Raven

Picked up a copy of Ben Aaronovitch's new novella, The Furthest Station this afternoon. I think it is only the second book I've bought this year!

Not a lot, evidently!

Well, it's out - what do people think?!

Five whole books this year. I'm about ready for a lie down...

*bump* Local booksellers pay 91p tax per £100 turnover. Amazon only pays 8p The hidden cost of buying cheap books - the people you are buying them from aren't contributing fairly to society...

Looks like they've all gone off script...

4!

Cheers Chesil, bought two of them when I saw that!

I don't believe there will be much change. West Indies cricket is in a bit of a state at the moment, due to a number of reasons (and most of them off the pitch). This is a very young team with very little experience to draw on and I don't think they have the ability to step up their game. Whilst it's fun to watch Cook and Root smash balls around the park and Anderson & Broad up their stats, if the resistance is as week as it was last week it's just embarrassing...

That wasn't a good game; the West Indies didn't turn up. Not good preparation for an away Ashes series...

Maps in fantasy books. And especially maps in fantasy books by authors who have no idea about geography or town planning. And extra especially the authors who start talking about places that aren't on their flippin' maps

Started reading Small Gods by Terry Pratchett this week. It is the one Discworld book I missed first time around and, for some reason, never got around to until now. 50 or so pages in, and enjoying it so far. A much easier read than his later novels.

Mind the wet bit in the middle...

Magic Rock High Wire.

If people are all travelling at the same time now, then there must be significant opportunities for people to car share more than they do. If flexible working hours are preventing that, then companies should be encouraged to standardise their working hours to make it easier for employees to travel together (perhaps with staggered start times across different areas to avoid everyone heading for work at 9am, for example). There are a lot of practical things that could be done, by again it comes down to people having to change their mindset. We obviously aren't at a point where something like this could be implemented today, even if there was public will to do so, but I think over time technology will be able to help with this. Companies are already testing driverless cars, for example, so in the future it may be possible for some to book a car to turn up at a set time, by itself, no matter how remote they are from a large town or city.

Vodka's idea isn't about switching people to public transport, it's about having a publically owned fleet of cars that are made available to people as they are required, instead of having lots of privately owned cars sitting around idle most of the time. Walking home from work in the evenings I often have to pass a queue of cars trying to get out of town, and with very few exceptions most of them have a single occupant. That means one person getting up in the morning, getting in their car, driving 10/20 minutes to work, leaving the car in a car park all day and then repeating the exercise again in the evening - multiplied by many. Instead of having all of those cars sitting in a car park all day, what if they could be used to allow a parent to do the school run, or an elderly couple to go shopping or have a day out? When food waste is being highlighted it is something people can easily get their heads around (because the image of a skip full of veg being dumped in landfill has a visual impact) but privately owned cars are probably a bigger symbol of waste than anything else in our daily lives. When you stop and think about all of the materials that go into a car, how they had to be mined, smelted, fabricated; the distance the raw materials travel, the energy used to assemble them etc. having them then sitting around in a car park or drive way for most of the day is crazy! And that's before you take into account all of the roads, car parks and other infrastructure that is required to support them and the extraction, refining and burning of the fuels they use. People have got used to having cars to use on demand, but like a lot of things in modern life the implications of what that really means have been sacrificed in the name of convenience. Any change to the existing model is going to take a fundamental mind-shift in society, and I just can't see happening in the short-term.

It will take legislation to make this happen, and no government is going to cut off the tax stream car ownership currently provides unless it can make the same amount from another model. That's gonna take a lot of working out.

When I said TV, I meant it in a generic term. I suspect this will end up on Netflix, or similar, in the UK.

You've not had an original idea, I'm afraid. I saw Robert Llewellyn doing a talk about this - and other energy saving concepts - a couple of years ago. It's an interesting idea, but there are too many self interested parties involved in the game for this to happen.

HG Wells? The War of the Worlds has to have a pretty high body count!

3! (This has been a shocking year, book wise...)

Coming to a TV near you soon...

I started to read one of her books, a few years back, on the recommendation of a colleague, but I didn't make it past the first chapter because of the violence. I'm not squeamish, I just felt it was violence/being graphic for the sake of it...

@Nollaig That sounds like... work! Will have a better look this weekend, but I'm hoping for more flying around smuggling stuff, etc!

Does anyone here have any knowledge of Eve Online? I signed up the other day, and it took me over two hours just to create my character! Seems... complex!