Category Archives: amusements

amusements, current affairs, pleasures, science

Fictional Flying Carpets

Magic carpets are GO! According to a report in the Daily Telegraph of 19 December magic carpets are no longer a flight of fancy confined to the realms of the Arabian Nights. Professor Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan of Harvard has shown that the flying carpet is possible under the laws of Physics, although to be useful a lot of work will have to be done on the power to weight ratio. Good news for those of us who hate wasting time travelling.

amusements, beliefs, current affairs, quotes, thoughts

President Army Bush Quotes

Two excellent quotes today from the Quotation of the Day; both perpetrated by President George W Bush:

You can’t be the president and the head of the military at the same time.
Phone conversation with Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf; 7 November 2007; reported by CBC

The power of the executive branch is vested in the President, who also serves as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.
White House document explaining the role of the President of the United States

It does make one wonder how good these peoples’ grip is on reality.

amusements, beliefs, medical, science, thoughts

Microbes for Christmas Without Being Ill


So here we are. Just what every Just William schoolboy always wanted. Giant Microbes for Christmas. And you don’t get sick.

Thanks to a top off from Noreen it seems that quite a lot of gift outlets are selling soft toys this Christmas made by Giant Microbes. They have a wonderful array of bugs from Black Death to Syphilis by way of Typhoid and Ebola. They’re a snip at around £6 or $8 each. Just the present for the young science geek.

But there is a serious point to this. The toys are actually made in the shape of the eponymous organism, only around a million times bigger. And they they come with information about the bug they depict. So they do have educational value. And some of them, like E. coli (pictured above), are actually quote cute.

Go have a look at Giant Microbes and give yourself the ‘flu for Christmas! (Well actually maybe not, it’s a nasty pastel apple green colour.)