From today’s paper.

Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication.

The move, described as “epochal” by media commentators, will see all Guardian content tailored to fit the format of Twitter’s brief text messages, known as ‘tweets’, which are limited to 140 characters each. Boosted by the involvement of celebrity ‘twitterers’, such as Madonna, Britney Spears and Stephen Fry, Twitter’s profile has surged in recent months, attracting more than 5m users who send, read and reply to tweets via the web or their mobile phones.

That’s the stuff. Pity about the date.

Andy Hopper, the head of Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory, is currently on Sabbatical. He’s flying around the world — in his own plane. Follow his progress here.

Front page of this morning’s Irish Times. Junk bond status coming soon. Reminds me of a nice joke that’s been circulating for months in Ireland.

Q: What’s the difference between Ireland and Iceland?
A: One letter and six months.

Hooray! The OU’s evolution megalab project is up and running. Press Release says:

Snails, often the unloved blight of gardeners, are being put under the microscope with a new public science project being launched today (Monday 30 March) by The Open University. The Evolution MegaLab is a mass public research programme which is investigating how ordinary banded snails – found in back gardens, river banks and parks – have evolved over the last 40 years, by comparing data supplied by members of the public with a database of more than 8,000 historical records.

The project runs from April to October 2009, spanning Europe, and relies on members of the public doing their own snail hunts and submitting their findings to the website at www.evolutionmegalab.org. When data is received, people will get personalised interpretations of their observations. At the end of the year the results will be analysed by a group of leading evolutionary biologists, co-ordinated by scientists from The Open University.

Scientists believe that climate change and predators may have caused the banded snail population to shift habitat and even change their appearance. Professor Jonathan Silvertown of The Open University explains: “Banded snails wear their genes on their backs. Their colours and banding patterns are marvellously varied – but the darker shell types are more common in woodland, where the background colour is brown, while in grass banded snails tend to be lighter-coloured, yellow and stripier. These differences are thought to have evolved over time because they provide camouflage from thrushes, which like to eat the snails.”

Hmmm… We have snails in our garden at home, where they are regarded (at least by the Head Gardener) with unmitigated distaste. Various remedies are proposed by helpful friends — e.g. drowning them in beer. Somehow I can’t see her (the Head Gardener) taking kindly to the idea of them as evolutionary witnesses.

Credits: The Evolution Megalab is one of Doug Clow’s projects. See his blog entry about it.

As his fellow-Twitterers know, Rory Cellan-Jones has been grappling all week with getting 802.11n networking to work in his home. He’s now written an entertaining blog post on his experiences. Sample:

So then I got in touch with a real expert – a man who works for one of the big router firms. He immediately diagnosed my problem – I’d put the wrong kind of security on. It turns out that WEP just doesn’t work with ‘n’ routers – or rather it does but it throttles them back to ‘g’ speeds. It only works at full speed if you have no encryption or use one of the WPA options.

So why on earth does the router company allow you to choose WEP? He explained that they’d originally shipped the shiny new routers without it but there had been a consumer backlash. My router man also confirmed that the 802.11n standard hasn't been finalised yet, so there’s the possibility that some bits of kit won’t work with others, even if theoretically they are both using 802.11n.

He got it to work btw — eventually.

… in 1979, America’s worst commercial nuclear accident occurred inside the Unit Two reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania.

Lovely cartoon in current issue of the New Yorker. It shows two tramps. “In my day”, one is saying, “there was no reward for incompetence”.

Lovely blog post by Andrew Brown.

You know that feeling when you are sitting on the floor by the dusty disassembled guts of a computer and nothing works at all? It won’t even give a healthy cheep on startup? And then, slowly, it all comes together, until everything works, except, perhaps, sound, and you change something to fix that, and then nothing works at all again: you’re back in the smell of dust and silence and you can’t undo?

You will swear, when you finally recover, never to upgrade anything again. Yet you will. And I don’t know why, or didn’t, until I stumbled on a lovely passage in Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine, still the best book I know about the psychology of nerding…

He’s right about Ullman IMHO. Go to the link and read on.

Wow! Fascinating Reuters report.

ZURICH (Reuters) – Swiss private banks are banning their top executives from traveling abroad, even to France and Germany, because of fears they will be detained as part of a global crackdown on bank secrecy, the Financial Times reported.

The newspaper quoted an unnamed head of a leading private bank in Geneva as saying steps by countries like the United States and Germany to fight tax evasion meant banks felt they had to limit travel to protect employees.

It cited four unnamed sources in the Geneva private banking industry as saying some banks were introducing total travel bans for staff, even for neighboring European countries.

“Private bankers aren’t even traveling to France. The partners are not leaving Geneva at all,” the FT quoted one senior industry figure as saying.

Still, it gives them a chance to spend more time with their money.

One of my sons (Pete) spotted this in a well-known Cambridge second-hand bookshop. After an urgent phone call from his Dad, his brother went in and photographed it. Simply too good to miss.

What I’m hoping for, of course, is that the bookseller becomes so desperate to get rid of it that he offers to pay people to take it away.