Chasing the Phantom DB5, beautifully shot in Switzerland (by Tim Wallace, via fabforgottennobility.)
Newspaper reports say he enjoyed basketball and drawing cartoons in Switzerland, where school staff and friends reportedly remembered a shy boy who liked skiing and Hollywood tough guy Jean-Claude van Damme.
It appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light at CERN
Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists—because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.
Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.
The result—which threatens to upend a century of physics—will be put online for scrutiny by other scientists.
Fascinating stuff. No time machines yet, but science is progressing considerably this year.
Annoying Switzerland has some serious social problems.
Switzerland’s anti-Powerpoint party
The Swiss are a bit overly legalistic (indeed, I learned from a friend, a Swiss citizen, that it is illegal to vacuum your apartment on Sundays), but I am willing to join this political movement to ban Powerpoint:
The party is called the APPP. Yes, the Anti-PowerPoint Party. It’s an organization that has, at its core, the firm belief that the Microsoft presentation software is a waste of fine Swiss resources.
Indeed, it believes that PowerPoint costs Switzerland 2.1 billion Swiss Francs (about $2.5 billion) every year. You will, no doubt, be desperate to learn of its mathematical model. Well, it says 11 percent of Swiss people have to attend PowerPoint presentations on average twice a week. At each of these presentations is a minimum of 10 people.
We can all do the math, and it’s sad.
Edward Tufte is well-known for his The Cognitive Style Of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, so perhaps it’s an anti-corruption party:
No Powerpoint Sounds good to me. Colin Powell used Powerpoint to justify invading Iraq. I used Powerpoint once in 1997 and hated it. While we are at it, could we also ban Microsoft Word?
Swedish motorist facing world’s biggest speeding fine
The 37-year-old Swedish man was driving at two and a half times the speed limit in his £140,000 Mercedes and police said he was travelling so fast it took him some distance to stop.
In Switzerland speeding fines are worked out using a formula based on the income of the motorists and the severity of the speed. According to prosecutors he is now facing the highest possible penalty of 300 days of fines at £2,166 a day – a total of £650,000.
“We have no record of anyone being caught travelling faster in the country,” said a police spokesman, after they.
He was caught by a speed camera on the A12 highway between Bern and Lausanne on Friday.
He escaped being zapped by numerous radars en-route simply because he was going too fast and they were incapable of clocking speeds beyond 200kph (125mph). It was a new generation of radar machines that finally caught him travelling at close to 300kph (186mph).
Taking the SLS for a spin Is it wrong to have a sneaking admiration for this law-breaker? I mean, sure, he broke the law, got caught, and should pay the penalty, and if this happened in a movie I would be cheering the guy on.
The Henri Chapron collection at the Garage du Lac
The Vincent Crescia Musée Citroën appears to have the endorsement of the Chapron family, and has a lovely selection of the Henri Chapron cars. An absolutely lovely site.
Are you right to strap on a Rolex, 1967
Love the headline type Dear Matthew Carter, please do a Big Caslon Italic. Your friend and colleague, Jack.
Quick and mostly irrelevant thoughts from a 
