Things I really like:

• The huge choice of sub-reddits, and how you can subscribe/unsubscribe to them for the front page
• A remarkable self-policing community
• A clean, simple interface
• I switched off AdBlock Plus for reddit today, as I’d heard their ads were fairly unobtrusive and I want to support them. First thing I see? “Reddit would like to use this ad space to say: Thanks for not using AdBlock!” with a thumbs up from their cute alien logo. Clever both technically and psychologically, it raised a smile (and prompted me to write this post)

Cambridge-Peterborough, Crosscountry
Fairly quiet, punctual. Nothing to complain about. Still think Cambridge station is being greedy by having 3 AMT coffee stands and should share them with less fortunate stations.

Peterborough-York, East Coast
Fast, quiet and on-time. Ridiculously huge amounts of legroom. Loads of power sockets. “Free Wi-Fi” did turn out to be free for only 15 minutes, after giving away all your personal details, and be slower than just using the intermittent 3G. But on the whole A++ would ride again.

York-Blackburn, Northern Rail
Absolutely rammed, especially after Leeds.

Blackburn-Darwen, Northern Rail
Late. Inexplicably swapped destinations with another Northern train arriving Blackburn at the same time, causing much confusion. Also fairly certain train was on fire. Well done Northern Rail.

On March 4, 2010, President Obama signed into law the Travel Promotion Act (TPA) of 2009, Pub. L. No. 111-145. The Act directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to establish a fee for the use of the ESTA system, comprised of $10.00 for each VWP applicant receiving authorization to travel to the United States and $4.00 for the processing of the ESTA application.

Apparently the word “promotion” means something different in America.

X is talking about how he’s moving to America soon
Y: America’s alright. I was there this morning.
X (taken aback): Really? What were you doing in America?
Y: This morning? Getting on a plane mostly.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin&oldid=427227881)

“Do you think we’ll see a level in this video?” “Y’know I kinda hope not.”

“You don’t remember the part of Whomp’s Fortress where there were cannons shooting you out of the sky, and your Nintendo 64 would blow up?”

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Dear Mr Coombe,
You recently let us know that you don’t need a TV Licence. Our records have been updated and you won’t receive any more letters from us for almost two years.

That’s exactly what you said 6 months ago!

Just testing some of the features of WordPress.com’s Jetpack. Ooh, shortcodes for embedding videos. Hey look, LaTeX!

*geeks out*

Now Baudrillard, the author of the articles, seems very much like the stereotypical French “philosopher”. However they do make a fascinating statistical claim: “fewer US soldiers were killed in this ‘war’ than would have died in traffic accidents had they stayed at home”. For no reason I decided to investigate.

Looking into it further, there were a total of 294 US casualties in the Gulf War. However only 114 were due to enemy fire (35 were killed by friendly fire, 145 in accidents).

According to nationmaster.com, the total number of US troops deployed in Gulf War I was about 697,000. And thankfully Wikipedia has an article for everything, including “List of motor vehicle deaths in U.S. by year” (note to self – clean this article up!). That even helpfully gives deaths as a fraction of the population per year; for 1990 it was 0.000178779. So that gives an estimated 125 deaths among the troops, had they all remained at home for a whole year.

Obviously there are a whole host of confusing factors here: different lengths and timings of deployment, soldiers being an age/sex skewed section of the U.S. population and so probably having higher traffic death rates. But although the precise statistics may be debatable, the overall point is a valid one: the Gulf War had a remarkably low fatality rate for the U.S.

Of course this is only deaths, it doesn’t count injuries, PTSD or the mysterious “Gulf War syndrome”. Ironically whilst Googling for analysis of this claim, I found a study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16484030) apparently showing that in the years after the war, veterans suffered significantly more traffic fatalities than non-veterans.

Anyway, I should do some real work now.

“Who could it be from?” I thought. “Could it really be possible that someone out there actually LIKES me?” For a brief moment I actually felt a rare burst of self-esteem. With trepidation I opened the card.

Inside it said “from Jesus”.

I feel like I have been trolled by Christianity.