Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category
The Human Footprint (5)
May 18th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
The vocabulary of the average UK citizen is just 25,000 words, only 4% of the 616,000 words in the English Oxford Dictionary. We speak on average 4,300 words a day – more for women (6,400-8,000), less for men (2,000-4,000). That’s 123,205,750 words in a lifetime. Over a lifetime we will know 1,700 people . We […]
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Computers4Africa
May 16th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
There is a good cause here.
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Walking the Pilgrims’ Way
May 10th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
When I was Head of Research at the Communication Workers Union, my Deputy was a great guy called Derek Bright who took early retirement at the same time as me and with whom I still keep in touch. Derek formed a small tourist business for the area of Kent where he lives, organising walking tours […]
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Food for thought
May 9th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Have you got a Morrisons supermarket near you? I don’t – but a NightHawk reader who does has written to tell me about one of their campaigns which grammatically takes the biscuit. Their current posters are making her annoyed every time she goes past. The announcement reads: “The smarter way to eat healthier”. As she […]
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Welcome to the world, Joshua (2)
May 7th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
A couple of weeks ago, I did a posting about the birth of Joshua, the son of our dear Chinese friends Hua and Zhihao. They live in Norbury in south London and we live in Sudbury Hill in north-west London, so driving over there can take a while, but we’ve managed two visits now to […]
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What date is it?
May 2nd, 2007 by Roger Darlington
You might think that the answer is obvious, but historically there have been many different calendars around the world and even today there are several different ones in use. The main differences between calandars are when one starts counting and whether one measures intervals by reference to the sun or the moon. The most commonly […]
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Welcome to the world, Joshua (1)
April 25th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
When Vee and I went on holiday to China in September 2000, on the long flight back we talked to a 25 year old Chinese woman sitting next to us who was making her first-ever trip out of China to travel to Oxford University to do a PhD in biochemical engineering. She was called Hua […]
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How long is the marathon – and why?
April 22nd, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Today we have the London marathon and one must admire anyone who attempts it. But just how long is it and why is it that length? The name, “marathon”, comes from the legend of Pheidippides, a Greek soldier, who was sent from the town of Marathon to Athens to announce that the Persians had been […]
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Getting tied in knots
April 21st, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Is there anything that one can’t find on the Web? A friend has drawn my attention to this amazing site which shows you how to tie every kind of knot with fast and slow illustrations. Since I’ve never even learned how to tie shoe laces correctly, I could have done with this site, 50 or […]
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The problems of new technology
April 16th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Some people take a while to get used to it – check it out here.
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