A great gift idea for the kids! Try the Airline security screening playset!

Matches feature 11 rounds, alternating between chess and boxing. Four minutes of chess, two minutes of boxing, a minute break to check wounds and remove gloves, then into the chess again.

The Sydney Morning Herald has a more detailed article.

I ran into the infamous bike-texter today. This being the guy who texts while riding a scooter in dense peak hour traffic.

I pulled up along side him over the ANZAC bridge and noticed his attention fixed on his mobile phone. We were travelling at maybe 50-60 km/h in free moving but very dense traffic. He was clicking away with the thumb on his free hand, and while I watched he finished his text and stuffed his phone into his mouth.

I tried to have the following conversation with him:

"Excuse me, I couldn't help but noticing you seem to be sending a text message on your phone. And that you're riding a motorcycle at the same time, in dense traffic, over a bridge notorious for drivers thoughtlessly switching lanes, in twilight. While I applaud your sense of adventure and your obvious dexterity, I suggest you not do this any longer.

"In the event of a car suddenly braking, you will no doubt drop your phone. You will have no opportunity to pick it up before it gets crushed to a fine powder in the traffic. I know how this would upset you, since you seem very keen on your phone.

"Worse still, you will lose control of your scooter. Your natural reaction will be to stiffen up and go for the brake. However, because only one of your arms is connected to the bars, you will in fact be making a steering input causing your bike to swerve in an unexpected direction. If you happen to make it to the brake before colliding with something to either side of you, you will snatch a big handful and lock one of your tyres. Since you're right handed and on a scooter, texting with your right hand, this would be your rear brake.

"Your bike would then almost certainly wash out from under you, leaving you sliding down the road at something like 60 km/h amongst tired commuters driving in twilight. And let me tell you, the last thing they're looking out for is a human sliding along the road since they're all quite occupied texting people as well.

"Not only am I concerned for your physical well being, but also for myself. As a motorcyclist, I think we suffer a pretty bad time of things when it comes to our reputation; what you're doing now is certainly not helping. In addition, I loathe paying high insurance premiums which are in part dictated by the crash rate amongst motorcyclists. Losing control of your scooter and embedding your plump body in the bodywork of a car would also be classified as an at-fault accident by your insurer. and cause the police to charge you with negligent driving at the very least.

"So perhaps it's better if you put that phone away."

Now that's a bit of a mouthful at 60 klicks through a helmet and addressed to someone obviously mentally damaged. So instead I said: "Mmmmmmph!! Mmmm mmmm mmmmmmphhh!!" and gestured wildly with my hands.

I extended my thumb and pinky one one hand and held it up to my ear (phone) and then made a throat cutting gesture (danger!). I pointed at where he was holding his phone (his mouth) and made the throat cutting gesture (danger!) and shook my head (I disapprove). I then waggled my thumb on top of my fist (texting) and made the throat cutting gesture (danger!) once again.

All this was reflected back at me with a puzzled look. The kind of deeply indignant frown and look of incomprehension you might give someone if stood up in the middle of church and started urinating in the aisle.

I should have gently moved over and snatched the phone out of his mouth, then hurled it into the murky waters beneath the ANZAC bridge. Somehow I guess he wouldn't have understood that either; understood that I was doing it for his own benefit.

Anyway, good luck out there you crazy guy. I hope your inevitable and senseless accident isn't too painful.

Want a new name for your cat? Want to see some randomly generated vomit? Want to know what your Pope name is? Visit the Generator Blog and knock yourself out.

English is a nifty language, to be sure, but there are some things that it doesn't have a word for.

katahara itai: (Japanese) laughing so much one's abdomen hurts.

gigi rongak: (Malay) the space between the the teeth.

bakku-shan: (Japanese) a girl who appears pretty from behind but not from the front.

nakkele: (Indian) a man who licks whatever the food has been served on.

Kummerspeck: (German) "grief bacon", the excess weight gained from emotion-related overeating.

Putzfimmel: (German) a mania for cleaning.

Drachenfutter: (German) "dragon fodder", peace offerings made by guilty husbands to their wives.

die beleidigte Leberwurst spielen: (German) to stick one's lower lip out in a sulk (literally, to play the insulted liver sausage).

Backpfeifengesicht: (German) a face that cries out for a fist in it.

uitwaaien: (Dutch) walking in windy weather for fun

igunaujannguaq: (Inuit) frozen walrus carcass. The game involves the person in the centre of a ring trying to remain stiff as he is passed around the ring, hand over hand.

plimpplampplettere: (Dutch) skimming stones.

koshatnik: (Russian) a dealer of stolen cats

kualanapuhi: (Hawaiin) an officer who keeps the flies away from the sleeping king by waving a brush made of feathers.

tingo: (Pascuense [Easter Island]) to borrow objects from a friend's house, one by one, until there's nothing left.

I loved this, the Apple Product cycle. It begins with "An obscure component manufacturer somewhere in the Pacific Rim announces a major order for some bleeding-edge piece of technology that could conceivably become part of an expensive, digital-lifestyle-enhancing nerd toy." ...

I love this stuff. I love all the skincare products that lean heavily on pseudoscience or just nice sounding words to sucker people in - now with jojoba, alovera, cus cus, quat quat, and jus jus and 180,000 essential vitamins.

But this has to take the cake ...

JUST occasionally, a promotion for a commercial product is so misleading it makes us huff and puff. An example is the publicity for a new skincare product called Neaclear. It is apparently "creating a big commotion in the dermatologic community".

The company's website (www.neaclear.com) helpfully explains how "the body can only survive minutes without oxygen". "Today's breathable air," it goes on threateningly, "contains less than 20 per cent oxygen" whereas "at one time, this number was more than 50 per cent".

Shock, horror! The atmosphere is losing its oxygen! We've come across this rubbish before, and as far as the planet's recent history is concerned, it is simply not true. The oxygen in our atmosphere has been stable at about 18 per cent for at least 3 million years - and the last time it contained anything approaching 50 per cent was some 300 million years ago, when people weren't around to breathe it.

From the misleading to the absurd. Neaclear, we are told, contains a "powerful combination of liquid oxygen, vitamins C & E, sage, chamomile, seaweed and rosemary, coconut oil, sweet almond oil and hydroquinone". At first we thought this might be a typographical error, but no, the company goes on to explain that Neaclear skin care "is the first to combine stabilised liquid oxygen into all of its products".

This is "definitely unique", says Neaclear, and we agree. We have certainly never heard of a skin cream that contains liquid oxygen, the temperature of which is normally somewhere below -183 °C.

The amusing thing is that the company has since taken quotes from the New Scientist article and inserted them, verbatim, into their online product literature.

Lungs need a bit of spring cleaning? Why not try vacuuming them? Love the diagrams!

I enjoyed this discussion on Bruce Schneier's website about security in the Harry Potter Universe. In particular these comments at the end of the post from someone called Thomas Sprinkmeier:

"can you really render a powerful wizard helpless simply by taking away his wand?"

Every time I see a plot-device like this ('SW III, revenge of the sith' is full of it^Wthem) I mentally scream "LANYARD!" at the characters as loudly as I can.

They never listen.

As for HW security:

• no segregation of internal resources, so once the bad-guys had a foothold they were free to roam inside (interestingly the bag-guys set up a block to good effect)
• known-evildoer allowed internal access on the assumption he was contained in a security sandpit.
• obscure tunneling protocol used to bypass perimiter defences. eggshell security.
• No egress filtering, the perimiter defences did nothing to prevent the badguys from escaping
• insufficient communication among the defenders, warnings were ignored.
• 2-tiered perimiter defence incorporating a 'trusted' channel

For a childrens novel this sure is a lousy security textbook :-)

This is just really neat. Check out the Stellarium. Although for a moment I was worried that I was staring at a planet simulator instead of going outside and looking at the sky! Mind you, if you look at the sky close to the Sydney CBD all you'll see is a kind of hazy grey ...