Author Archive
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Posted by Sharon Creese on March 04, 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 [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on 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 [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on 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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Posted by Sharon Creese on January 04, 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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Posted by Sharon Creese on October 05, 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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Posted by Sharon Creese on 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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Posted by Sharon Creese on July 07, 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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Posted by Sharon Creese on July 02, 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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Posted by Sharon Creese on 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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Posted by Sharon Creese on June 18, 2009
I was amazed to discover today that there is actually such a thing as a PE (physical education) GCSE in the UK. When I was at school (and admittedly, it was a long time ago) ‘studying for a PE GCSE’ would have been some bright sparks’ explanation for what they were doing out on the [...]
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