Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, more famous in the UK for owning a football club than being a Russian businessman who did rather well out of some dodgy privatisations has reportedly ordered the world’s largest Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM).

At 19 metres wide - it eclipses the current largest machine which comes in at a “puny” 15.43 metres.

To put that into context - London’s newest tube network, the Jubilee Line is 4.35 metres wide and Crossrail will be 6 metres wide.

Football fans will be relieved to know that he isn’t planning on using it on the football pitch at Chelsea.

Link:

The Local

If you have an account with the Digg website - this would appreciate a bit of tender loving care:

http://digg.com/politics/UK_Parliament_disinclined_to_publish_bills_on_the_internet

It’s an attempt to convince the British Parliament to spend a tiny amount of money making parliamentary bills available in electronic formats which would make them easier to share online with intererested people.

A long time ago as it happens - I had a similar idea, which was to put the bills into a Wiki format and allow anyone to edit a proposed bill so that the document would end up as a better bit of proposed legislation. Whether Parliament would then take the edits and impliment them would of course be a seperate issue.
Cheers

Found via the Psychodramatic blog - a scientific *cough* test determines your level of caffeine intake by measuring how fast you can click your mouse.

Reminded me of a modern version of the 1980s Daley Thompson Decathlon computer game where you waggled a joystick back and forth as fast as possible to win the game.

Click on the icon to try it yourself.

Thanks to a tip-off from The Greenwich Phantom, I spent a couple of hours on a pleasant wander round Greenwich learning a bit about the underground history of the area.

It was a bitterly cold day and I almost didn’t go to be honest, but it was the tours first day - and as it was a bit of a “test”, there was also no charge for the services of our guide. He isn’t a history expert on the history of the area, being more an enthusiastic amateur (a bit like me!) - which actually works better as you don’t get drowned in technical facts and figures.

Basically, we had a slow rambling wander round the town centre, then heading up towards Blackheath and then back down towards the centre again - stopping at various points to explain the historic relevance, and also quite interesting how the geology of the area affects the history. For example, the geology affects where water reservoirs were placed or the location of the infamous chalk pits on Blackheath.

I did take some notes as we wandered round - but it was perishingly cold - so I didn’t write down too much - nor take lots of photos. I preferred to walk around with my hands in my pockets!

I will go back in a few weeks and take some photos of some of the bits which really interested me and do a bit of a write up about them.

However, there was one spot where I did take photos, and for various reasons I won’t say where it is (although research will reveal that if you want) - but there was once a second railway leading into the very centre of Greenwich - which ironically I had started researching myself only a few weeks ago as later this year will be its 100th anniversary (expect a write up on the date) and part of the old railway arch still exists under a road and some housing.

There is an entrance via an unmarked door which leads down to the archway - and after noticing that the padlock on the door was attached to just the door and not the latch, hence impotent in function we all went down the stairs to have a look. Not expecting this, none of us had brought a torch, so the only illumination was from mobile phone screens and camera flashes.

We finished off the tour by the site of an old sand pit on a side street with some rather nice houses now lining the area.

Overall a very informative couple of hours and when the weather warms up a bit this will be a very nice way of spending an afternoon wandering round the town on a weekend visit.

If you are interesting in finding out the dates for next tours and more info - send an email to anthony@signware.co.uk

You can see my photos of the underground railway arch on my usual Flickr account.

There have been a fair number of reports of increased rates of ice melting on the Greenland ice cap - and regardless of why you think temperatures are rising (man made or solar), this sounds like a serious issue. After all, the Greenland ice cap is absolutely massive and unlike the arctic ice which is already part of the ocean mass - when the Greenland ice melts it will add to the sea levels at a catastrophic rate.

Or will they?

Just how big is Greenland? Here is a fairly classic map of the world:

Greenland looks big doesn’t it.

Well, that is not quite the reality - as the map above is a standard Mercator projection - which has the disadvantage of exaggerating the size of landmasses when you move away from the equator (and shrinking them as you get closer to the equator). You might also notice that the equator is not actually half way down the map - but about 55% of the way down, which further exaggerates how the northern continents are enlarged.

Greenland’s actual size in terms of landmass is around 0.8 million sq. miles.

To put that into perspective (pun intended), Africa is around 11.6 million sq. miles - in other words, Africa is 12 times larger than Greenland, but looks smaller than Greenland on the above map.

Here is a rather controversial - if more accurate in terms of landmass size representation of the continents - known as a Peter’s Projection.

Doesn’t Greenland look small now!

So - it could seem to imply that I am suggesting that the melting of the Greenland ice cap is not as catastrophic as it may look like it could be - and from an emotional aspect of looking at the presumed size of the landmass affected, it is indeed less disastrous that it looks.

However, thanks to modern map making - there is a hidden danger at the other end of the world, and that is the Antarctic continent - which is ironically often shown as smaller than it really is due to cropping. Even though the Google map above shows more of Antarctica than is often shown in maps, at first glance most people would probably guess that Greenland and Antarctica are roughly the same size.

Back to the numbers - Africa is around 11.6 million sq. miles, but Antarctica is around 5.3 million sq. miles - that thin strip of land often shown at the bottom of maps is actually huge - and some 6 times larger than Greenland.

So, while the Greenland melt is a problem, it isn’t as big as it looks at first glance. However the Antarctic ice melt could be vastly worse than it looks at first glance of a map.

I guess it goes to show how important it is to be aware of how graphical representations of data can twist how we interpret that information.