Nick Jordan

The New Order: When reading is a crime. I heard about this a little while ago, but this article provides a good summary of the situation. If anything is a good indication that something is wrong in this country, it’s this. I’m quite appalled at the authorities’ treatment of someone who clearly poses no threat and obtained material in order to further perfectly legitimate ends.

The Phoenix has landed safely on Mars. To pull off such a complex and difficult thing is a real triumph. Even in the unlikely event that it discovers nothing new it will have provided valuable information on how to land probes on other bodies in space, and for that alone it’s worth it. I suspect, however, that we’re going to start learning a whole lot of new and fascinating things about Mars. I can’t wait.

I’ve just been introduced to We The Robots via Metafilter, and have spent a happy time reading the archives and chuckling to myself. It’s clever, witty, tragic and just plain damned funny. This is one I shall be reading regularly.

Fight for your writes. A nice little article by Zoe Margolis. While it’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever write anything here that anyone else would want to reproduce, I’m fully aware that the copyright for my blog posts rests with me and, if the circumstances arose, I’d be more than willing to enforce it. Having said that, I’d be very pleased and flattered if anyone ever wanted to use my stuff, so my permission, if sought, would almost certainly be given without much hesitation, as it has with a photo of mine on Flickr, for example.

Email spam celebrates its 30th anniversary today. Oh joy. Perhaps we should celebrate the occasion by hunting down those responsible and stringing them up with Cat 5 cable.