[old bits snipped]

In case you suddenly fear you'll be missing out, "my research in astronomy" roughly translates as "how I finally persuaded the computer to do X, and why in hindsight X is pointless and I should have made the computer do Y instead".

For those of you still in the dark, René Magritte, a Beligan surrealist artist, painted La trahison des images (The Treachery Of Images) in the 1920s. Underneath a picture of a pipe he painted the words, Ceci n'est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe).

I became familiar with this work not through my extensive knowledge of Belgian art, but through the quite remarkable Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. Why not order a copy now instead of reading blogs?

I don't want to start writing a blog (I'll explain why in my next post - d'oh!), so I maintain that this is not a blog. But it does use some really useful blogging technology, such as RSS feeds.

Feeds such as RSS or Atom enable you to keep track of updates to web sites without having to visit them individually. I use Bloglines.com for this. Most days I check my Bloglines page and it tells me about the latest news stories (on BBC News and others), articles on various science pages and updates to various friends' web sites - oh, and the latest Dilbert strip, of course. So, rather than checking 30 or so web sites for updates, I need to check only one. And if I'm offline for a week, it will remember what I have read and what I haven't read, so I don't even need to check every day.

There we are. Sign up with Bloglines, add this page to your list of feeds, and it will watch my site day and night for any updates!