Apparently the latest trend is that Lidl and Aldi are actually full of posh people buying the basics before popping over the road to Sainsburys or Waitrose for the more expensive bits and pieces.

Cruyff.

Who else has a turn named after them?

I think SLR in the quoted passage was referring to a camera (single lens reflex) not the old British army rifle of the 70s (self loading rifle).

Current product names are MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac Pro, Mac mini. Operating system is Mac OSX.

Apple certainly seem to use "Mac" all the time in their bumph… and never MAC which is an ID for a network card or router or whatever.

How near Junction 31?

It's the wrong side of town for mountain biking really, though you could pootle around Rother Valley Country Park.

Personally I'd cycle west through town and out into the hills, if you've got 5 hours you'd have enough time to get across town and still get a ride in just west of Sheffield – say, through town to Hunters Bar, up through parks and over to Stanage, then Houndkirk, Blacka then back along the ring road.

Or, cycle into town, get a train out to Bamford or Edale or somewhere in the Peak(s) and cycle back. Might be worth getting a train at Woodhouse into town…

Edit: Sheff council have a handy cycle map on their web site. You want the south sheet.

To go back to the original point – can someone explain to me why anyone would think religion and evolution are somehow at odds?

It seems to me that if I were some sort of supernatural creator being, and I wanted to stuff a planet full of interesting life forms, I might invent evolution as the tool I'd use to do that.

I'm not religious, but I can't see why anyone who is would worry about evolution being some sort of threat to religion, because it isn't.

What's BST got to do with it?

Surely the issue here is that the people who decided to fire were miles away in an aircraft looking at pictures on a TV screen, and don't see the results close up. So they don't have to dehumanise anyone, that's done for them by the fact that they appear to be playing a giant video game – they sound like my teenage son and his friends on Modern Warfare 2.

There are now people who go to work every day in the US, and remotely fly drones over Afghanistan and Pakistan and take out buildings, vehicles, and groups of people in this way with hellfire missiles… and then when their shift is over they drive home to their normal family life. No horror of war for them.

There are numerous Lakes in the Lake (singular) district yet its the 'Lakes' (plural)?

Actually…

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_lakes_in_the_lake_district

;-)

Keep the Peak District for the good folk of Derbyshire

Does that mean that Cut Gate is right out for any Derbyshire folk, what with it being entirely within the City of Sheffield boundary? ;-)

Oddly enough I rode at Ladybower last Easter, and despite it being arguably better weather than this year I parked easily on the A57 at 2pm ish (the only sensible time to start a ride) and met very few other people riding, and relatively few walkers (the largest group being some orthodox Jews in best clothes on top of Hope Cross – Bamford must be getting pretty cosmopolitan these days).

What I can't stand is all those country folk coming into our cities and clogging up our roads, parking in our car parks, using our train stations, making the shops too busy, stealing our jobs, etc. etc. etc.

Peak District busy in places on bank holiday shocker!

Not sure that refutes freewilly tho just shows that our awareness of the choice is delayed doesn't it? Poop hang on that means there is a robot In My head making me do things.
My conscious mind is not responsible for my actions no?

Well suppose you're playing tennis or something. Are you really making conscious decisions about what shot to play as the ball is hit toward you at 80mph by your opponent? I'd say not, and your conscious mind is mostly responsible for stuff like noticing that every time you play a certain shot you lose the point, so try something different next time.

andrewh – was on a Horizon programme a couple of months ago. That Marcus du Sautoy bloke. Who sounds very middle class, and so as ernie would have it, merely trying to impress people by being a professor of mathematics with a job to promote the public understanding of science.

Volenteer is put into a brain scanner, told to wave their hand at a random moment. Scientist can see from brain scanner half a second before they decide to wave their hand that they will wave their hand.

Doesn't it actually show that our conscious perception lags behind actual events, rather than say anything about free will or decision making?

Am I the only one here who doesn't buy into this utilitarian argument?

Science is worth doing for its own sake, not (just) because it might turn out to be useful.

I don't think I'd like to live in Torquemada's perfect society – "Put that book down citizen, and do something I deem to be more useful!" (or face the inquisition?)

If we're questioning spending money on science instead of hospitals and so on (not sure how you'd have hospitals without science, we'd be back to leper colonies and leaches, but never mind), why not also question why anyone spends money on arts, music, theatre, films, literature, and culture in general, not to mention mountain bikes, when it's all useless and should be spent on these mythical hospitals?

Nuclear Structure Facility, Daresbury, Cheshire:

I'm sure if 1% of the NASA or CERN budgets had been put into projects of more direct social impact

Leaving aside the obvious idiocy of the argument, the US spends roughly twice as much on foreign aid as it does on NASA.

I mean, if you only behave well because of some theoretical punishment or reward hereafter, it's merely self seeking hypocrisy.

Will God understand this logic though? It seems doubtful, he sounds like a bit of a self serving git to me.

Don't panic by the way, he's known I think this for ages now. Hasn't he?

The only reason alchemy sounds nutty to us is because Newton started the way of thinking that we now call science. There was nothing nutty about it 400 years ago.

Are we really debating this complete non-story?

Here's a 'before' picture for those interested…

Urban Splash is the development company, they have done a good job on many previous jobs, I don't see why they can't do something with Park Hill…

I also don't see why any building more than 40 but less than 80 years old is considered to be bad.

EDIT: current progress below:

+1 for Newton

It's Sunday night edutainment… of course the style is similar to The Blue Planet or similar.

In fact, if you remember Cosmos from 30 years ago, it's pretty similar. But with better graphics and accent ;-)

that surely means that htc is better everyone knows skoda is better than vw cars but snobs buy golfs?

That's the STW logic anyway… of course in the real world everyone gets a Golf.

I really like my iPod Touch – best handheld computer since the old Psion Revo. And also it's an iPod…

However, it seems that if I decided to get a version of the Touch that also makes phone calls, I will suddenly be a fashion victim. Is this solely because HTC owners are the telephonic equivalents of Skoda drivers in STW World?

I can't help thinking that if people thought they needed to make better provision for themselves in later life they'd be less prepared to sink such eye watering amounts of money into mortgages while in their 30s and 40s which in the end only tends to make their parent's generation richer anyway. Given that many people in their 50s, 60s and 70s are often now extremely asset-rich because of this property mania, it doesn't seem too unfair to ask for some of that windfall to be put toward their old age care should they need it.

Passing those assets down a generation to middle aged people isn't going to help young people get on the housing ladder after all (perhaps what they could do is use it to get a house big enough for granny to live in with the family and therefore get looked after, but this doesn't seem to be done very often any more).

The BBC Radio adaptation of the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman is very good IMO, I got CDs for a good price on Amazon (it was either 6 or 9 CDs in total, can't remember). There must be a download version available somewhere.

A rather strange graph. Without thinking too hard the following obvious points occur:

1. The Roman Empire in western Europe was Christian when it fell, and was replaced by non-Christian 'barbarians' – it was only several hundred years later that Christianity became a feature in western Europe.

2. The Christian Roman Empire in the eastern mediterranean (Byzantium or Constantinople) continued much as before.

3. The Islamic world which arose later and first competed with and then took over from the Byzantine empire did nothing to destroy the Greek and Roman learning and in fact moved science and maths on quite a long way (ever wonder why we use arabic numbers, or why words like algebra or algorithm sound arabic?)

4. What about China and India?

But then you knew that…

When I was a teenager a mate had an old Cortina Mk 2 which had lights that sometimes blinked out for a bit without warning, usually on the way back down some country lane from a pub (my mate wouldn't have drunk anything) – we'd all be sat there shouting out which way we thought the next bend went, which I'm sure he found a great help…

dammit finbar got there first ;-)

Somebody got 3 million on Doodlejump?

MMR repeat anyone?

I don't know about anyone else but I'm tired of people taking views on these matters based on nothing more than what sounds trendy (oo, big business is bad, science is bad, let's be effing space cadets).

It's easy if you aren't hungry.

Sorry this nonsense makes me angry.

Here's what Norman Borlaug said about some of the misinformed trendy objectors to the green revolution of the 50s and 60s:

some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels…If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things"

Plus ca change…

Yay

Let's feed the planet instead of being irritating gits.

You want us to go through them all? ;-)

The one I wrote is, naturally, ace.

If you like that sort of thing.

My son is addicted to doodlejump, I can't be bothered. I like moodagent, which chooses music semi-randomly according to various settings for things like tempo, 'joy', 'aggressive', 'tender' etc. Sounds a but rubbish but actually works quite well – adjust a couple of the setting then if the first track suits your mood you'll have a whole playlist full of songs that match. Ideal for the car.

I was thinking more of kilamarsh sp? I'm sure that's Sheffield council but in Derbyshire while also being part of Sheffield

Killamarsh is North East Derbyshire council, same as Eckington and Dronfield. Nearby, Swallownest and Aston are Rotherham. Some of these areas have Sheffield postcodes or telephone numbers, but that's different ;-)

arnt parts of Sheffield in Derbyshire but controlled by sheff council

Err… no. All of Sheffield is in Sheffield ;-)

Parts of the Peak District are inside Sheffield council's boundary, is that what you mean?

The border between Derbyshire and Sheffield is right down the middle of Howden reservoir at one point – but all within Peak Park.

Yes but if it's food, or heating, or shelter, then all you are is alive, which is exactly where you started. So you've 'gained' nothing (apart from another day of life) but paid out all the same. However the person charging you has made a profit.

Let's suppose you get your heating from British Gas because you don't fancy spending all day collecting wood or trying to dig up coal. You then can instead spend the day going to work and getting paid more than enough money to pay your gas bill, with enough left over to buy some other things. So actually you've gained a lot.

Anyway, slightly OT.

Back on track, I wonder if all the fuss about the health care bill just be yesterday's news after a while and just be as normal and accepted in the US as Medicare is. If so then Obama will have achieved something, no matter what else happens.