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Alison Hawke

Alison Hawke

Not dead yet

BBC News: 'Big Bang' experiment starts well Scientists have hailed a successful switch-on for an enormous experiment which will recreate the conditions a few moments after the Big Bang. They have fired a beam of particles called protons around the 27km-long tunnel which houses the the Large Hadron

Particle smashing

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) goes live at Cern this week! A hundred metres below France and Switzerland it will be smashing particles together at high energy levels using a 27km ring of superconducting magnets kept at -271C. Particle energies will be up to 7TeV, for a head-on collision of

The Brain and the Internet

There have been a few news and magazine articles recently about how the internet may be changing how we think, affecting our focus, even re-wiring our brains. I got wondering about this, and an older article about Asperger's syndrome and the Autism spectrum, and it ended up as

One hundred ugly cars

From the Telegraph, the 100 Ugliest cars of all time. This was a poll of British readers, but take a look at what claimed the top slot: Cars 100-81, cars 80-61, cars 60-41, cars 40-21, and the final 20-1. The editor's comments on each car are funny. The

The Great Wollmeise Frenzy

There's this yarn, Wollmeise, dyed in Germany in vivid colours. It's nice yarn. The colours are intense and you get 50% more than other yarns. Wollmeise is made by one person, so it's rare and coveted. Every time it arrives at The Loopy Ewe

Secret diaries

BBC News: The secret code of diaries There is a certain thrill to cracking a code. The 300,000-word journal of Charles Wesley, the co-founder of the Methodist movement, which was written in an obscure shorthand, has been solved and the diary transcribed. It has taken nine years. Wesley'

Recreational test-driving

I'm not a gear head, or a speed freak, but I like cars and I like driving. I like acceleration because I want to know that what I'm driving has enough oomph under the bonnet to get me out of a problem if necessary. I like

Knit up the ravelled sleeve of care

Cabled waist shaping on Eris is mostly done and I'm on the fourth skein of yarn. I'm going to adjust the decreases on the sleeves because I have teeny wrists and hate floppy sleeve cuffs. Might lengthen the body a bit too because my row gauge

Shamu the mysterious whale

BBC News: Police top misheard lyrics chart. Rock band The Police have written some of the most commonly misheard pop lyrics of all time, a poll suggests. Two of the band's songs feature in a top 10 of misunderstood tracks. A line from The Police's Message

Trailing the crowd

I finally caved and got a Facebook account. Found a few people I know, a herd of people from church found me, looking for a few friends from school and university. A lot of the people I knew are only on Friends Reunited, I hadn't been there in

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