tonyhaile.com

The camera on Ben’s Mac Book Pro really highlights our more attractive qualities I think.

Ask Metafilter is the oracle where all questions are answered. Apparently it’s denizens also have a wealth of ideas as to what to do when spending 90 days in prison. This could be useful if Ben’s comments about my tent etiquette ever push me too far. (Via).

Basso’s out too! This is the biggest scandal in cycling history.

The Tour de France starts tomorrow, and with Lance Armstrong out of the running the field was wide open. Ben is a cycle nut and we spent a lot of time in the tent in Greenland talking about this year’s tour and we both agreed that it would be the most exciting in years.
Jan Ullrich, [...]

Continuing the TED talks series, Sir Ken Robinson talks about creativity and how we seem to be doing our best to stifle it in our children.

Some really beautiful open-source website templates primarily designed for non-profits but available to anyone.

The BBC has the winning entries from the One Vision Photography Competition, launched to combat the stigma of HIV/AIDS. Take a look.

“A century from now, when historians write about our era, one question will dwarf all others, and it won’t be about finance or politics or even terrorism. The question will be, simply, how could our rich and civilised society allow a known and beatable enemy to kill millions of people.” This is the question Greg [...]

1,400 music videos from the eighties. Flock of Seagulls, Jive Bunny, when will we see your like again?

Ok, forget Al Gore, I’ve just watched Majora Carter give one of the most inspiring and heartfelt talks of my life. If you do nothing else of importance today, watch this speech.

I’d always gone along with the idea that Al Gore was pretty much the way the media portrayed him: stiff, bureaucratic and a little inhuman. However, TED have begun putting some of their talks online and Al Gore has just blown me away. And it’s not just his passion for his subject, who’d have thought [...]

Last Thursday, Ben mentioned that we had better start getting everything we would need for the weekend ready. The only thing I could think of that was happening on the weekend was the England-Ecuador match and Ben is hardly the kind of football fan to need four days preparation time so I asked him what [...]

I tried to post this earlier as an embedded file but wordpress seemed to use this as an excuse to play silly buggers with my site. In the 2001 Tour de France, Lance Armstrong and Jan Ullrich were climbing wheel on wheel up the Alpe D’Huez when Armstrong turned round, looked Ullrich in the eyes [...]

This would have been useful knowledge back in St. Andrews. Alex Halavais explains how to cheat more convincingly on university essays. (Via).

Interesting article on the rise of IQ magnet cities and the importance of the growing creative class to the future of our economy. (Via).

I was a bit of a late bloomer when it comes to philosophy. I think the first book that really got me thinking about the subject (if we don’t count Dawkin’s Selfish Gene, which got me thinking about everything) was A.C. Grayling’s What is Good?, a superb and accessible read. Since then, I’ve been following [...]

And yet more from Everest, this newsreader made a teensy weensy error when she introduced blind Everest climber Erik Weihenmayer. (Thanks to Paul Deegan for digging this jewel out.)

Someone singing James Brown’s ‘I feel Good’ in a heavy Turkish accent at 2am. You hardly ever hear that at all. Back in Kentish Town I am slowly adapting to life’s hustle again. Waking up at six this morning, despite my soulful serenade of a few hours previously, I headed out on the bike to [...]

it seems a fair few things have happened. My flatmate’s band, the tuneful Mr Hudson and the Library have begun to hit the big time and have been gigging all over the country. They are supporting Erykah Badu next month, whose album ‘Baduism’ I flogged to death when I was doing day shifts in my [...]

Continuing with Everest, University College London is looking for 200 volunteers to climb to Everest base camp as part of a study into how scarce oxygen resources affect the human body. Any takers?

A very gutsy Sherpa may be in trouble with the Nepal Mountaineering Association for going starkers on the sumit of Everest.

This morning, lying in our tent at the top of the Hann Glacier we heard the familiar whup-whup of a helicopter heading our way. Our taxi had arrived. We jumped into action, threw sleeping bags in sledges and dismantled our tent in short order. Helicopter pilots do not like to hang around in the cold [...]