Quizerama QI Scrapbook

10 things we didn't know last week

2009-11-27T18:09:00.001Z

Snippets from the week's news, sliced, diced and processed for your convenience.

1. Michael Jackson's iconic white glove is a modified golf glove.
More details (The Scotsman)

2. To be a Beefeater you have to have done 22 years military service.
More details (The Times)

3. Seemingly vegetative patients are asked to think of playing tennis while being scanned for evidence of consciousness.
More details

4. The UK had its first curry restaurant in 1809.
More details

5. The hamlet of Seathwaite in Borrowdale is, on average, the wettest inhabited place in England.
More details

6. All British infrastructure, including bridges, is designed to at least withstand the kind of flooding that would happen on average once every 200 years.
More details

7. Hammerhead sharks can actually see rather well.
More details

8. And humans use their skin to "hear".
More details

9. Google will only remove images from its image search facility if legally ordered to do so.
More details

10. Christmas trees can be dangerous.
More details

Download Junkie

2009-11-27T18:07:00.000Z

Highlights This Week Include:

	System Mechanic 9.5 Trial Software Keep your system tuned and drive optimised with this toolkit 28 November 2009
	CCleaner 2.26 Freeware System cleansing & optimisation tool 28 November 2009
	Foxit Reader 3.1.4 Freeware Portable & quick PDF reader 28 November 2009
	ZipGenius 6.2 Freeware Complete archive manager 25 November 2009
	FinalBurner FREE 2.15 Freeware Basic & free disc burning suite 24 November 2009
	Recuva 1.33 Freeware Salvage & recover deleted files 24 November 2009
	Opera 10.10 for Windows Freeware Take a look at the future of this web browser 23 November 2009
	Spotify for Windows 0.3.22 Freeware Find & stream your audio from the Internet 23 November 2009
	Paint.NET 3.5.1 Freeware Powerful & modern paint program 23 November 2009
	FastStone Image Viewer 4 Freeware Image and digital photo viewer 20 November 2009

New brewing museum to open in Burton

2009-11-25T14:42:00.000Z

A new brewing visitor centre and museum is set to open in Burton next year on the site of the old Coors facility.

The new complex – the National Brewery Centre – is due to open around the end of March and it is promised will be a "unique visitor attraction".

The old Coors centre, formerly the Bass Museum, shut last summer, despite efforts to save it by local MP Janet Dean and an action group.

But thanks to a £200,000 donation from Coors, which still owns the building, the museum is set to be revived.

The museum will be opened and run by specialist visitor attraction firm Planning Solutions.

John Polglass, director of business and property services, Molson Coors, said: “Molson Coors has always been committed to finding an organisation that can provide a long term future for a brewing museum in Burton.

“Planning Solutions has a great track record in running visitor attractions and we are delighted to support their exciting plans to put Burton on the UK tourist map.”

Coors will also provide £100,000 annually for the maintenance of the buildings.

Planning Solutions has plans to introduce animatronics and ‘live’ actors to entertain and inform visitors in full historical character.

Bars and restaurants will also be incorporated in the plans for the new centre and be open to the general public and available for private bookings and live performances.

For more information visit: www.nationalbrewerycentre.co.uk

BEER NEWS VIA THE PUBLICAN ONLINE

Musical Scrooges

2009-11-25T10:36:00.001Z

It looked like a generous gesture from a sometimes greedy music industry.

The album by The Soldiers, a group made up of three serving members of the Armed Forces, was advertised as donating part of its proceeds to military charities.

But last night the record company behind the trio was facing a backlash after it emerged that as little as 3 per cent of the price of each CD goes to charity.

The Soldiers, Lance Corporal Ryan Idzi, Sergeant Major Gary Chilton, and Sergeant Richie Maddocks, perfoming their single Coming Home at the Royal Albert Hall in October

Proceeds from the record have been intended to support the Army Benevolent Fund, Help For Heroes and The Royal British Legion.

The album, Coming Home, is sung by Lance Corporal Ryan Idzi, Sergeant Richie Maddocks and Sergeant Major Gary Chilton.

Try the Sudoku diet

2009-11-25T10:34:00.000Z

Sitting in your favourite armchair doing a crossword or Sudoku does not sound like a particularly effective way to use up calories.

But if you are about to postpone that trip to the gym and turn to the Coffee Break section of your Daily Mail instead, you may be pleasantly surprised.

Tackling puzzles for an hour, it seems, can burn more calories than are contained in many biscuits.

That was the eyebrow-raising claim being made by mental agility experts yesterday in a bid to encourage more people to log on to their brain-training website.

Doing puzzles and quizzes burns an average of 90 calories every hour, they say - while a chocolate chip cookie contains an average 56 calories, a custard cream 57 calories and a jammy dodger 85 calories.

Researcher Tim Forrester, from cannyminds.com, explained: 'Our brains require 0.1 calories every minute simply to survive.

Quiztime Quiz

2009-11-25T02:12:00.001Z

1. Which English house had the red rose as its symbol?
House of Lancaster
2. What coffee concoction is named after the Capuchin monks?
Cappucino
3. What is winnie-the-pooh's real name?
Edward bear
4. What is a resident of Moscow?
Muscovite
5. What passenger train once ran between London and Edinburgh?
Flying Scotsman
6. What do you call hair like or feathery clouds?
Cirrus
7. In order for a deck of cards to be mixed up enough to play with properly, at least how many times should it be shuffled?
Seven times
8. Who was the greek goddess of love?
Aphrodite
9. Who was the original voice of Darth Vader (hint: NOT James Earl Jones)?
David Prowse
10. What are the three winter months in the southern hemisphere?
June, July, August
11. What is the english word for 'fiesta'?
Festival
12. Who starred in the film 'the man with two brains'?
Steve Martin
13. 'You get a shiver in the dark, it's raining in the park ...' What's the Dire Straits song title?
Sultans of swing
14. Colorless, corrosive liquid that has the chemical formula HNO3?
Nitric acid
15. What do the auricularis muscles move?
Ears
16. Spell the name of the largest city in New Mexico?
Albuquerque
17. Which song did the Easybeats record that everyone sang at the end of a work week?
Friday on my mind
18. What is the branch of medicine dealing with curing by operative procedures?
Surgery
19. Who spun straw into gold?
Rumplestiltskin
20. What famous mountain is often photographed by film of the same name?
Fuji

21. The first metered taxi become operational in 1899, 1903 or 1907?
1907
22. Which president married Martha Dandridge Custis?
George Washington
23. What is the spanish word for 'fox'?
Zorro
24. Who recorded the 1983 hit "china girl"?
David Bowie
25. What was the first x-rated animated cartoon film?
Fritz the cat
26. What 1942 naval engagement saw the sinking of four japanese aircraft carriers?
Battle at Midway
27. Four thirds multiplied by pi multiplied by the radius cubed, gives you the volume of what geometric object?
Sphere
28. What was the name of the Addams family's giant man-eating plant?
Cleopatra
29. What structure in the back of the brain governs motor control?
Cerebellum
30. Which musical was based on the play The Matchmaker?
Hello Dolly
31. What bird builds a nest about 12 feet deep and eight and a half feet wide?
Bald Eagle
32. As who is the Frankish ruler Charles the Great better known?
Charlemagne
33. Of what was charlie chaplin's cane made?
Bamboo
34. In greek mythology, who solved the riddle of the sphinx?
Oedipus
35. The electric chair was first used in 1890, 1900 or 1910?
1890
36. What film found Bruce Willis at 'flotsam paradise'?
Fifth Element
37. What does yellow gold contains 10% of?
Copper
38. What sport's been the subject of the most American movies?
Boxing
39. Into what body of water does the yukon river flow?
Bering sea
40. How many tunes blared from the 1948 wurlitzer model 1100 jukebox?
Twenty Four

Tiebreaker - In what year was Diet Pepsi introduced?
1965
What year saw the launch of Sputnik I?
1957

Thanks to http://twitter.com/thequizbot

Attachment: Quiztime Quiz 046-2009.txt

Quiztime

2009-11-25T02:10:00.000Z

Attachment: Quiztime Picture Board 251109.pdf

Attachment: Quiztime Sports Board 251109.pdf

The map that changed the world

2009-11-25T01:14:00.001Z

An annotated guide to the 1507 map

Enlarge Image

Drawn half a millennium ago and then swiftly forgotten, one map made us see the world as we know it today... and helped name America. But, as Toby Lester has discovered, the most powerful nation on earth also owes its name to a pun.

Almost exactly 500 years ago, in 1507, Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure Germanic scholars based in the mountains of eastern France, made one of the boldest leaps in the history of geographical thought - and indeed in the larger history of ideas.

Near the end of an otherwise plodding treatise titled Introduction to Cosmography, they announced to their readers the astonishing news that the world did not just consist of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the three parts of the world known since antiquity. A previously unknown fourth part of the world had recently been discovered, they declared, by the Italian merchant Amerigo Vespucci, and in his honour they had decided to give it a name: America.

What is coming into focus is a document that is far richer, far stranger, and much more historically valuable than had previously been imagined

Toby Lester

But that was just the beginning. Waldseemuller and Ringman in fact had written the Introduction to Cosmography merely as a companion volume to their magnum opus: a giant and revolutionary new map of the world. It's known today as the Waldseemuller map of 1507.

The Waldseemuller map was - and still is - an astonishing sight to behold. Drawn 15 years after Columbus first sailed across the Atlantic, and measuring a remarkable 8ft wide by 4½ft high, it introduced Europeans to a fundamentally new understanding of the make-up of the earth.

The map represented a remarkable number of historical firsts. In addition to giving America its name, it was also the first map to portray the New World as a separate continent - even though Columbus, Vespucci, and other early explorers would all insist until their dying day that they had reached the far-eastern limits of Asia.

The map was the first to suggest the existence of what explorer Ferdinand Magellan would later call the Pacific Ocean, a mysterious decision, in that Europeans, according to the standard history of New World discovery, aren't supposed to have learned about the Pacific until several years later.

World of four parts

The map was one of the first documents to reveal the full extent of Africa's coastline, which had only very recently been circumnavigated by the Portuguese. Perhaps most significant, it was also one of the first maps to lay out a vision of the world using a full 360 degrees of longitude. In short, it was the the mother of all modern maps: the first document to depict the world roughly as we know it today.

America, named after Amerigo Vespucci... and a pun

In the years after 1507, copies of the Waldseemuller map began turning up at universities all over central Europe. There, displayed in classrooms and discussed by geographers and travellers alike, its vision of a four-part world insinuated itself into the popular imagination.

Waldseemuller himself would later record that 1,000 copies of the map had been printed, a very substantial number for the day. But the rapid pace of geographical discovery meant that copies of the map were soon discarded in favour of newer, more up-to-date pictures of the world, and by 1570 it had all but vanished from memory.

When the map maker Abraham Ortelius that year published a comprehensive list of his cartographical predecessors and their maps, he mentioned Waldseemuller but made no reference to the great 1507 map.

Last surviving copy

Fortunately, one copy did survive. Sometime between 1515 and 1517, the Nuremburg mathematician Johannes Schoner acquired a reprint of the map, bound it into an oversized folio, and made it part of his reference library.

The $10m map at the Library of Congress in Washington

In the years immediately afterward, Schoner studied the map carefully, but as the decades wore on, as newer maps became available, and as his own interests shifted from geography to astronomy, he consulted the folio less and less. By the time he died, in 1545, he probably hadn't opened it in years. The last remaining copy of the Waldseemuller map, beautifully preserved in Schoner's folio, had begun a long slumber - and wouldn't be roused again for some 350 years.

As is so often the case with historical treasures, the map was rediscovered by accident.

In the summer of 1901, while doing research in the library of Wolfegg Castle, in southern Germany, a Jesuit geography teacher named Joseph Fischer stumbled across the Schoner folio and quickly realized what he had found.

Within months his discovery was international news. "LONG SOUGHT MAP DISCOVERED," a New York Times headline announced in March of 1902. "EARLIEST KNOWN RECORD OF THE WORD AMERICA FINALLY BROUGHT TO LIGHT."

The map remained in the Wolfegg collection for the next hundred years - until 2003, when the US Library of Congress announced, with great fanfare, that it had acquired the map from the castle's owner for the staggering sum of $10m.

It was the highest price the library had ever paid for anything in its vast collection. Proudly, in its press release the library referred to the map as America's "birth certificate".

Value for money?

Was it worth the price? Some observers grumbled that it was not. But now that the map is on public display at the library, scholars and generalists alike have been looking at it with fresh eyes—and what is coming into focus is a document that is far richer, far stranger, and much more historically valuable than had previously been imagined.

Copernicus' view of space seems to have been influenced by the map

The map turns out to be an enormously revealing patchwork of several different kinds of maps: the world as depicted by the ancient Greeks and Romans, as diagrammed by Europe's Christian theologians, and as charted by the sailors who plied the waters of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

There's more. The name America, for example, very probably represents not just a tip of the hat to Amerigo Vespucci but also a multilingual pun that can mean both "born new" and "no-place-land" - a playful coinage that seems to have inspired Sir Thomas More to invent his new world across the ocean, one meaning of which was also "no-place": Utopia.

The map itself seems also to have made a powerful impression on none other than Nicholas Copernicus, who began his landmark On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres by describing America as he saw it depicted on the map, and who then went on to argue that the existence of a fourth part of the world meant that the traditional model not only of the earth but also the cosmos would have to be rethought.

For the only surviving copy of the map that not only gave America its name and introduced the New World to Europe but also helped Copernicus rethink the cosmos, $10m seems a very reasonable price to pay.

Toby Lester is the author of The Fourth Part of the World, which tells the story of the Waldseemuller map, published by Profile Books.

Tokyo 'world's best place to eat'

2009-11-25T01:13:00.001Z

Tokyo's sheer size helps explain why it has so many Michelin stars

Tokyo has leaped ahead of Paris as the city with the most Michelin three-star restaurants, confirming its status as the "world capital of gastronomy".

Tokyo now has 11 three-star restaurants compared with 10 for Paris, according to the latest edition of the Michelin guide to Tokyo.

The Japanese capital also has more of the coveted stars in total than Paris - 261 shared by 197 restaurants.

New York, by comparison, has four three-star restaurants.

After controversy over earlier Tokyo guides that used non-Japanese inspectors, Michelin said it used only Japanese inspectors for the latest edition.

Japanese restaurateurs and food critics had been sceptical that non-Japanese could adequately judge the country's cuisine.

The first Michelin guide to Tokyo came out in 2007.

Scotch whisky protected against 'inferior' copies

2009-11-25T01:12:00.001Z

New guidelines to protect whisky from foreign imitation, including new rules on labelling and bottling, are coming into force in Scotland on Monday.

There will be a new requirement to only bottle Single Malts in Scotland, and tighter rules on the use of distillery names on bottle labels.

There will also be better protection of traditional regional names such as "Highland" and "Lowland".

The Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) described it as "landmark legislation".

The regulations have been drawn up by the UK government.

Additional protection, including the requirement to bottle Single Malt Scotch Whisky in Scotland, helps safeguard Scotch from unfair and deceptive practices

Gavin Hewitt
SWA

Secretary of State for Scotland Jim Murphy said: "It is vital that we protect our key industries. We cannot allow others to trade off our good name and to pass off inferior whisky as being produced in Scotland.

"These regulations will help protect whisky customers across the globe.

"New labelling rules will also mean that customers will have a clearer understanding about precisely where and how their drink has been produced. This will enhance the education of many whisky drinkers as well as their enjoyment."

SWA chief executive, Gavin Hewitt said: "This is landmark legislation for Scotch Whisky delivering important benefits for consumers, distillers, and the economy.

"Additional protection, including the requirement to bottle Single Malt Scotch Whisky in Scotland, helps safeguard Scotch from unfair and deceptive practices; the new labelling rules provide a unique opportunity to promote consumer understanding of Scotch worldwide.

"These regulations have the strong backing of the Scotch Whisky industry."

Regulation details

Some of the details of the new legislation include:

Five categories of Scotch Whisky are defined for the first time; Single Malt Scotch Whisky, Single Grain Scotch Whisky, Blended Malt Scotch Whisky, Blended Grain Scotch Whisky, and Blended Scotch Whisky.
These compulsory category sales terms will be required to appear clearly and prominently on all labels.
A requirement to only bottle Single Malt Scotch Whisky in Scotland.
New rules to prevent the misleading labelling and marketing of Single Malt Scotch Whiskies.
A ban on the use of the term "Pure Malt".
A ban on the use of a distillery name as a brand name on any Scotch Whisky which has not been wholly distilled in the named distillery.
Protection of five traditional whisky regions of production; Highland, Lowland, Speyside, Islay, and Campbeltown.
A requirement that Scotch Whisky must be wholly matured in Scotland.
Clear rules on the use of age statements on packaging.
Designation of HM Customs & Excise as the verification authority for Scotch Whisky.

Blitzed artwork returning after 70 years

2009-11-25T01:09:00.001Z

Paul Delaroche's painting was damaged in the World War II bombing raid

A painting by Delaroche is going back on display after being damaged in a World war II air raid and hidden away for decades.

Charles I Insulted was evacuated to Scotland in 1941 after its London home was bombed.

The 1836 artwork was unrolled for the first time in the summer, revealing many tears and traces of plaster dust.

The painting, which has yet to be fully restored, will be shown in London's National Gallery from 24 February.

Doomed monarch

Restorers found some 200 tears on the canvas and fragments of plaster from the bomb blast, which hit the London home of its owners, the Ellesmere family.

The artwork was carefully unfurled earlier this year

Despite the damage, the painting had lost none of its intensity after spending decades tucked away in a Scottish country house.

Efforts to lessen damage to the painting were taken immediately after the air raid, with paper laid on top of the bigger tears.

The picture shows King Charles I shortly before his execution in 1649, being bullied and taunted by Oliver Cromwell's troops.

Paul Delaroche depicts the doomed monarch as a Christ-like figure, taking the blows with fortitude.

The artwork will remain on public display in the gallery until 23 May, along with other of the French artist's masterpieces including The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, which was painted in 1833.

Design fixed for 1,000mph car

2009-11-25T01:06:00.000Z

The power of imagination: Bloodhound's race with a Eurofighter

The UK team aiming to smash its own land speed record by driving a car beyond 1,000mph (1,610km/h) has settled on a final design for the vehicle.

It calls for a major re-configuration of the vehicle's two power units, with a Eurofighter jet engine now being positioned above a hybrid rocket.

The car, known as Bloodhound, will be built in Bristol's docklands.

The team expects to start running the vehicle on the Hakskeen Pan, Northern Cape Province, South Africa, in 2011.

The dried-out lake bed had the perfect surface for the record attempt, said Bloodhound's driver, Wing Commander Andy Green.

"It's hard enough to support a six-tonne car on metal wheels but soft enough to allow the wheels just to sink in maybe 10mm," he told BBC News.

Thrust SSC broke the sound barrier when it claimed the record

"That gives the damping, or compliance, we need; but it also gives me the lateral grip that allows me to steer the car at slow-to-medium speeds. At high speeds, it's not so important because the bits of the wheel that stick out of the bottom of the car act as an effective rudder."

Andy Green set the current World Land Speed Record in 1997 when he drove the Thrust SSC jet-powered vehicle at 763mph (1,228km/h).

The RAF pilot is now returning for a crack at his own mark in a project led by his old team principal, Richard Noble, himself a former land speed record holder.

Many of the original Thrust design and engineering staff are also involved.

The Bloodhound group hopes the quest to take a car through 1,000mph will be an inspirational venture, in particular to young children thinking of pursuing careers in science and technology.

'OOMPH' NEEDED FOR 1,000MPH

Car will feature largest hybrid rocket ever designed in UK

EJ200 jet engine is same unit that powers UK's frontline aircraft

Total of 212kN (47,500lb) of thrust - about the same as 180 F1 cars

The project was launched into the public domain in October 2008. Since then, intensive efforts have been under way to finalise the car's design - one that maximises the vehicle's performance and stability.

The original plan was to position a small (200kg) rocket above a heavier (1,000kg) EJ200 Eurofighter Typhoon engine loaned to the team by Britain's Ministry of Defence.

However, as the design staff worked through the modelling, it became clear that additional thrust was going to be needed to overcome the aerodynamic drag. This called for a bigger (400kg) rocket.

This in turn introduced instabilities that could only be solved by flipping the positions of the two power units.

"We have switched the architecture of the rocket and the jet engine and the reason for that was we were seeing some quite high lift loads at the rear end of the car," explained chief designer John Piper.

"The change, though, has had some beneficial side-effects, he added.

"We can now get a good chassis structure across the top which means we can now have a really good mounting for a single fin, whereas before with the rocket on top it was right in the way of where the fin would go. That meant we were going to have to have two fins, one on each side; and they were occupying the space where ideally we'd like to put in parachute cans.

The BBC's Robert Hall discusses the final design of Bloodhound

"So, there've been lots of small gains out of this."

With the design now fixed, the car can be built. This will be done at a special facility in Bristol's docklands area, right next to Brunel's famous iron ship SS Great Britain.

Bloodhound is a private venture. Although it has substantial in-kind support through the MoD in the loan of two EJ200s, it has to raise some £10m of funds to complete the record attempt.

Major sponsors include the aerospace giant Lockheed Martin which has helped in designing Bloodhound's aluminium wheels; and Intel which has assisted the modelling work by making available one of the largest computer clusters in the country.

Bloodhound now has more than 2,410 primary and secondary schools, 98 further education colleges and 33 universities signed up and using the Bloodhound education resources in their lessons.

Ride-on lawnmowers 'injure thousands every year'

2009-11-25T01:05:00.000Z

Slow and steady is the safest way to mow, say experts

Using a ride-on mower to cut the grass might save energy but they land thousands of people in hospital every year, experts have warned.

Over five years some 66,000 Americans ended up in emergency departments with injuries caused by lawn tractors, reports the Journal of Safety Research.

While many suffered bruises or sprains, some of the injured suffered broken bones and amputations. Six people died.

Most cases resulted from moving mowers or machines flipping over.

Borders' website suspends book sales

2009-11-25T01:03:00.002Z

Borders has 45 stores across the UK

Borders has stopped taking orders for new books on its website while the retailer "is in discussion with potential buyers".

The firm said that existing customer orders are also being delayed but will be fulfilled.

The Borders Entertainment part of the site - which sells DVDs, CDs and electrical items - continues to operate as normal.

Some publishers are also reported to have severed links with the retailer.

When customers try to order a book on the website they receive a message saying: "Sorry, title cannot be purchased."

Potential buyers

Reports have suggested that Borders, which has 45 stores in the UK, does not have enough cash to last until Christmas. It is thought it could go into administration if no buyer is found.

Talks with WH Smith reportedly collapsed last week. There is also speculation that HMV, the owner of Waterstones, is in talks to buy some of the stores. HMV refused to comment.

Borders, which also owns Books Etc, has suffered from increased competition from online retailers, such as Amazon, as well as supermarkets.

The Borders chain was originally owned by the US book giant of the same name but was sold in June 2007 to Risk Capital Partners.

Risk Capital then sold it on to the private equity firm Valco earlier this year.

Charles Darwin's missing Galapagos notes

2009-11-25T01:03:00.001Z

Darwin's former home, Down House, is now owned by English Heritage

An appeal has been launched to trace Charles Darwin's missing Galapagos notebook which provided crucial evidence for his theory of evolution.

English Heritage says the notebook, which helped him write On The Origin of Species, may have been stolen from his former Kent home in the 1970s or 80s.

In it he described encountering a giant tortoise and made notes on local birds.

English Heritage is putting Darwin's 15 notebooks online 150 years after On The Origin of Species was first published.

If Darwin had not posed the questions in that notebook, he might never have written On the Origin of Species

Randal Keynes

Picture gallery of notebooks

Curator on missing notebook

They will include highlights from a 1969 microfilm of the missing notebook. The books from Darwin's five-year voyage on HMS Beagle in the 1830s were all put on microfilm, but by the early 1980s the Galapagos book had vanished.

It is believed to have been stolen from Darwin's study at his former home, Down House, now owned by English Heritage.

The small, almost square notebook is bound in red leather with a brass clasp and labelled in Darwin's handwriting "Galapagos. Otaheite. Lima".

Darwin's great-great grandson, the author Randal Keynes, said: "Our family always felt that the best Darwin material should be at Down House so that the public could see it in his home.

Darwin's detailed notes will now be available online

"The Galapagos notebook is of outstanding value for the history of science. If Darwin had not posed the questions in that notebook, he might never have written On the Origin of Species."

English Heritage's chief executive, Simon Thurley, said: "There's a desperately sad gap on the Down House bookshelves and it's one that we hope will be filled."

The missing book contains entries from 1835 when Darwin was in Chile, Peru, the Galapagos and Tahiti.

The then 26-year-old noted: "met an immense Turpin; took little notice of me."

He was later told it was possible to tell from which of the Galapagos islands a tortoise came by the variation of its shell.

Britain's Got Talent star Faryl lands HMV in trouble

2009-11-25T01:02:00.001Z

Faryl Smith has released the fastest-selling solo classical debut album

Music chain HMV is to be prosecuted for letting Britain's Got Talent finalist Faryl Smith sing during a signing at one of their stores.

The 14-year-old from Northamptonshire was signing copies of her debut album, Faryl, when she started to belt out a song from the record.

But the HMV store at the Newlands shopping centre in Kettering had not applied for an entertainment licence.

Kettering Borough Council said it planned to prosecute the store.

The council said the firm has refused to retrospectively apply for a £21 licence for the event, which took place in March.

A spokeswoman for the authority said: "It's a routine prosecution. It doesn't matter who the artist is.

"We offered HMV the opportunity to apply for a retrospective licence but they refused."

No action is being taken against Faryl, the council added.

Pet labrador which 'knew train timetable' dies

2009-11-25T00:59:00.000Z

Archie's adventure in 2005 made headlines around the world

A dog which made headlines around the world after he lost his owner and caught the right train home has died.

Archie the labrador became separated from owner Mike Taitt in 2005, so the impatient dog boarded the train at Inverurie in Aberdeenshire.

Archie got off the train when it stopped at Insch and was spotted by a signalman, who contacted his owner.

Mr Taitt said of Archie's death at the age of 13: "It's very sad. He was a great friend and a great character."

The story of Archie's solo train journey was retold around the world.

Neither fellow passengers nor railway staff realised that the black labrador was unaccompanied.

'Didn't have ticket'

The Insch station signalman Derek Hope logged Archie's arrival as Incident no. 822344: "Unaccompanied doggie gets off train. There was the train conductor standing with Archie on the platform saying he had got on at Inverurie and didn't have a ticket."

Mr Taitt said at the time "He is a very intelligent dog. I am sure he can read a timetable. When he could not find me he took the right train home. He's been on that train before.

"I am convinced he knew it was the right one. But who knows."

The Scottish SPCA said it could be quite easy to underestimate the intelligence of animals.

2012 movie storms UK film chart

2009-11-22T14:18:00.001Z

2012 is also number one on the US box office chart

John Cusack disaster movie 2012 has topped the UK box office, with takings of £6.48m in its opening weekend.

The Mayan-inspired film sees a series of geological and astrological disasters befall Earth in 2012.

The movie knocked Disney's A Christmas Carol into second place, although the animation still made more money in its second weekend than its first.

Michael Caine's latest film Harry Brown debuted at number three, while Disney Pixar's Up slipped one spot to four.

George Clooney's military satire The Men Who Stare at Goats also dropped one place to number five.

UK and IRELAND BOX OFFICE TOP FIVE

1. 2012 - £6.48m

2. A Christmas Carol - £2.5m

3. Harry Brown - £1.27m

4. Up £985,722

5. The Men Who Stare at Goats - £796,080

Source: Reuters

The animated version of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox, directed by Wes Anderson, remained at number six.

This Is It, the Michael Jackson film based on rehearsal footage for his ill-fated concerts, slipped five places to seven.

Alien thriller The Fourth Kind, starring Milla Jovavich, moved down from five to eight, while 1960s coming-of-age tale An Education held on to the ninth spot.

Jennifer's Body, a horror comedy, slipped to tenth position after debuting at number seven last week.

Five British heroes overlooked by history

2009-11-21T02:56:00.000Z

The National Lottery has published a list of 50 "unsung heroes" to mark its 15th birthday. Here are five people that history forgot.

THOMAS CLARKSON

William Wilberforce has become the poster boy for the anti-slavery movement, with 20,000 people attending a ceremony to mark the 100th anniversary of his death, his house turned into a museum and his statue in Westminster Abbey.

Clarkson was overshadowed by Wilberforce

But the contribution of Thomas Clarkson, from Cambridgeshire, was equally important, says Michael Turner, professor of history at the Wilberforce Institute in Hull.

"He was passionate about the anti-slavery cause, he wrote a prize essay on anti-slavery when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, but perhaps most important of all he organised a vast petition which he carried around the country to secure names to support the Parliamentary campaign that Wilberforce then presented on numerous occasions to Parliament.

"To that extent the two men, Clarkson and Wilberforce, were indispensable to each other, the former out on the streets so to speak and the latter at Westminster."

Clarkson is well known in academic circles, says Mr Turner, and in his home town of Wisbech, where there is some unhappiness that Wilberforce still hogs the limelight.

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SIR JOHN HARINGTON

The first flush toilet was described by Sir John in 1596, when he published A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax.

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He installed one for his godmother, Queen Elizabeth I, at Richmond Palace, although she was rather fearful of it and refused to use it. Partly for that reason, it was not adopted in England but was in France.

It's difficult to over-estimate Sir John's contribution to the development of the toilet used today, says Lucinda Lambton, author of a history of the lavatory called On The Throne. She says Sir John never gave it a name, he just called it his "device".

"He designed the first flushing mechanism. The Romans had produced something fantastic many years before but it wasn't mechanised.

"Sir John designed it for his godmother, the Queen, but she was too frightened to use it. She likened it to a thunderstorm. It was never manufactured. Perhaps if she had used it, it would have taken off."

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MARGARET ANN BULKLEY

It was only when the distinguished doctor James Barry died of dysentery in 1865 that it was discovered "he" was in fact a woman called Margaret Ann Bulkley.

According to the Science Museum, Bulkley saw very few career choices as a woman, so she hatched a plan in which she would become James Barry. After graduating from medical school in Edinburgh, she worked at St Thomas' Hospital, London, before joining the Army.

A successful career as a surgeon followed, in India and South Africa, and she eventually rose to the rank of Inspector General in charge of military hospitals.

Her methods of nursing sick and wounded soldiers from the Crimea meant she had the highest recovery rate of the whole war, and she also performed one of the first successful Caesarean sections, in 1826.

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PERCY SHAW

Yorkshireman Shaw invented the "cat's eyes", which can now be found all over the world to help motorists at night.

Although he made his discovery in the 1930s, it was not until Roads Minister Jim Callaghan ordered their introduction in 1947 that they really took off.

Shaw had the idea while driving in fog

Eventually, there were 400 on every mile of motorway, and more than 20 million across the country.

"He probably single-handedly saved more lives than anyone else, almost," says Sir Bernard Ingham, who acclaimed Shaw in his book, Yorkshire Greats.

"Cat's eyes are such a memorable invention, telling drivers where they are on the road. The world has forgotten his contribution, but he's not forgotten in Halifax, because he was a real character."

Shaw got the idea, says Sir Bernard, when he was stopped from going over a cliff on a foggy night, because he caught the light of the eyes of a cat sitting on a wall.

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MARY RAND

Rand led the way

The Somerset athlete became the first British female to win an Olympic gold medal in track and field, when she took the long jump title at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, breaking the world record in the process. Six days later, her room-mate Ann Packer won gold in the 800 metres.

"It was an incredible achievement," says Brendan Foster, former Olympic medal-winner. "A whole generation of British female athletes were inspired by Mary Rand and Ann Packer.

"It really set the ball rolling. Without the first, you don't get anywhere, so Mary should rightly be celebrated as the first star of British athletics. If it had happened in the present celebrity age, she would be the ultimate golden girl."

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Cern Large Hadron Collider restarts

2009-11-21T02:55:00.000Z

The LHC's tunnel runs for 27km under the Franco-Swiss border

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment has been re-started after a hiatus of 14 months.

Engineers have now made two stable proton beams circulate in opposite directions around the machine.

If all continues to go well, the team might even try to increase the £6bn ($10bn) collider's energy to record-breaking levels this weekend.

The LHC, the world's largest machine, is housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border.

The experiment is designed to smash together beams of protons in a bid to shed light on the nature of the Universe.

Among other things, scientists will search for signs of the Higgs boson, a sub-atomic particle that is crucial to our current understanding of physics. Although it is predicted to exist, scientists have never found it.

It happened faster than anyone could have dreamed of, everything went very smoothly

James Gillies
Cern

In pictures: LHC restarts

Large Hadron Collider: Guide

Q&A: Fixing a particle smasher

The LHC: worth the wait?

Dozens of giant superconducting magnets that accelerate the particles at the speed of light have had to be replaced after faults developed just days after the collider was inaugurated last year.

Operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), the LHC will create similar conditions to those which were present moments after the Big Bang.

The BBC's Pallab Ghosh in Geneva says the restart of the collider was the moment the scientists had been waiting for.

It means they can once again go in search of the new discoveries they believe will roll back the frontiers of understanding our universe, says our correspondent.

"It's great to see beams circulating in the LHC again," said Cern's director-general Rolf Heuer.

Particle physicist Jim Virdee says that scientists are excited that the LHC is coming back online

"We've still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we're well on the way."

Engineers sent their first beam all the way round the LHC's circumference 100m underground after 1930 GMT on Friday.

Record attempt

The beams themselves are made up of "packets" - each about a metre long - containing billions of protons. But they would disperse if left to their own devices.

Electrical forces had to be used to "capture" the protons. This keeps them tightly huddled in packets, for a stable, circulating beam.

Engineers had not been expected to try for a circulating beam before 0600 GMT on Saturday.

This giant machine part will try to detect the elusive Higgs boson

James Gillies, Cern's director of communications, told BBC News: "It happened faster than anyone could have dreamed of."

"Everything went very smoothly."

Dr Gillies said that if everything continued to go well, Cern might try to reach a record-breaking beam energy of 1.2 trillion electron volts this weekend.

Only the Tevatron particle accelerator in Chicago, US, has approached this energy, operating at just under one trillion electron volts.

But other team members want to keep the beam circulating at low energy and try for the machine's first proton beam collisions.

"The LHC is a far better understood machine than it was a year ago," said Steve Myers, Cern's director for accelerators.

"We've learned from our experience, and engineered the technology that allows us to move on. That's how progress is made."

1 - 14 quadrupole magnets replaced

2 - 39 dipole magnets replaced

3 - More than 200 electrical connections repaired

4 - Over 4km of beam pipe cleaned

5 - New restraining system installed for some magnets

6 - Hundreds of new helium ports being installed around machine

7 - Thousands of detectors added to early warning system

There are some 1,200 superconducting magnets which form the LHC's main "ring".

These magnets bend proton beams in opposite directions around the tunnel at close to the speed of light.

At allotted points around the tunnel, the proton beams cross paths, smashing into one another with enormous energy. Large "detector" machines located at the crossing points will scour the wreckage of these collisions for discoveries that should extend our knowledge of physics.

Engineers first circulated a beam all the way around the LHC on 10 September 2008.

But just nine days later, an electrical fault in one of the connections between superconducting magnets caused a tonne of liquid helium to leak into the tunnel.

Liquid helium is used to cool the LHC to its operating temperature of 1.9 kelvin (-271C; -456F).

The machine has been shut down ever since the accident, to allow repairs to take place.

Professor Norman McCubbin, from the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, added: "I'm sure every particle physicist has been feeling just a little bit impatient as the 're-start' of the LHC has drawn nearer. It's great to see beams circulating again."

The damage caused to the collider meant 53 superconducting magnets had to be replaced and about 200 electrical connections repaired.

Engineers have also been installing a new early warning system which could prevent incidents of the kind which shut down the experiment.

Cern has spent some 40m Swiss Francs (£24m) on repairs to the collider.

10 things we didn't know last week

2009-11-21T02:53:00.000Z

Snippets from the week's news, sliced, diced and processed for your convenience.

1. Three of the world's supercomputers are in the US.
More details

2. Humans are more likely to be killed by a hippo than a lion.
More details (Times)

3. Teeth grinding is known as bruxism.
More details

4. Spin doctors were used in the Iron Age.
More details

5. School phobia is a condition recognised by doctors since the 1960s.
More details

6. Whisky should be stored upright, unlike wine.
More details

7. "Wrap rage" is a term coined to describe the anger felt by people trying to get into bonded plastic "clamshell" packaging.
More details

8. Male and female candidates to be officers in the British Army have to do different amounts of press-ups, but the same number of sit-ups in a physical test.
More details

9. For three decades, the BBC took a very dim view of Enid Blyton's work.
More details

10. Swindon has the UK's highest broadband use.
More details (Times)

Download Junkie

2009-11-20T17:16:00.000Z

Highlights This Week Include:

	WinCDEmu 3.0 Freeware Mount an ISO image as a virtual drive 20 November 2009
	FastStone Image Viewer 4 Free for personal-use only Image and digital photo viewer 20 November 2009
	Google Earth 5.1 Freeware Quickly view satellite maps of the Earth 20 November 2009
	GoodSync 8.0.8.0 Freeware Sync files across computers and USB keys 18 November 2009
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	VirtualBox for Windows 3.0.12 Freeware Host a virtual operating system 18 November 2009
	WindowBlinds 7.0 Trial Software Customise your Windows desktop 17 November 2009
	doPDF 6.3.311 Freeware Create your own PDF documents 16 November 2009
	Transmute 1.65 Trial Software Quickly convert your bookmarks between browsers 11 November 2009
	Cyberduck for Mac 3.3 Freeware Transfer & upload files with your Mac 15 November 2009

Film & TV Set Information

2009-11-20T14:50:00.000Z

VISIT LINK

Cheese and onion rules

2009-11-20T13:29:00.000Z

It was the year when the cheese & onion bit back.

The flavour, first launched in the UK by Golden Wonder back in the 1960s, has leapt to the top of the chart of the top-selling varieties of bagged snacks in pubs in the Food Report this year.

Last year it was lagging behind perennial favourite ready salted – yet now more than three out 10 (31 per cent) Publican readers say cheese & onion crisps are their top-selling bagged snack, ahead of ready salted on 27 per cent.

The Food Report research backs up the findings of a recent study from Mintel which also showed cheese & onion was now the top-selling crisp flavour in the UK.

And the category continues to perform well overall in pubs. With snacks being one of the simplest categories that a pub can sell, requiring no preparation, only four per cent of pubs admitted to not stocking some form of bagged snacks.

Mintel's research showed that the market for crisps and snacks has experienced a recovery, following a period of slowdown from 2003 and 2006. Last year, sales grew by 5 per cent as the nation munched its way through £2.53bn worth of crisps and savoury snacks.

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2009-11-20T13:25:00.000Z

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