ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

As the more astute amongst you may have noticed, I have upgraded my ‘blogging engine’ to Wordpress 2.5.
I’d been keen to upgrade for a number of reasons.
Partly because I’m a techie, and being a techie I feel obliged to try and upgrade to the latest versions of stuff as soon as is practical (but ideally […]

Read: Wordpress 2.5 »

The multi-storey car park in Gateshead’s town centre is an ugly, rotting, concrete lump.
Except for some reason Wikipedia describes it thus:
Trinity Centre Multi-Storey Car Park is an iconic concrete structure in Gateshead, north-east England. Designed by Owen Luder, it is a prime example of Brutalist architecture. The structure has a prominent role in the 1971 […]

Read: Knock The F***er Down »

Following on from his previous performance as The Sudocrem Kid, young SWP decides to continue in his forte of “performance art”:

However, in a break from previous tradition, the felt pens weren’t used to produce what SWP no doubt thinks of as “an art installation” but is generally considered by his parents to me more along […]

Read: Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man »

Garfield Minus Garfield. Appropriate credit for the spot must be given to Thea, as this is simply genius. A journey into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman, the question is what Jon Arbuckle’s world is like if Garfield didn’t actually exist…
Next we have Ewan McIntosh’s Edublogs. I came across Ewan at the Web […]

Read: Recent Discoveries »

but when you read this:
Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe has warned his opponents not to protest if they do not win elections on Saturday.BBC News
Does this instead actually enter your head as:
Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe has warned his opponents that he has won the general election to be held on Saturday
Or is not everyone that cynical […]

Read: Call Me A Cynic… »

Came across a weird but rather interesting diagram on Phil Teare’s site the other day describing the Uncanny Valley. Phil is quite into robotics and stuff, so it was no surprise to discover that the Uncanny Valley:
…is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like […]

Read: BigDog In The Uncanny Valley »

No, this isn’t me “stepping out of the sideboard” (I’m heterosexual, and if you can’t handle that, well that’s your problem, not mine), it’s a book review of a piece of chick-lit fiction with that title. I’ve already posted this on my Facebook visual bookshelf thingummy which is quite a nice application, but I thought […]

Read: Remind Me Again Why I Need A Man »

As you can no doubt see for yourselves, now that I’ve come across some old photos and scanned them in, it’s difficult to improve on perfection. Me.
And indeed as I child, I was perfect in absolutely every respect. From my incredible cuteness, to my impish cheekiness, to my allowing my parents a good nights sleep […]

Read: The Perfect Child »

I remember the Turin shroud being radio carbon dated in the late 1980s and showing that it was a mediæval fake. Yet the controversy has refused to go away, and it now seems as though there was good reason for this.
The two main strands of argument put forward against the results of radio-carbon dating were […]

Read: Dating The Turin Shroud »

According to my Premiership Predictions (based partly on the assumption we’re not going to win anything away from home), we were going to be in a bit of a relegation battle. However, my calculations using the BBC’s Premiership Predictor, show that we’ll stay up, but it’ll be a close-run thing, and if we hadn’t won […]

Read: Newcastle Will Stay Up. Probably. »