What I'm Reading
The Manhattan Project: Big Science and the Atom Bomb by Jeff Hughes. Very short book with a misleading title: only a couple of chapters cover the Manhattan Project itself. It's mainly a short history of Big Science which he reckons actually began with the big observatories and expensive radium experiments of the early 20th century: the Manhattan project just accelerated an existing trend.

The author seems somewhat anti Big Science, enough that it feels unreliable as a dispassionate history of the subject, but not enough to make for a powerful polemic. Not terribly useful or interesting.

What I'm Reading 2
World War Z by Max Brooks. Interesting novelty: better than the related Zombie Survival Guide by the same author. It covers the history of an apocalyptic war against zombies, but is structured as a series of interviews with protagonists, which gives it a different angle to most. It's also refreshingly non-US-centric, with interviews covering a variety of nations.

Pretty good and a nice easy read. Would have been nice to have some visual stuff to back up the documentary feel though: illustrations, maps, photos, diagrams, but I suppose that would have been too expensive. Worth a look.

What I'm Reading 3
Latest Aubrey/Maturin book was Treason's Harbour. This one's more land-based than some. For part of the book they're held up on Malta while Aubrey tries to bribe the naval dockyards into repairing the Surprise while struggling to preserve his crew from the depredations of debauchery, syphilis and raids by other captains. Meanwhile Maturin tries to track down a traitor, with less success than normal.

There's also an overland excursion to the Red Sea in an attempt to chase a treasure galley.

Overall a pretty solid chapter in the series, but doesn't come to much of a conclusion.

Me
Back at work now, though still coughing a lot. Feeling ground down.

Lots of fiddly XML/XSL crap to do. Stupidly got something very complicated working in the XmlSpy transform, but it doesn't seem to want to work in the .Net transform. I hate XSL. Have to put that on hold while I fiddle with other fiddly stuff first anyway.

YouTube test: Green Onions

Web
Status Quo fan hangs himself after wife left him for guitarist Rick Parfitt. Why isn't B3ta all over this?

Beautiful people get better loan rates, are worse risks.

End of the Wire. Final montage. David Simon interview. Unanswered questions. Metafilter. Slate. Salon.