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Sharon Creese

All units: what am I on about?

March 10, 2010

OK, I’ve got a bit of a quiz for you.
I freely admit that I watch too much television, and like many people, I watch quite a few ‘cop shows’, though these days, ‘cop shows’ can involve anything from genius mathematicians to lip reading FBI agents to forensic anthropologists! Whatever the spin of the particular programme [...]

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World Book Day

March 4, 2010

Today is World Book Day – the ‘biggest annual celebration of books and reading in the UK’. When I was a child, there was no such thing as World Book Day, but I would have loved it if there had been!
I’ve been an avid reader for as long as I can remember, absolutely devouring anything [...]

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Can I borrow that…?

February 17, 2010

A while back, I was lucky enough to spend some time living in South America. As anyone who has lived abroad knows, it can be a mind-expanding (and mind-blowing!) experience, immersing yourself in a completely different language and culture.
What surprised me though, was how hard it was to go back to speaking just English when [...]

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Modern-day date-ing

January 27, 2010

The issue of dates is interesting me at the moment. Not the romantic sort (well…), no, the passage-of-time sort, and specifically those in this now-not-quite-so-new-Millennium. We’ve touched on the issue of how we refer to these new years a couple of times already here, thinking about the original uncertainty over what we’d call the year [...]

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In summery [sic]

January 4, 2010

Right, I have a question for you – did you ‘Christmasize’ your house for the festive season? And did you correctly ‘ovenize’ the turkey before you put it on to cook? I ask, because in the aftermath of the cold-induced train-stuck-in-the-tunnel debacle, I heard an interview in which a representative of a certain train-company-that-shall-remain-nameless talked [...]

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In the news – speaking in code

October 5, 2009

Once upon a time, writing in code was the stuff of detective novels and spy movies. Messages would be encoded using transposition ciphers (rearranging the letters of a word), substitution ciphers (where letters are replaced with other letters or numbers), or even steganography (where a piece of text says one thing, but means something completely [...]

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In the news – making your mark

August 24, 2009

The British attempt to break the longest-standing land speed record continues in the Mojave Desert, USA this week, after a series of disappointing failures. The team’s steam car, Inspiration, is fondly known as ‘the fastest kettle in the world’, a nickname that raises some interesting mental images! It has already unofficially beaten the 127mph steam [...]

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‘Cuddles’ or ‘Cleopatra’ – what do you want to be shouting down the garden path?

July 7, 2009

When you get a new pet, how do you choose a name for it? My brother-in-law thinks I’m barking for the way I go about it, but for me, a name has to not only fit the face (and character) of the pet, but it also has to have some significance, be a bit ‘clever’ [...]

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In the News: The Father of Modern Computer Science

July 2, 2009

Last week saw the anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, a name that many of us probably recognize, without quite knowing why. Yet we should be grateful to him every time we write an email or produce a report, because Turing is widely recognized as the father of modern computer science. He created the [...]

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Never mind ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’, this is ‘History through the Rear-view Mirror’

June 23, 2009

Back when Henry Ford started mass producing cars, there was no need for clever names to differentiate them from the competition – there was no competition. ‘Model T’ worked, even if it wasn’t exactly exciting. Now, though, there are scores of manufacturers and hundreds of models, each with a name designed to make us want [...]

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