Oddly comforting

1. For the first time in fourteen years I have not bought a copy of the Cambridge Lecture List. Hurray!

2. I am gutting for bibliography a book with the short title Bedingfield 2002, and I cannot get "Gotta get thru this" out of my head. Catchy tune...

3. I was puzzled by the BBC's issue with how to tell the time on the new insect clock; but a colleague says that when he went by on Saturday night it had broken down, and there was a group of people standing there trying to work out how to read the completely dark dial, and that might account for it I suppose. Probably it hadn't really broken down, and occasional darkness is a design feature, perhaps to remind us that we're all going to die. Die!!!

4. It's oddly comforting when science and science fiction are not easy to disentangle. Take this suggestion that the universe is just a projection on the lip of a black hole which has already swallowed us. I saw something which said that if the Hadron collider produced any black holes they would "small, benign and fleeting", which is also an oddly comforting idea, like the dragons in T. H. White that are little and live under stones, hissing like kettles.