• No sense of humour at all – “Personally, I’d love to see the Pope in a debate on abortion, where he would actually have to address difficult questions and defend his own ideas. Best idea yet would be a debate on various controversial topics, like birth control, abortion, the role of women in the church, and homosexuality…with the Pope on one side, and Stephen Fry on the other. It could be perfectly respectful, and it would be hilarious.”
• Audio slideshow: Hubble’s first 20 years – Amazing. Beautiful.
• Do liberals read only liberal blogs? – The dangers of the “long tail…” I deliberately go read Daily Mail headlines on a regular basis just to check that I’m sane. The moment I start to agree, please shoot me.

• exactly – “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?” Looks like we’re not going to find out because of a few hold-outs…
• A Typeface for the Underground – Design and typography on the London Underground. Fascinating stuff.
• Britain to Levy a One-Time Tax on Banker Bonuses – “To a large extent the levy underpins a quite broad understanding here — even among those generally sympathetic to the industry — that bank profits this year were largely subsidized by the government due to historically low interest rates.” The best discussion I’ve seen of today’s pre-Budget speech is, bizarrely, in a US paper.

• News Corp to Offer Plaid Stamps! – “Giving Murdoch the benefit of the doubt, then, I’m guessing he simply doesn’t mean what he said. Perhaps he just wanted to sow a little confusion, get some publicity and maybe a concession or two from Google.”
• The night the Berlin Wall fell – “For me it was that rare occasion when a story was unqualified good news. After years watching the way communism was practised, I felt no need to mourn its collapse. Whatever came next had to be better.” Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin wall.
• OMG Ponies!!! (Aka Humanity: Epic Fail) – “The real world has failed us. It has concentrated on local simplicity, leading to global complexity. It’s easy to organise a meeting if everyone is in the same time zone – but once you get different continents involved, invariably people get confused. It’s easy to get writing to work uniformly left to right or uniformly right to left – but if you’ve got a mixture, it becomes really hard to keep track of. The diversity which makes humanity such an interesting species is the curse of computing.”

• “The Government” – “Try something. Every time somebody complains about the evils or failings of ’the government,’ strike out ’the government’ and see what results.” (via @marcoarment)
• People get red-dy – “The idea of a ginger festival may sound like little more than a bit of fun, but when 3,000 redheads came together for a recent gathering it became a bonding experience.”
• Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why. – “It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.”

• Clive Thompson on the New Literacy – Maybe the Internet isn’t the end of literacy after all…
• Galileo’s telescope reaches 400th anniversary – “Exactly 400 years ago today, on 25 August 1609, the Italian astronomer and philosopher Galilei Galileo showed Venetian merchants his new creation, a telescope – the instrument that was to bring him both scientific immortality and, more immediately, a whole lot of trouble.”
• Creationists, now they’re coming for your children – “The Greatest Show on Earth is a book about the positive evidence that evolution is a fact. It is not intended as an antireligious book. I’ve done that, it’s another T-shirt, this is not the place to wear it again. Bishops and theologians who have attended to the evidence for evolution have given up the struggle against it.”

• Apple Answers the FCC’s Questions – A few interesting tidbits, including the fact that two reviewers look at every update, but I’d say that there was little of real substance here.
• The brutal truth about America’s healthcare – “But the truth is that the rich, and the insurance firms, just don’t realise what we are going through, or simply don’t care. Look around this room and tell me that America’s healthcare don’t need fixing.” Still finding the whole debate quite bizarre.

Welcome to ZX81.org.uk’s new host. It may look the same as the old one but will hopefully be more reliable!

If you missed the full story, here’s how I reported it on the old server:

If you came here a day or two ago you probably found that ZX81.org.uk was missing.

It turns out that this was not just an extended outage but a planned maintenance activity where they moved my account from one server to another.

• Mind the staff – A photo of a member of staff at every London Underground station. Neat idea.
• The Pain of Being a Redhead – Green is not the only colour that it’s not easy being…
• Government rubbishes ID card hack report – “This story is rubbish.” A not very reassuring response to yesterdays story that it was possible to both clone and change the details on the new ID cards.

• Apple iPhone Developers Mostly Don’t Make Much Money – “Martin surveyed 100 development teams, received 85 usable responses, and found that 52% of the developers had earned less than $15,000 for their efforts and 33% earned less than $250.” Missed this one when it was first published. Bizarre to think that I’m doing better than a third of other iPhone developers!
• Trust, hostility, and the human side of Apple – “When the relationship’s power is so lopsided, the only sensible reason to stay in it is trust. If we can reasonably trust Apple to use its power reasonably and fairly, we can sustain the imbalance.”
• Don’t call what happened in Iran last week an election – Christopher Hitchens’ take on the recent events in Iran.

• Life after Humph – “The show is such a fixture, such a massive part of the radio landscape, I think British radio would be the poorer without it so they made a great decision.” Couldn’t have said it better myself. Welcome back I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue
• Iran election: state moves to end ‘Facebook revolution’ – At best this is very suspicious. And changes are we’re not talking about a best case scenario here. Let’s hope that those in power see sense.
• I stole your images, put them back or I will call a lawyer? – When people steal my images I’m never sure whether I should be flattered or offended. If I ever get an email like this I’ll know which way to think…