TOTP debacle aside, the BBC knows full well you don’t need viewers to have a successful brand, especially if said brand is cheap as Mars Bars to make.
The BBC’s longest running programme celebrated its 50th birthday last night in typical […]

as you can (sort of) see, the label sez:
“TESCO
Total Care
Freshmint flavour
INTERDENTAL
WOODSTICKS
100 double ended
with fluoride”
i. the freshmint and fluoride presumably mean you no longer need to brush yr teeth ever
ii. hence the phra[…]

Crazy title, crazy book. And for a while Jaynes was painted as a crackpot too — he had committed the sin of publishing his theory as this popular and accessible book instead of in the technical language of a peer-reviewed journal. The book rece[…]

At the annual Tween’ Christmas And New Year Freaky Trigger Pub Crawl we always do a list. Such themed lists in the past have included the FT Top 100 Films Of All Time Ever 2003 and the FT Top 100 Songs. Many are started and not finished. But th[…]

I trust you all watched the first of Adam Curtis’s new documentary on freedom last night (The Trap, repeated BBC4 surely, so look out for it.) It might have left you in a state of paralysis as he traced the impact that a strain of game theory h[…]

Looking back it’s so bizarre, it runs in the family. My mother’s brothers grew up in the 50s and when I was growing up I received some hand me down books and toys. Were they ever into space stuff! A Dan Dare radio station toy, an early To[…]

Its good to see that in the great GIANT SQUID story the BBC no longer trust the standard units of measurement, be they imperial or metric. Instead, as any good news story will have it, the all new SI Units* are being used. In this case the squid is b[…]

The Hello Experiment on Lean Mean Fighting Machine is a grand stab at the kind of science we all wanted sorted out as a child. Could a blind woman make such a good clay bust of Lionel Richie, and could you do it in the time it takes to listen to &#82[…]

Much like those eminently satisfying reports of wine experts preferring £4 Sainsbury’s plonk in a blind taste test, Gramophone magazine finds that an obscure pianist who built a cult following on the back of an astonishing variety of accomplis[…]

Since mean-spriritedness is in the air (not here obv, but in other places and of course on the emo kid / indie kid / Tanya Pink Floyd articles) I thought I would respond to Alan’s continuation to the Digg 9 Things The non-tech savvy do to&#8230[…]