ratio of viruses to human cells will be so huge as to be incalculable. Also, we have a surprising number of recognisable viral and bacterial genes in our genome - the wikipedia article on "endogenous retroviruses" is pretty good if you're interested.

Very little is known about the typical population of gut bacteria, or even whether "typical population" is a meaningful phrase. It's certainly influenced by diet and culture and possibly genetics. Your gut bacteria is essential for digesting certian foods (um... including some sugar types but I can't remember which) and possibly involved in the immune response against pathogens. It was recently shown that changing a mouse's gut population could make it skinny or obese.

Silver particles are acknowledged as germicidal; it's fairly common to find wound dressings and surgical tools with silver particles in the surfaces.

But most importantly: does it come with a free eyepatch? Yaaarr!

I genuinely don't understand why everyone hates software patents so much. Why do people say that the plans for a new type of engine are patentable while the plans for a new type of software aren't?

They're both intricate pieces of design that required valuable hours of research and ingenuity to create. The argument that software is easily copied and modified is invalid, as the blueprints for an engine are just as easily photocopied and modified. The patent system has always been about novel ideas, not physical artifacts.

I agree wholeheartedly that the system has been abused. However, that should lead for calls for better patent inspection not an abolition of the patent system overall.

NB: I'm not trying to start an ideological war here, I just genuinely don't understand your position. Please, educate me!

@Barnaby:

Blood coagulation is caused by enzyme activity (The main enzyme is called "Factor VII") altering blood components (mostly platelets) to make them sticky so they clump together. Oxygen isn't required for this process.

The cascade of enzyme activations can be triggered by several things, usually signals released by damaged epithelial tissues.

I agree with Subtle_turtle that HIV is unusually unstable outside its host. I don't know enough about anticoagulants to guess their effect but I expect (s)he's correct that they'd degrade the virus.

I have to expose my ignorance, but what does "French dipped" mean? If I went to this fine eatery, what exactly would my sandwich be double-dipped in?

I haven't read the messageboard, but your own post says that Creative were happy to overlook the patch at first. They only stepped in when he started taking money in exchange for a reverse-engineered version of their commercial (and presumably copyrighted / patented) sofware.

About the finger pH: I find mine is affected by my diet.

Acidic sweat gradually makes latex gloves discolour. I've found that by cutting meat out of my diet, my gloves discolour much slower. This makes some sense: the body can't store raw protein, instead breaking it down to ureaic acid for excretion in urine and sweat. Cutting out meat made my protein intake drop, and therefore reduced the acid content of my sweat.

I have no idea whether slightly acidic sweat could actually incresase wear on a plastic keyboard. Is there a chemist in the house?

I'm not a surgeon or even anything similar, but surely the purpose of a sponge would be to soak up whatever fluids are oozing around your cavities. So what happens when a spot of that blood or bile obscures part of the barcode?

I think RFID might be a good idea, provided it can stand up to being gamma irradiated during sterilisation.

Storm in a teacup.

Wray is not a big town, so any big gathering of exhilerated, noisy and mostly drunk kids will have been perceived as far worse than it actually was.

If you ignore the speculation and emotive language, the paper is describing a party that got a bit out of control (aren't they the most fun ones?) and at which a few 16 or 17 year olds had drunken sex.

Also, the smallish number of "village hall chairmen" and other local officils I've met have all been quite conservative types. I wouldn't be surprised if some over-enthusiatic kissing and groping was misinterpreted as "sex standing up", inflating the number of couples reported to have had sex there.

I'm not saying that underage drinking and drunken sex aren't important problems, just that they do tend to get sensationalised by journalists who're all too aware that stories like this one capture all of the "hell in a handbasket", "think of the children!" and "uninhibited sex" box that gets their readers going. You can tell I'm not a journo because I'm a buzzkill and just wrote one of the lonest run-on sentences in the history of the language.

A group in my lab are working on a similar idea, using protein markers in urine. Unfortunately there isn't all that much intact protein in urine so they had to build what's effectively a urine still, concentrating it by evaporation.

Forget releasing viruses into the wild, we all live in terror of the extract system bursting and flooding the lab with our patients' vapourised urine.

Some scientists come up with a new therapy for treating drug dependance and not a single person has something positive to say?

The idea is to offer treatment to addicts, so even if their resolve breaks any drugs they take will have little or no effect on their recovery process. Why assume that it's intended to crush your right to take (currently illegal) drugs?

During the early 90s I was present for a bomb scare in England. Someone found a big unmarked cardboard box in a busy pedestrianised road. At that time the IRA had an unpleasant habit of actually blowing stuff in England, so the bomb squad got there sharpish for a controlled detonation.

...which showered the street with fragments of cheap nappies (diapers). Oh well, at least they were clean.

Does anyone else think that exposed aerial looks like a serious weak spot? You might not be able to destroy the tank, but damage the aerial to make it uncontrollable and it's useless.

/totally uninformed opinion.

@ MPB (40)

It's comparing volume with volume: the total volume of the Earth's water or atmosphere (assuming it's kept at a constant pressure of 1 bar) compared with the total volume of the land.

The calculations I did were to work out the total volume of all the world's living humans, then the diameter of the sphere you could make this volume into. All bunched into a sphere our species is far, far too small to be seen on the image.

Surface areas don't enter into the calculations. However, because all of the volumes are formed into spheres their surface areas are of course in proportion.

@Patrick (22) - Nope, my victim-juicer is on the fritz today so I left all the water in the bodies. Knocking 60% off the sphere's volume by sucking out the water will only have a smallish effect on its diameter anyway.

@Takuan (23) - A picture like this showing the "total meat wad" (mmm, appetising!) can't sensibly be made.

You see Great Britain just above the water and air balls? The longest straight-line journey you can make in Britain (Land's End in the SE to John 'o Groats in the NW) is 945 kilometers, give or take a few diversions around the mountains.

So picture a pinkish ball almost exactly one thousandth of the height of Britain, and that's what the "total meat wad" would look like.

The more astute will have noticed that I forgot to include pi in the calculation. What can I say, it's been an extremely long day.

The last lines should of course read:

adius^3 = Volume / ( (4/3) *pi)
Radius^3 = 4.355x10^8 / (1.3333333 x pi)
Radius^3 = 1.0397x10^8
Radius = 470.21 meters

Diameter = 940.43 meters

I'm going to be generous in my assumptions, so the resulting ball will be bigger. I'm going to claim that my upwards error is exactly the same as the extra volume added by the packing inefficiency that's inevitable when stacking human bodies together in space. Not that I'd know, of course; my orbital death platform is entirely fictional. Honest.

Asumptions:
6.7 billion humans in the world
Average mass of a human is approx 65kg (Wikipedia says that the mean for the UK and USA is around 75kg; I assume most of the world is lighter than us)
The mean density of a person is 1g/cm3

So humans mass a total of 6.7 billion people x 65kg/person = 4.355x10^11 kg.

At 1g/cm3 this mass takes up 4.355x10^11 litres = 4.355x10^8 cubic meters.

Now we plug this value into the formula linking the volume of a sphere with its radius:

Volume = 4/3 * radius^3

Therefore

Radius^3 = Volume / (4/3)
Radius^3 = 4.355x10^8 / 1.3333333etc
Radius^3 = 3.266x10^8
Radius = 688.69 meters

The sphere of all living human bodies would therefore be a puny 1,377m across. That's pretty humbling.

@8 (Monument) "I say almost anything and everything can be used as a medium, and to have someone tell you that your tools imply messages of vulgar hostility is absurdly ignorant."

If not outright hostility, there is at least a lack of repect. A lot of graffiti artists don't stop to consiser the possibility that neither the owners of the media you're talking about (say, the walls of my apartment building), nor the users of the space it borders, don't want someone scrawling over their property or environment.

Grated, a tiny minority of the street art I've seen is excellent and does appeal to me. However, appreciation of art is totally subjective. Whether a property owner will enjoy having your art painted on or in their building is not your decision to make.

"the 3,400 pound robot will be 12-feet tall and feature 11-foot arms"

It's a fantastic piece of tech and I can't wiat to see it in action but I'm dismayed that they didn't give it a much, much more ominous name.

Ooh, this is tempting. I wonder how splashproof it is though? I dive from a RIB so this would be great for me if it can deal with all the spray that gets kicked up when we're underway.

My first impression was of a trunk used to cage a modern, office based kraken. You can just see a few of its tentacles reaching out through the ports, searching for morsels of food or the limbs of anyone foolish enough to get too close.

Heck, I might have to uild and decorate one of these.

"destroying the rain forest section in favor of adding a nationalistic USA section"
How beautifully apt.

I read a lot of books for pleasure and get through a lot of printed papers for work.

I'm not waiting for an ebook reader to reach the price of a paperback. After all, how many people are still wating for MP3 players to reach the price of a 6-month old album?

eBooks will start to tempt me when I find a virtual bookshop with the same range of titles as a good physical bookshop, which I can be confident I'll still be able to read after upgrading the hardware and changing manufacturer a few times.

It's great, but still nothing for us Europeans.

The only site I know of to buy legal DRM-free MP3s is play.com. They have a nice system (direct download, no special software required), but a fairly limited library. Does anyone have any suggestions?

It's a cool looking design, but I don't like the chain they've used. It'd be much better (although less pretty) with a standard bit of chain to make it more flexible. When you're fighting for a bit of space on a crowded bike-rack, limitations like that are really annoying. Also, I'm wary of anything like this that you can lock without the key. I can imagine accidentally locking it in a position where I can't get the key into the lock, or even locking my bike somewhere then realising I've left the key at home.

I'm yet to find anything as cheap and versatile as a toughened steel chain and padlock. Mine was sold as a motorcycle lock so it's a bit hefty, but you can't be too careful with bikes in London.

I thread the chain through the front wheel and bicycle frame. Where possible I also put a decent D-lock through the back wheel and frame. There have been two attempts to steal my bike: once trying to saw through the chain, once through the D-lock. In both cases the thieves gave up and left my bike alone.

Cool, I was in Nemo on Saturday!

It's actually deeper than 100 feet. My dive computer measured it as 34.7m, which is about 114ft. I didn't make an effort to put my computer right on the floor, so the real depth is probably a round 35m.

It's well worth a visit if you get a chance - the water is chlorine-free, crystal clear (the vis was easily the full 35m) and heated to 30 degrees centigrade.

The nicest touch is the windows which let you look between the bar and 9m below the pool's surface.

"ls pprct chngng th frmt t rmv th 'tlkng hd' prtns wth th blnd rprtr. Sh r hr wrtrs r nt s wtty s thy sm t blv. Th rprt ws grt dl mr wtchbl wth hr prvdng vc vr nstd."

That's the third or fourth post I've seen recently with no vowels. Is this how all the cool kids are talking now, or did he just buy a cheap keyboard?

"The figure-8 structure is placed into a dryer, on high heat setting, for exactly three minutes. When performed correctly, the set becomes denser and more entangled."

You have to wonder how much experimentation went into refining that specification. Based on the tech types I know, I'm guessing lots.

It's funny but not that original - it looks very similar to the Amazon users' reviews of Black Bic Biros (for example: http://www.amazon.co.uk/BiC-Kugelschreiber-Cristal-schwarz/dp/customer-reviews/B000JTOYLS/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_helpful?ie=UTF8&customer-reviews.sort%5Fby=-SubmissionDate&coliid=&showViewpoints=1&customer-reviews.start=1&colid=#customerReviews)

For those who haven't seen them, they're spread between several of the cheapest pens Bic make and contain some pure comedy gold. Undoubtedly some of the best pages on t'interweb.

It's not an admission of anything like that. If anything it's the reverse: releasing the patch is a statement like "We're not going to make any more money from sales, so we're removing the anti-piracy stuff. Now you can distribute and play it freely".

If the companies believed that the disc-checks were pointless and did nothing to prevent piracy, they'd see no reason to release the patch.

"Gene Jockey" - that's awesome, I'm going to add it to my c.v.

I'm always ambivalent about seeing science news like this. There's smugness because someone always makes a comment like "Still no cure for cancer", which actually is my job, tinged with envy because the tearless onion guys will soon be very rich. Ho hum, maybe I'll accidentally stumble on something lucrative while researching the big C.

Oh, and "onion goggles"? I have a 14 year-old pair of swimming goggles tht work just fine for particularly vicious allia. After all, there's nothing quite like sitting down to a home-cooked romantic dinner with still-fresh goggle marks around your eyes.

This, surely, is one of those technological feats that makes us all pause for a second and think, "Wow, I'm living in the future!"

(Surely this would cool the nuggets and warm the soda? I understand that hot air rises, but I'd still expect the Nugget Caddy (TM) to conduct some heat downwards)

Funny you should say that: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/NE1000000097300/

I just want to second Chimera's point that McDonalds are NOT planning to offer A-Levels, or even anything like them. It's just the more excitable newspapers lying in order to sell papers.

The BBC have a couple of good pages:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7213781.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7209276.stm

"An employee on one of these McDonald's courses will not be completing anything equivalent to a whole six-unit A-level or advanced Diploma - only part of one."

So McDonalds is permitted to award govt-approved credits to its staff. The modules offered include marketing, human resources, finances etc. These credits can be combined with courses from other institutions to fulfil the requirements of a "Level 3" diploma. This still isn't an A-Level, but a vocational qualification aimed at the same age group. For a bit of context, A-Levels and Level 3 Diplomas are primarily aimed at penultimate- & final-year Hich School students, typically 17-18 year olds.

SquirrelGirl - It's a deposit, not a payment. The trolleys are chained together and need to be released by putting a £1 coin into the lock. When you finish with the trolley, you're supposed to return it to one of the trolley parks. Reattaching the trolley to another parked trolley releases your coin.

It has become very common over the last 4 years or so. I've seen it a few times in France too.

I assume the idea is to encourage customers to returnt their trollies to the trolley parks instead of leaving them strewn around the car park.

Do you have locking wheels in the USA? Another recently common feature is a magnetic band around the car park perimiter. If you try to take a trolley over the band one of the wheels locks, making the trolley unweildy until unlocked with a special tool. It seems to be fairly effective as an anti-theft device.

If you don't already know it, have a look at www.biro-art.com . It's a site filled with one artists biro drawings. They're easily matched to this in quality and skill, but with a much more surreal and humourous style.

I'm blown away by both artists. I can barely control a pen to write legibly let alone come close to producing something like this. Awesome stuff.

Sorry to double-post, but this is also relevant:

"The term legal tender does not in itself govern the acceptability of banknotes in transactions. Whether or not notes have legal tender status, their acceptability as a means of payment is essentially a matter for agreement between the parties involved."

So British law agrees with "EH" (11). Shops have every right to refuse banknotes they don't feel like accepting.

Much bigger notes do exist, even if they aren't in general circulation. The biggest British bank note is worth £1,000,000 and is used to "back' the notes in circulation.

From the Bank of England website (http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/about/other_notes.htm)

"Instead, special one million pound notes are used. These notes are for internal use only and are never seen outside the Bank."

A very similar illusion is very easy to do at home. Have a look at the "Rubber Hand Illusion" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCQbygjG0RU). It uses a similar technique -- you watch a fake hand being stroked while your real hand is stroked -- to produce the feeling that the rubber hand is part of you.

There are more details about it and similar illusions on the New Scientist archive, e.g. http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19526221.300-mind-tricks-six-ways-to-explore-your-brain.html (subscription or Athens account required).

The hand doesn't need to look very convincing. Use one from a joke shop or get your friend to put his own hand on the table. I've found that you can use the same technique to make people feel that other objects, like the table itself, are part of their body. This takes a few minutes longer and won't work for everyone, but it's a weird enough sensation to be worth the time!

A few years ago I did some minor tech work in a DJ booth in one of my Students' Union bars. They'd taken a budget approach to a very similar system: each turntable was bolted to a paving slab. This slab sat on a half-inflated bicycle inner tube, which in turn sat on top of a second paving slab.

Not quite in the same league as the product above, but the tech guys and DJs swore by them. IIRC the paving slabs were rescued from a skip, so the total cost of each mount was about £4.

Electrolysis plants really appeal to the evil genius section of my brain. I mean, what other business can legitimately keep huge vats of boiling electrofied acid?