Just a song for today.
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Big bug
There’s a 28 metre long Escherichia coli in Sheffield city centre at the moment:
But don’t worry, it’s not going to infect you. It’s there to promote krebsfest – a celebration of all things Sir Hans Krebs.
I can’t get excited; that man ruined Biochemistry 101 for me and everyone else who wasn’t weird.
Train
This brought my family back to me this afternoon.
It’s been a difficult couple of weeks without them, so it was great to see them all again.
They were pretty tired after the journey over from Cape Town, but exposure to the er… “cool” Yorkshire air as the train doors opened soon woke them up.
Mines
Browsing through Flickr, I found this photo by Keren Wormwell – who I have always presumed (possibly correctly) as being the partner in crime of Chris Wormwell, who has featured previously on the blog.
That’s a tin mine in Cornwall. Cornwall has many similarities with the Isle of Man in both landscape and culture. In fact, there’s a broad swath of similar areas running up from Brittany, through Cornwall, West Wales, Ireland and up into the Scottish islands. Perhaps united by their Celtic roots, and sharing similar language and lifestyles, if you were dropped in one or other of them, you’d have to do some detective work to find out exactly where you were.
Mining is another thing that joins Cornwall and the Isle of Man. Except in Cornwall it was tin and copper, and in the Isle of Man, it was lead. But the remains are dotted all across the landscapes of both. Here’s the chimney at Ballacorkish mine, a photo I was reminded of by Keren’s:
The mine chimneys were used to pull air through the mine. A fire was lit at the bottom of the shaft (under the chimney) and the hot air rising up the chimney drew air in from the horizontal tunnel (called an adit), keeping the miners suitably oxygenated. Later mines used steam engines, which also utilised chimneys.
But still, my point is this: every mine chimney in Cornwall is circular. Every one on the Isle of Man is square. You’d think that there would be one common, best way of building chimneys. It seems strange that the Manx and Cornish builders would do things so very differently. Maybe it had something to do with the quality of the building materials available.
Flight tips for idiots
Overshare. No, I’m not (just) talking about the locker room conversations about the after-effects of your recent curry, I’m talking about the stuff people choose to post on their social media accounts.
People have amazing lives, don’t they? The happy happy joy joy stuff that gets shared on Facebook tells us so, be it yet another amazing dinner at that amazing restaurant, the amazing results of your amazing child at their amazing school, or the amazing trip to that amazing place that you’re about to take on that amazing plane. We’re all guilty of it to a greater or lesser extent.
But overshare can be dangerous – be it sharing pictures of your children (I think that this one is a bit dramatic, but that’s more down to the extrapolation by the author; the points within are valid) – or, as Brian Krebs told us recently – putting a photo of your boarding pass onto the internet. Because then people can find out loads about you, just by using the barcode and an online barcode reader like this one.
Besides his name, frequent flyer number and other [personally identifiable information], I was able to get his record locator (a.k.a. “record key” for the Lufthansa flight he was taking that day).
I then proceeded to Lufthansa’s website and using his last name (which was encoded in the barcode) and the record locator was able to get access to his entire account. Not only could I see this one flight, but I could see ANY future flights that were booked to his frequent flyer number from the Star Alliance.
The Star Alliance, by the way, is a group of 27 member airlines, offering mutually beneficial deals to passengers using their services. It has nothing to do with Darth Vadar. Yes, I was also disappointed.
No-one is going to be able to kidnap your children if you share your boarding pass, but with full access to your travel plans, they could easily change details of your flights, steal frequent flyer miles or work out when you are out of town. And together with that photo you shared of your amazing new 72″ TV, that last one could be valuable information.
The thing is, it’s rather unlikely that anyone would ever use this information against you. But without victim blaming, if they did, you should be fully aware that you could have stopped it happening by just not showing off about your amazing trip to New York.