Google will be donating up to $1m to the relief fund. The page linked also contains a map showing the path of the cyclone, so that you can understand more where the affected areas are. If you are considering donating money yourself, please consider donating through my father, as money donated to him will go directly to Christians in Myanmar. That is if you want your money to go to a definitely Christian source.

My father’s ordered a visa for Myanmar, please pray that he gets it without hassle.

To repeat, you can e-mail my dad for more personal details about the Myanmar disaster, or to donate money at:

phil [at] tentmaker [dot] org [dot] uk

If you have not yet heard, Burma has been hit by Cyclone Nargis. The news today was that the death toll has reached more than 22,000. This hits particularly close to home because my father has visited Burma twice in the past year or so, the second time taking Ally with him, and we have had personal letters from several of the people who will be most affected by this disaster.

One man runs an orphanage. He has given up everything, a degree, a good standard of living, to live in a small house in which he looks after as many orphans as he can possibly fit in. His house has been completely destroyed. My father says that many of the believers he has met are in similarly built houses, which do not stand a chance against the wind.

Please pray for God’s provision and help for the people of Burma, many of whom do not have water or electricity at this time.

If you are interested in having e-mail updates on the situation in Burma, please e-mail my father at:

phil [at] tentmaker [dot] org [dot] uk

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been working on a little bit of decision maths. A secret in Boggle is to remember word patterns, so when you see a group of letters on the board, you know there are several ways of rearranging those letters to get a killer score. Alastair, over on his Blinging Boggle Blog, has been listing anagrams of 4 letter words for precisely this purpose. He asked me to find all the 4-letter anagrams in the SOWPODS dictionary. I created a program that cannot only find the 4-letter anagrams, but the 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 letter anagrams too (not that there are any 1 letter anagrams to find)

However, it has to be said that because finding all the anagrams in the dictionary takes quite a while, even for a computer with 512MB of memory, I have only until now been able to find the 2, 3, 4 and 5 letter anagrams, but they are here, free, for your enjoyment (some people pay for this information):

Just so Google finds it easier to find this, I’ll just clarify that these lists contain all the anagrams which are acceptable in the SOWPODS dictionary

• All the 2 letter anagrams
• All the 3 letter anagrams
• All the 4 letter anagrams
• All the 5 letter anagrams
• All the 6 letter anagrams
• All the 7 letter anagrams

Update

Update 2

Update 3

4/4/2008

Nanowire ‘pine trees’ on physicsworld.com

This morning I picked up a recent copy of national geographic and read through an article about environmentalism in Iceland. It was talking about the dilemma Iceland are facing surrounding renewable energy. Iceland has thermal and hydroelecticity in abundance, but also has an incredibly beautiful landscape, which the exploitation of such power sources, would, and is in the process of, destroying. ‘Green Energy’ and environmentalism have therefore in this case become enemies. You can see pictures on the National Geographic Website.

The reason I say all this is that it reminded me that for some time I’ve been wanting to find a good Physics magazine. It turns out physicsworld.com is a good one, and it’s online, so I don’t have to pay anything, which is of course a bonus. It’s the level of physics which is actually interesting, unlike ‘New Scientist’, which is just annoying… And produces articles which provide ‘proof’ for pantheism.

On English Russia there’s a post about a scale model of the entirety of Moscow. Quite an undertaking.

On a similar note, there’s a good chance my father’s model railway should be fully operational soon. This is a 47ft long beast of an O gauge layout. At the moment, it’s stored in his Tentmaker book storeroom, and that’s where it’s going to be kept for the foreseeable future. The layout was the labour of love of his Model Railway club. It is so long that the club were only ever able to fully erect it at model railway exhibitions, and only two of the many railway boards were permanently seen in the clubroom.

As fuel price rise rapidly, the Roberts’ acquire a new car. It’s very nice and I like it ^^. It’s also clean, which makes a change.

It is my opinion that memory loss due to old age is a mechanism by which old married couples can still have something to talk about.

This is the worst short you will ever see. It’s only funny because it provides an infinite range of possibilities for annoying people with quotes from it later.