Women's Rights

I've been drafting this post for ages (well, since I read the article linked below, at any rate). I noticed it this evening, sitting as a draft in my post list and thought "I'll finish it off and get it posted" but when I opened it I found that only a title existed.

I can't be bothered to write much more, so here's a link (Yemen Times). Read the article. It is not, as far as I can tell, satirical.

Saturday Morning Gym

The gym is always busy in January as people try to keep New Year's Resolutions to get fit, lose weight or just use the gym membership they've been paying for for the last six months. By the third week in January the enthusiasm is fading and the changing rooms are a bit emptier, the treadmills a little less over-used.

My advice is to forget the resolutions and simply to try to enjoy the exercise; there's no point forcing yourself to do something unpleasant but if you find activities that you enjoy and then set milestones and targets so you have something to aim for then it gets much easier to drag yourself out of bed for early morning exercise.

That's my handy hint for the day.

Feynman Quotes

No excuse is needed for a quote from Richard Feynman; I saw this one this morning:

“The gravitational force is weak,” he said at one conference, introducing his work on quantizing gravity. “In fact, it’s *damned* weak.” At that instant a loudspeaker demonically broke loose from the ceiling and crashed to the floor. Feynman barely hesitated: “Weak — but not negligible.”

Flights

Susie and I have booked flights to Edinburgh in February to visit our friends Cathy and Hamish. Nothing controversial there - FlyBe from Southampton Airport run a fast, easy and relatively cheap. We did consider the train, but life is just too short (unlike the train journey, which takes eight and a half hours) and even when FlyBe started racking up extra charges (bags, paying by credit card, space for both legs, booking a seat etc.) at the end of the booking process the train did not become any more attractive.

I did have a look at British Airways because they fly the same route and sometimes try to compete on price. Not this time though - FlyBe's final price of £197 (1 bag, no seat booking, credit card payment charge, only 1 leg per passenger) was easily surpassed by British Airways' £395 (that is not a typo). British Airways did not offer better flight times, either; nor was the plane better, or, in fact, different so we could have paid an extra £200 for exactly the same product. Rip off?

A Universal Flu Vaccine

The BBC have a story (link) about successful first trials of a universal flu vaccine. Very clever, very interesting.

Charts Galore

The Economist ran an article about graphical representations of data (link) which I found passably interesting. The most horrible thing was the chart of Napoleon's attack on Moscow in 1812 (link to chart) which outlines the almost complete destruction of the Grand Army.