A Blog With No Name

I didn't think I'd done all that much blogging really, but it turns out I've a few new posts to mention here. I'll group them by subject.

Twitter

Everyone suddenly seems to be discovering Twitter, the service that lets you share 140-character messages with whoever wants to see them. At the same time, there's a lot of confusion around—and the website has its deficiencies too. (Particularly the fact whereas it once worked in Opera Mini, it no longer does . . .) Luckily Twitter's own website isn't the only way to access Twitter, and I've been using a site called Dabr which in many ways does a better job of accessing Twitter than the official site does, and—crucially—works in Opera Mini (or on pretty well any mobile phone, or on a PC). I've been on Twitter for quite a while. I'd been meaning to write a review of Dabr for some time, so I could simply send interested people to it rather than have to explain again and again (in 140-character snippets) why I like it. And I'd been getting tired of seeing and hearing very misleading things said about Twitter in the media. So (a week apart) I ended up writing these two blog posts:

• Dabr: making Twitter accessible
• Why is Twitter so confusing?

The result was rather startling, maybe because a friend on Twitter alerted her 19,000(!) "followers" to both posts. Normally my blog gets between about 10 and 25 views per day. When I posted the first one, I suddenly got 209 views that day (gradually going back to normal over the next few days). When I posted the second one, about Twitter being confusing, the views shot up to 386 one day then 804 the next! That post has had 1172 views so far (I wrote it 3 days ago), so I must have got something right.

Photography

Two short posts linking to photography blogs:

• Beautiful bird pbotos
• Another beautiful photo blog

I found the first of these by chance, when its author commented on my post about Dabr. It turned out that he's a keen bird photographer, and there are many stunningly beautiful bird photographs on his blog. The second is the photo blog of a web designer in Colorado who takes nature photographs to relax. Again, the photos are beautiful.

Language

I've always been curious as to why, in English, minute and second can either mean "very small" and "number two in a sequence", or "a 60th and a 3600th of an hour or of a degree". Around a year ago I unexpectedly found out, and it's interesting (if you like languages). The post I wrote about it is

• Why are seconds called seconds?

Thinking about things

I've always found money very puzzling: we largely base our lives on it, but it's hard to tell whether the money in banks actually exists, and if so, where. It's all very strange. And as we know, a lot of the "money" in the world, which maybe didn't exist anyway, has suddenly stopped "existing" when people stopped believing in it. Hence the recession we're now in. I had to study a lot of quantum physics at university, and I actually find that easier to make sense of than money. Both worlds are very strange. I suddenly realised that the strangeness of quantum physics and the strangeness of money weren't so different from each other, so I wrote

• The bizarre similarity between money and quantum physics

Note: hopefully you don't need to have learnt anything about quantum physics to understand the article! It came out of a discussion with a friend who used to be in finance, and people with no background in physics say they can understand it.