Iain Strachan

Two weeks ago, we received a call from someone in our office asking about alternative routes into work. She was stuck in traffic because an accident was causing congestion. Later we heard that the accident had involved a collision between a cyclist and a school bus. Being a commuter/cyclist myself I had to admit that I thought "ooh; that doesn't sound good". When I arrived home from work in the evening, I found out that my wife, Christine, knew the victim; she was the star pupil at the school where Christine works as a library assistant. She and the other librarian had got to know the victim, Sarah Waterhouse, very well - and she had told them she was about to apply to Cambridge for Natural Sciences. She was killed almost immediately, apparently attempting to cross the road, when the bus hit her. See this link for the full story. Although I did not know Sarah, she knew about me - Christine had told her that I also had read Natural Sciences at Cambridge. Anything tha...

Back in July, I posted a YouTube link to a beautiful song, Fix You , by Coldplay. It is easy in the emotion of the music to give assent to what is expressed in the chorus of the song: Lights will guide you home And ignite your bones And I will try To fix you But of course it's never as easy as that - there are no quick fixes for those in the kind of emotional distress that is portrayed in the song. So here is my creative response to those words ... Not trying to fix you I have no lights to guide you home, Instantly incandescent and full of hope. The little flame that burns in my heart Will perhaps suffice To see you, stumbling and hesitant, Around the next corner; Accompany you on the next twist In your path to light or darkness. For half an hour or maybe more I'll be alongside you An arbour of safety In which, if you are able, You'll begin to unpick The fettering threads of despair And release to me The gift of your story. And I, not guiding, But quietly receivi...

Find the answer here However, it did destroy a triffid belonging to a friend of mine...

Just LOVED this, physics geek that I am. "Alpinekat" (Kate McAlpine) is a science writer at the CERN experiment in Europe, which will turn on the largest particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider, on Sept 10th. There are some who say it will cause the end of the world, because of the potential to create "mini-black holes". Black holes are normally formed by the gravitational collapse of a massive star, but it is possible that the conditions at the time of the Big Bang could have created extremely small black holes. Steven Hawking postulated that such holes would evaporate by the emission of radiation, called "Hawking Radiation", a result of a virtual particle-anti particle pair being produced at the black hole's event horizon. Some physicists now believe that Hawking radiation may be a flawed concept and that a mini black hole created by the LHC would not evaporate, but could cause a cataclysmic disaster and swallow up the earth....

There is a really useful website titled Bullshit Bingo that is a very good concentration aid during management meetings. The web page produces a five by five grid of randomly chosen meaningless management metaphors ( like "traction", "vertical market", "horizontal market", "hardball", and "leveraging core competence"). You listen out during the meeting and every time one of the phrases is used by someone, you cross it off. When you get a line of five together, you jump up and shout "Bullshit!!" (or not, if you want to keep your job!). It really improves your listening skills. In a company I once worked for someone I knew actually got a line during a meeting, so it is possible. Other choice examples were when the CEO, in a 20 minute recorded telephone message to employees used the phrase "Moving Forward" a total of 39 times (someone was actually counting!). A couple of other hilarious comments were: ... this n...

Canal Walk, Indianapolis, 27th Jan 2008. On business in Indy in January, we had a weekend to kill. The folks at the office recommended we visit Chicago, but neither of the two of us, mad Englishmen that we were, fancied a round trip of seven hours in the car to see a city where we wouldn't know where to go. So we found in the hotel room a guide that said the Canal walk in Indianapolis is very beautiful, so we decided to give it a try. Alas, it had been drained for the winter, making the warning in this picture somewhat superfluous. Fancy diving into that! I shall be out there again next week, and I am sure the canal walk will be beautiful, but I doubt if I'll get to see it, as I'll just be there during the week :-( And here's the proof that I was really there! Such a lovely picture it might have been!

From a letter from 2001 between the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams and Dr. Deborah Pitt, a psychiatrist and evangelical Christian: "By the end of the 1980s I had definitely come to the conclusion that scripture was not dealing with the predicament of persons whom we should recognise as homosexual by nature. I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness." Good for him!! I agree with the above 100%. Apparently the Church of England is going to split on this issue, and some Conservative Christians say Williams's position is now "untenable". Some Conservative Christians need to go back to the Bible and read Matthew 7:1-2 . Some Conservative Christians need to understand the truly horrific abominations that are perpetrated on innocent children, not by h...