Science Guide

[caption id="attachment_134" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="The Bill and Jerry Show"][/caption]

A few quick links to finish off the week.

The Guardian's Media page reports the latest newspaper ABC figures - and the news is not good for all of the quality dailies: circulation down across the board.

Link..

The Guardian also reports that smart operator Jeremy Clarkson has made a killing through his involvement in a co-production deal for Top Gear. This is all about the successful marketing of a TV format across the world. The amount of money it's making is mind-boggling.

Still at the Guardian, there's some discussion (and across the web) about the fruits of Jerry Seinfeld's collaboration with Microsoft on some advertising. The back-story for Mac-using Seinfeld fans is that there was always a Mac sitting on Jerry's desk in his apartment in the show. The model changed with the years, and it was never mentioned, but the hint was that Seinfeld uses Macs.

Now he's advertising for Microsoft in a head-scratching campaign that begins with an encounter in a shoe shop. As one commenter on the Guardian story puts it,

This ad also points to Microsofts habit of promising stupid future features that never happen, in this case an edible computer - it might be funny coming from someone else, but not these chronic "promise and not deliver" guys.

Link. (As the Guardian story points out, the best version of the ad is on the Microsoft web site, where the quality is high and the sound doesn't jitter.

Courtesy of BoingBoing, we learn that Michael Moore's next movie will be a free download.

Finally, my favourite topic: science in the news. As you may be aware, next week at CERN in Swissland, the Large Hadron Collider will be switched on in an experiment designed to recreate some of the particles that only existed in the nanoseconds after the Big Bang. True to form, the Daily Mail's reporting of this event is inaccurate scaremongering, full of the kind of stuff paranoid schizophrenics come up with:
Landmark experiment to unlock secrets of Big Bang could cause end of world, say scientists in court bid to halt it | Mail Online.

Meanwhile, Science Daily points out that the Mail's reporting is "completely unfounded."

The truth is, if the average Daily Mail journalist/editor really thought the world was going to end next Wednesday, they wouldn't bother to show up for work, would they?

I'm hedging my bets. I'm going to work, but I'm not planning any lessons.