No Running With Fish

A week or so ago this delicious sign appeared beside on of the lakes between Frimley and Farnborough North stations. I think that the intended meaning is that you must not take away any fish you catch in the lakes, you must put them back.

Young Egyptian Goose

We went for a walk round the university lakes this afternoon. The 8 Egyptian goslings now look quite smart in their adult plumage. I took this picture of one of them.

QLink Deception

From an article on the QLink pendant by Ben Goldacre:

Last summer I obtained one of these devices (from somewhere cheaper than Holford’s shop) and took it to Camp Dorkbot, an annual festival for dorks held - in a joke taken too far - at a scout camp outside Dorking. Here in the sunshine, some of the nation’s cheekiest electronics geeks examined the QLink. We chucked probes at it, and tried to detect any “frequencies” emitted, with no joy. And then we did what any proper dork does when presented with an interesting device: we broke it open. Drilling down, the first thing we came to was the circuit board. This, we noted with some amusement, was not in any sense connected to the copper coil, and therefore is not powered by it.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this device was designed with the deliberate intention of deceiving people.

The closer you look at alternative medicine, the less ethical it becomes.

Lamport on Program Design Methods

From a recent interview that Leslie Lamport gave to Mihai Bidiu:

The idea of doing something before coding is not so radical. Any number of methods, employing varying degrees of formalism, have been advocated. Many of them involve drawing pictures. The implicit message underlying them is that these methods save you from the difficult task of thinking. If you just use the right language or draw the right kind of pictures, everything will become easy. The best of these methods trick you into thinking. They offer some incentive in the way of tools or screen-flash that sugar coats the bitter pill of having to think about what you’re doing. The worst give you a happy sense of accomplishment and leave you with no more understanding of what your program is supposed to do than you started with. The more a method depends on pictures, the more likely it is to fall in the latter class.

I find that the worst methods confuse me so much with irrelevant details that I give up before I get to the happy sense of accomplishment. But then I am probably more easily confused than Leslie Lamport.

Another Blue Tit Nest

This one is at Farnborough North station, under the eaves of the prefabricated concrete building beside Platform 2.  The nest is about a metre and a half to the north of the "Charcon" sign.  I first noticed it yesterday when I heard lots of twittering from it and then saw a blue tit disappear into the 1cm gap between the roof and the top of the wall.  This afternoon, while waiting for my train I saw the parent birds return to the nest 5 times in just 6 minutes.  Each time they would first alight on the branch of of a nearby tree and let out a chirrup which was answered by an outbreak of tweeting from the nest.  Then the parent would fly into the hole and the tweeting would become more frantic.  A few seconds later the parent would re-emerge and fly off again and the tweeting would die down again.  Both parents looked pretty ragged, with feathers sticking out at odd angles from their heads.

Update on Thu 2007-05-17 by Tristram Brelstaff

This afternoon the parents made 7 visits in only 4 minutes. 

Update on Fri 2007-05-18 by Tristram Brelstaff

Today it was 8 visits in 6 minutes.

Update on Wed 2007-05-23 by Tristram Brelstaff

On Tuesday afternoon there was no sight or sound of any blue tits at the nest.  I can only assume that the young must have left the nest over the weekend.