I've spent the last couple of days reading through the archives of Questionable Content after my friend Christopher linked to one of the strips. I do enjoy a good webcomic, and that is one of my new favourites.
This panel did make me wonder, though, if the author has been spying on Gennie and me:
Now I'm off to read the new Harry Potter book.
I love reading John Baez's column This week's finds in mathematical physics even though I usually only understand a tiny bit of it. This week he's talking about special relativity in 3 dimensions over the integers mod 7 - fascinating stuff, and a bizarre combination of physics and pure mathematics.
This morning I've been listening to this after having enjoyed listening to the single ("Emily") on the radio all week. I kept just missing the name of the artist because they would annouce it right before playing the song instead of right afterwards, but finally figured out what it was by googling some of the lyrics. Pretty good.
It's kind of surreal listening to the BBC radio stream from 10 hours ago, when the first reports of "an incident" in the underground were coming in, and knowing how the story is going to unfold. The first reports mention stopped trains and power surges, and only faint rumours of an explosion - there is no panic about multiple bombs and terrorist attacks. Although I'm sure that the possibility was on a lot of peoples' minds, it's nice that the reporting is not of the "shock, horror" angle and is keeping calm until more information is available. I imagine BBC reporters must have to go through some training to avoid rushing on air and saying "Oh my God the sky is falling" and to break bad news calmly.
I can't imagine how horrible it must have been to be one of those trains when the bombs went off. It sounds selfish, but I really hope that never happens to me. I know it's unlikely (terrorist attack is a rather unusual cause of death) but one can't help but imagine themselves in that situation, especially when the situation is so close to home. While it is a terrible tragedy, it is lucky that more people weren't killed - those trains are really packed at that time of a weekday morning.