I’ve added another cartoon to the blogroll – KXCD’s combination of nerdiness and maths that I almost understand makes it a winner here.

Other favourites included

• Velociraptors (a theme develops…)
• Mispronouncing
• Search history
• Organic fuel
• Goto
• Names

Notice Nottingham, the Council’s regular propaganda bulletin, alerts me to an interesting factoid in respect of Nottingham’s trams, which have clocked up 5 million kilometres since they have been in operation.

This is, apparently, the equivalent of seven return trips to the moon.  But although our tram fleet is shiny and futuristic, I’m not sure I’d trust them for interstellar travel.

Last year, I made elderflower cordial, which was easy, and tasted amazing, and this year, I’m making more as soon as the elderflowers come out.  The cordial was lovely, and it worked well as an icecream sauce and a constituent of salad dressing.

I’m not sure if I’ll have another go at elderflower champagne, which last year went mouldy and had to be discarded pre-bottling.

And I’m *really* not sure whether I’ll be attempting this new recipe from Manda who has found another culinary use for dandelions, apart from dandelion and burdock, dandelion leaf salad and dandelion wine.

Apart from anything else, I’ve not seen much in the way of dandelions yet this year.  Yes, there’s a huge one pushing its way through the daffs in our front garden, and yes, very annoyingly, there’s one growing in the tiny gap between the front door step and the drive tarmac.  But apart from that, I’ve seen hardly any little yellow flowers anywhere.  Hardly surprising when you consider that nights are still regularly at or below freezing.

see more crazy cat pics

I track “Nottingham” on Twitter – which mostly just gives me fairly inconsequential tweets from people across the country who come here and prop up our economy in business or pleasure.

But a couple of weeks ago, I started getting messages about “Youtube videos of Nottingham scientists”

Turns out there’s a year-long film project of a group of people working in science in this city, and you can watch the project as it happens with little snippets of film on the website test-tube.org.uk

I have to admit, so far I’ve mostly been looking at the videos of the new University of Nottingham hot air balloon, but I also spent an interesting 8 minutes following Aziz around a new lab he’s just about to inhabit. The fascinating thing was the lab had been in his building, vacant, for a year or two, while his team were cramped into an already overcrowded lab on another floor. In showing the cameraman around his new space, he said something along the lines of the previous team had left so suddenly they simply left experiments in the middle. The room is full of bottles of liquids, and you have to wonder whether it’s entirely safe…

Good stuff – will be interesting to see it develop.

I found this ticker-making site…

On this bizarre blog about anatomy.

I’ve also been playing with this online Morse Code translator.

Someone got me to look at this story in the Daily Mail which is pretty good, once you overlook the fairly spurious link to The Good Life which the journo keeps going on and on about.