Election launch: a nation reaches for the remote

Gordon Brown posed outside No. 10 Downing Street with his Cabinet. David Cameron stood on crates on his own outside County Hall, to frame the House of Commons in the background. Nick Clegg and Vince Cable launched their campaign from outside the LibDems Cowley Street headquarters.

The symbolism? Brown has a 'team to return him as Prime Minister'; Cameron wants to 'hide his team in his ambition to be Prime Minister'; Nick Clegg wants to 'show off Vince Cable as a potential Chancellor of the Exchequer'.

So it's a month of kissing babies, having cups of tea in semi-detached houses, and being hijacked by hecklers of opposite party hues. And come 6 May 2010, all this effort will boil down to a few dozen key marginals and the need for the Conservatives to gain a national swing of 6.9 per cent.

Fast-forward all the debate, play the odd gaffe in real time (and on YouTube), read the odd policy that relates directly to your material wealth, and moan in the pub over the odd pint, and the real world will soon hove into view once more on 7 May 2010 (or at least once the hung parliament coalition has been negotiated).


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Odd title Diagram Prize winner

The votes are in and the winner of the Diagram Prize for the unintentionally oddest book title of the year is ...

Crocheting adventures with hyperbolic planes by Daina Taimina (see also earlier post, 'The importance of being odd', 11 March 2010)

Apparently it's the best fusion of crochet and mathematics known to humankind. Long may it prosper in the Billboard Geek 100 bestseller chart.

Non-contact Collider

The Large Hadron Collider under Geneva is turning out to have a fitness record worse than Michael Owen's.

The latest hamstring injury revolves around a new safety issue. The Collider currently operates at 7 trillion electron-volts, but is having to shut for a year in order to cope with twice that amount.

For a bunch of elite physicists, eminently bright, this lack of mathematical forecasting regarding the level of energy needed to recreate Big Bang conditions seems a little baffling.

Maybe the maths is developing at the same rate as the science? And, in the final analysis, will twelve months slip by before the boffins realise that 14 trillion electron-volts is not enough?

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Chequered future

Farewell, then, bank cheques: after 300 years of supremacy For the inevitable reason that banks find them too expensive. It's going to be increasing hard to be a 21st-century Luddite as there is no machinery to smash up: the technology is all virtual, in cyberspace.

For those people who find money scary enough to keep their cash under the bed, the days of such subterfuge may be numbered. Now matter how susceptible to hacking, online banking is like a super-massive black hole, sucking all other ways of keeping account into its midst.

Generational shift is no longer generational. Paradigms are changing on an exponential curve akin to Moore's law for computing power: ways of dealing with the modern world seem to be doubling in difficulty at least every 18 months.