A HUGE ice shelf, bigger than Manhatten, has broken off.

 

 

On the BBC news site, its listed lower down than "Rod and Zara top New Year Honours" and next to "Indiana Jones to Return in 2008" but at least they did carry the item i suppose...

 

 

EEk!

 

Due to all the rain we've had recently, the back wall of a block of luxury tenements (even nicer than mine!) fell down, rendering the building unsafe until its repaired.

 

Have a look here - "Clarence Drive is Falling Down"

 

Now these are expensive flats - each one must be £250k absolute minimum, so the block itself is worth many millions.  It looks to me as if there are 2 doorways/cupboards where there shouldnt be - actually placed into the inner wall which presumably should be solid all the way up.  But apprently there are also problems with modern builders not knowing how to deal with the beautiful old sandstone blocks properly - they need pointed correctly with old-fashioned lime.

"Temperatures in central England have been recorded since 1659, the world's longest climate record, and they indicate the trend towards warming weather across Britain as a whole."

 

"The record year has astounded scientists. "What's phenomenal about this year is that some of these months have broken records by incredible amounts. This year it was 0.8C warmer in autumn and 0.5C warmer between April and October than the previous warmest years. Normally these records are broken by around one tenth of a degree or so," said Prof Jones."

 

 

Are you afraid?  I am...

 

Meanwhile here in Scotland...

 

 

Scotland has suffered the wettest November on record, and there is more bad weather to come. Worst hit has been Glasgow, which has endured the highest levels of rainfall on record since the First World War. The city recorded 342mm of rain last month, double the expected average, while Scotland was drenched by 244mm of rain, significantly higher than the average 166mm November total.  Continuing torrential downpours have already delivered 141.5mm of rain this month, about 91 per cent of the total average for December. "

 

"A Met Office spokesman said: “It has rained every day in Scotland for more than 40 days and so far every day in December has brought wet weather. It’s not going to get any better.”"

I've got a really terrible memory and I just realised that its completely exhausting.

 

It makes me feel lazy even when i'm not.  i forget things and then have to think of ways to find the info again and look them up again (or find wherever i wrote it or whatever).  Thank god for the internet and search engines or i'd be completely stuck and in a permanent fog.

 

It seems to be getting worse, and it does worry me.

 

My friends know to work with it, and not take offence when i forget things they've told me.  i'm sure it must be exasperating sometims for them, as it is for me.

My good friend dave is into mobile gadgetry, and is an experienced developer for them.  For this reason, he sourced both PSP (Playstation Portable) and Nintendo DS (Dual Screen) devices before they were available in the shops here.

 

I'm not really into games (i usually tire of them quite quickly), but I do like gadgets so I had a look.

 

He showed me them both on the same day.  The PSP had the biggest immediate wow factor - the screen was amazing and the games looked just as if they'd been shrunk from the TV screen, and it could show widescreen movies. 

But then he showed me what the DS could do.  It looked like one of the silly wee electronic games we'd had in the 80s, but then he showed me that it had a touch screen and could do voice recognition and games with relatively simple graphics suddenly came alive, were amazing fun and I realised that this was the more fun device, that i would be more likely to actually use and enjoy.

 

A few months later he introduced me to "Doctor Kawashima's Brain Training".  This is a work of genius, making full use of the DS's unique abilities to allow it to calculate your brain's "age" and then train your brain through a variety of challenges.  You write the answers to sums using the stylus and you speak the answers to some other challenges, like the stroop test.

 

So here I am, not having worked for a few months, and i genuinely feel as if my brain is losing some of its sharpness.  My memory in particular is appalling.  So I went out and bought a DS and the Dr Kawashima game...  first age calculation?  44.  Then 34 yesterday (my real age) then today its down to 28.  The surprising thing is that when i'm doing the wee tests, i don't feel like i'm doing them any better, in fact i feel worse, then it tells me i got more right and did it quicker than yesterday.  Amazing.

 

I've also bought "Brain Academy" which is also clever, but doesn't have the same instant wow factor as the first game.