ChristopherWhite.info

Zaidi, a warehouse supervisor, said: “If I’d known this would be the result of breaking the law I would never have done it.”

Well what the shitting hell did you expect the consequences of breaking the law to be?

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“A War On Terror board game designed in Cambridge has been seized by police who claim the balaclava in the set could be used in a criminal act.”

There’ll be no masks on sale this year.

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Steve McClaren is getting a bit of stick for putting on a Dutch accent in this interview before the game between his Twente and Arsenal.

Much of it is probably unfair: the commenters assume he’s doing it deliberately. It could just as easily be subconscious.

In fact, I did much the same, and sounded like a Welsh boyo while talking on the phone to someone from Cardiff and Vale NHS Trust the other week.

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In a world of 6.6 billion people, it does seem hard to believe. The theory of six degrees of separation contends that, because we are all linked by chains of acquaintance, you are just six introductions away from any other person on the planet.

But yesterday researchers announced the theory was right - nearly. By studying billions of electronic messages, they worked out that any two strangers are, on average, distanced by precisely 6.6 degrees of separation. In other words, putting fractions to one side, you are linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances to Madonna, the Dalai Lama and the Queen. The news will come as no surprise to film buffs who for years have been playing the parlour game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, in which they link other actors to Bacon in six films or fewer.

Researchers at Microsoft studied records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people in various countries, according to the Washington Post. This was ‘the first time a planetary-scale social network has been available,’ they observed. The database covered all the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging network in June 2006, equivalent to roughly half the world’s instant-messaging traffic at that time.

Fascinating, I’m sure. But I’d rather Microsoft weren’t analysing my MSN Messenger conversations like that.

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Passed on this “classic books” thing from Gary.

Bolded are ones I’ve read; bold and square-bracketed are the ones I’ve read and loved; italicised those I intend to read. (I’ve exorcised the duplicated because they annoyed me.)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 [The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien]
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - Various Artists (most of it)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (most of it)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams]
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 [Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis]
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 DELETED DUPLICATE
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 This one was blank so I’ll fill it in with [2001: A Space Odyssey (and sequels) - Arthur C Clarke]
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 DUPLICATE DELETED
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

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At 5ft 10in, 12st 5lb and a 36E, she is keen to point out that the average UK woman is a size 16 like her.

She told Newsbeat: “I’ve always been bigger than most girls.

If this Miss England finalist is both average size and bigger than most girls there must be a handful of truly massive women unbalancing the weight distribution.

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Firstly, forgive the crudity of my methodology.

These have probably been up for some time, but I’ve just had a look at the overall results [scroll down a bit] collated from more than 25,000 people who took the Vote Match quiz before the London Mayoral election.

I then ran the archived version of the quiz, clicking “agree” for those issues with which a clear majority of particpants agree, “disagree” for those with which a clear majority of participants disagree and “neither” for those with a small difference (less than around 7%) between the two.

For which issues were considered important, I picked the top five — the table is ranked in order of importance.

Doing this gives the order of preference of candidates as follows:

While this isn’t entirely accurate, it does seem to lend weight to the idea that past electoral habits and/or the probability of victory are as big a factor in determining who to vote for as the parties’ actual policies are. More on this later.

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It’s often claimed that the number of foreign players playing in the Premier League has a detrimental effect on the English national team.

But the two teams contesting last night’s Euro 2008 final, Spain and Germany, have 41% and 51% of their respective domestic leagues made up of foreign players. The Premier League has 63%.

If the flood of foreign players into the domestic leagues did adversely affect a country’s national team’s performance, and a 10% difference in the number of foreign players only translated into a one-goal difference in international tournament success, would a further 12% really make so much greater a difference that a country wouldn’t even qualify?

Or is it more likely that England are just crap?

NB * In Italy (who lost a quarter-final to Spain on penalties), 36% of players in Serie A are foreign.
* You’d probably have to take account of the size of the countries’ native populations to look at this properly.

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I know graphology is an utter nonsense, but have a look at this:

This week, work sent me along to cover “Parliamentary Links Day” — it’s an event every year where the sciences’ learned societies (such as the organisers, the Royal Society of Chemistry) and professional institutions get together with a handful of MPs, mostly from the Innovation, Skills, Science and Technology Committee, or whatever absurdly long name it goes by.

Naturally, both party leaders are too busy to come. Both of them, and the Speaker of the House, sent letters of apology. These were their signatures:

It’s not clear in the scan, but Cameron’s was in blue — it’s clearly seen an actual pen at some point. I’m not sure whether Brown’s is a felt-tip held in a sword-grip or something emanating from MS Paint, but it’s clear to me that he just couldn’t be fucked. Thank you Gordon, your respect for the sciences is awesome.

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The Queen, better value than an iPod download

The Queen and the royal family cost each taxpayer 66p a year, an increase of 4p from 2007, Buckingham Palace accountants said today.

The accounts showed the cost of keeping the monarchy in the year to March 31 rose by £2m to £40m. Officials said this was 3.1% lower in real terms than in 2001.

The per person expenditure each year was said to be just under the cost of two pints of milk and or an iPod download.

Cheaper, yes. But not necessarily better value.

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