Wed 2008-10-29 
At 11:30pm last night, I looked out of the window and this is the sight that greeted me. Snow in the air, on the grass, and on the cars. It was still there at 6:30am when I had to walk across a crunchy mixture of snow and horse chestnut leaves to get to the road on my walk down to the station.
The BBC said that this was the first October snowfall in this area for 70 years.
Wed 2008-10-22 Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology
From this article by Sean M. Carroll at Scientific American.
Sat 2008-10-18 
Tower cranes on the Energis House site at the junction of Vastern Road and Forbury Road, Reading, UK. I see this view most mornings on my way to the railway station, and it has been interesting to see the buildings on this site develop. They seemed to build the concrete lift shafts to full height before starting on the metal framework for the rest of the buildings. In its present state it reminds me of Richmond Castle.
Inspite of the financial crisis there seems to be a lot of building work going on in central Reading at the moment, at least if the number of tower cranes is anything to go by.
Image constructed from two photos taken at 7am this morning, 2008-10-18.
Fri 2008-10-17 From a post by Mark Dominus:
I hate uncountable sets, and I have a fantasy that in the mathematics of the 23rd Century, uncountable sets will be looked back upon as a philosophical confusion of earlier times, like Zeno's paradox, or the luminiferous aether.
Thu 2008-10-16 This morning I was reading on the train when I happened to look up at the electronic display at the end of the carriage. These displays are used to inform passengers of the stations visited and other relevant information. Each display shows a fixed number of letters which are formed out of rather chunky triangular pixels. The information is flashed up cyclically, a few words at a time. This way a display will take several minutes to show the full list of stations and other information, then it goes back and starts at the beginning again. Some of the displays have faulty pixels which either stay dark or stay bright all the time. Well, this morning, when I glanced up, I am sure I saw the message:
Snoring is not permitted
It took a while for the strangeness of this to register in my brain. When it did, I put my book away and kept watch waiting for the message to come round again but, unfortunately, we got to my stop before it reappeared.
