Basking in the Sun

No, not at the moment, but last week on the shores of Valencia. Even came back with a bit of suntan. This is also the reason why all the news gets put into this post (albeit briefly).

In a bid to aid pandas bred in captivity to understand the idea of mating, researchers have been showing films of other pandas 'at it' to give them the gist, and it seems to be working. Who said pornos weren't good for you? :)

Now that Mars has been visited by various robots, and plans are afoot to put people on it soon, the next logical step is that they can grow their own food. Therefore it's no surprise that NASA is preparing to put the british strawberry on the planet. So now there is another requirement to wannabe astronauts - they must like strawberries, as that's all they're going to be eating during their time on the planet.

Yet another scientific project has come up with earth-changing results. This time sheep are determined to prefer happy people to sad people. They obviously learnt this by looking at the face of the farmer before he took them away for lamb chops.

Police in Wiltshire are embracing the internet for useful purposes, as can be seen by the example of their stolen gnome appeal.

Web services, always trying to be helpful, sometimes don't quite have the desired effect that was intended. Take, for example, the Amazon "related items" feature. Children looking for Spot the Dog toys, may be surprised to find links to female ejaculation and the G-spot. Not quite what they were expecting, I think. Go on, have a try, and see what else you can find.

I really am considering creating a seperate column for the goings-on in Italy as no sooner has it been made illegal to send spam to mobile phones (with prison sentences and fines as a result) than the country's 'leader' mass SMSs all the mobile phones in the country telling them to vote. Apart from the fact that lots of those phone owners were not elegible to vote, it's also a very sly move at influencing the voters prior to the election. But, no doubt, he will be exempt from this law, like with all the others he seems to be flouting nowadays.

Taling about mass mailing, an IT security company sent out an email to all of it's customers stating the dangers of not protecting confidential data. Fine you would say - but not if it forgot to BCC all the addresses, and therefore sent out all the names of it's subscribers in the mail. Very clever.

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