Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König. Wow…

I Believe I can Fly ( flight of the frenchies ). Free segment from sebastien montaz-rosset on Vimeo.

Looking for something extraordinary to do this Halloween weekend?

You’ve found it – Shadows Follow is a psychological thriller set in the darkest places of central Bristol. for 1.5 hours of unique and nightmarish adventure.

Friday 28th Oct 7pm – central Bristol (secret) location

This is the inaugural production of Splash & Ripple: a game and experience making company run by creatives whose past work includes direction of 2.8 hours Later (citywide zombie chase game) and creation of xmas thriller “Silent Night” and the terrifying “Basement”.

The game is both in and outside with some walking/sneaking/running required; bring a mobile phone and wear comfortable shoes. Flashes and strobe lighting will be used.

Interesting TEDx talk from Nigel Marsh.

This morning we noticed the Page Tab icons had completely disappeared, when viewing via HTTPS! This issue was raised as a bug and marked as resolved. It turns out the fix has introduced a new field in a Facebook app settings – under “Facebook Integration” – called “Secure Tab URL”. Set this and you are good to go again! Phew.

Oh the joys of working at the “bleeding edge”

The William Blake quote at the end is one of my favourites…

One of the great privileges of being a priest is that I often get the opportunity to be with people when they die. It frequently astonishes me that, despite the ubiquity of death, this is something a great many people have never actually seen. Little wonder we’re so frightened of death. It used to be something public, but now it’s pushed out of life. Whereas we used to die at home surrounded by friends and family, we now die in hospitals, often alone and hidden behind expensive technology.

It’s commonly assumed that Christians don’t really believe in death at all, that we subscribe to the view that when we die we go on living in some other realm, or in some disembodied form. Just to be clear: I believe nothing of the sort. I don’t like the euphemistic language of “passing on” or “having gone to sleep”. Nor do I subscribe to Platonic ideas about the immortality of the soul. When you die, you die. As the first letter of St. Paul to Timothy puts it: “God alone is immortal”

Today is Ash Wednesday. Like millions of Christians around the world, I will be marked with ash and told that I am dust and to dust I shall return. There is nothing depressing or morbid about any of this – in fact, quite the reverse. Personally speaking, it leaves me with a more intense sense of the preciousness of human life, something that’s intimately bound up with its intrinsic limit and fragility.

Indeed, the problem with the modern lack of experience of death is precisely that it robs us of this very intensification. Life without death is “just one damned thing after another.” For death gives life its urgency: now is the opportunity to love and respond to love, to be different, to make a difference, to change the world. There is no time to waste.

This is why I have little enthusiasm for the idea that science might be able to keep us alive indefinitely, that through cryogenic suspension or uploading our DNA onto computers we might be able to achieve immortality. I’m not saying these extraordinary things will never be possible ” who can say? ” but rather, that the best these technologies can ever offer is a life that goes on and on and on. And if I can put it like this: more and more of me, extended over time, doesn’t really solve the problem of being me.

When theologians like Boethius and Augustine speak of entering eternity they mean something altogether different from this: for eternity is outside of time, unrelated to temporal sequence. Which is why eternity can be as much as quality of our present experience, more an expansion of our imagination, a call to reach beyond claustrophobic self-absorption and to see the world anew. As William Blake so memorably suggested:

“To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.”

The Rev. Dr Giles Fraser

The pricing for the scheme is aimed at journeys less than 30 minutes so, once you’ve paid the daily access charge, the first half an hour’s rental is free and you can make as many 30-minute trips between docking stations as you like without paying any more (provided a bike is available, of course). If you want to make longer journeys between docking stations, the costs can mount up to £50 for the day but, given you could cycle from one end of the docking station zone to the other in less than 30 minutes, it really is an unlikely and easily avoided situation.

So the only snag is bike availability in peak times – I’ll be very interested to see how this scheme takes off.
I’m certainly signing up. If I’m ever caught out without my trusty Birdy folding bike, I know how I’ll be getting about!

Thanks to cyclehireapp.com for the map visualisations of bike docking locations data from TFL – the  bike rental map on the London transport site doesn’t (yet) work!