out of his element

Having seen some huge birds of prey recently, which may or may not be Iberian eagles, I have a tendency to watch the skies when out walking.

This morning there was a blob high up which looked vaguely like the waspish ultra-light we often see. Since it was making no noise, and seemed to be hovering rather than going anywhere, it was clear, though, that that wasn’t what it was.

When I got close enought to see, it turned out to be a helium balloon:

This reminded me of a story I’d seen early in the week about medical helium stocks running low while the gas is squandered in balloons.

millions and billions

drawing courtesy Lance Tooks

I was intrigued by the BBC website Magazine story entitled Do the dead outnumber the living?

My attention was caught in particular by the table at the end showing a total for the number of people who have ever lived as 107,602,707,791.

surely some mistake?

A news story on the BBC website under the headline “Polar bears have maternal Irish brown bear ancestors” seems to imply some strange evolutionary time shifts:

It reminds of the theory that insanity is hereditary – you get it from your children.
 

“an even better blog”

Checking my blog comments, I found this in the spam file:

It clearly is spam, but I wondered how many people had received something similar and let it be published.

So I googled the phrase “I couldn’t have asked for an even better blog” and wasn’t really surprised when the search returned over a million hits.

not born yesterday

I missed the story in the Guardian on March 6th about our “growing lifespan”. (I do think ‘growing’ is a strange adjective: surely ‘increasing’ would be better?)

Anyway, I came across the story today after reading the bemusing phrase:

The lifespan of the average British person increases by five hours a day.

on the BBC website.

Reading that made me suddenly feel tired.