- Completely awesome Steve Jones lecture on whether human evolution has stopped. The stuff on Francis Galton was new to me - apparently he constructed a ‘beauty map’ of Britain which concluded that Aberdeen had the most mingers with the loveliest people in the country being found just outside Harrods. The latter finding might still hold.
- Six-day cycle racing was invented down the road from me in Islington. Possibly the weirdest sport ever, though it did indirectly promote the art of reading a newspaper while on your bike.
- Epic, must-read rant about the strange world of academic journals.

I think I mentioned this when I was back: Prince Charles intervened to block what he saw as an insufficiently traditionalist design for the Chelsea Barracks site in London, so Building magazine asked a few architects to re-imagine some London landmarks along modernist lines in response. George Saumarez Smith didn’t quite play along and instead offered a redesign of Richard Rogers’ Heathrow Terminal 5 as Charles might have preferred it:

There’s something wonderful about that multi-level neo-classical car-park, and as Smith says it would provide ‘a huge boost to the stonemasonry industry’, so personally I’m all for it.

This video of the Germany v Algeria group match from the 1982 World Cup is prompted by the Guardian’s inclusion of Algeria’s right-back Chaabane Merzekane as one of the great unsung heroes of football. His two 70-yard runs up the pitch are pretty good, but the match as a whole is brilliant, and Algeria’s second goal, a sucker-punch straight after Rumenigge’s equaliser, is amazing, 20 seconds of dream pass-and-move and a team goal up there with Carlos Alberto’s in the 1970 final. Algeria looked like a superb team but went out at the end of the group stage following a fit-up by Germany and Austria somewhat reminiscent of the Ireland / Holland go-slow in the 1990 finals.

So, here is the opening sequence of ‘Soylent Green’, using the Ken Burns effect fully 17 years before ‘The Civil War’. So, it should be called the Soylent effect. It’s a great opening, effective, prescient, and delightfully simple - far better than the film that follows it.

For more interesting credit sequences, though not all the ones I would choose to be in a list of the best, go to Creative Review.

This seems like a wowblog kind of thing, and it’s about time I posted about a graph.