Well, whaddya know? Sitting straight is ‘bad for backs’…

Sitting up straight is not the best position for office workers, a study has suggested.

Scottish and Canadian researchers used a new form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to show it places an unnecessary strain on your back.

They told the Radiological Society of North America that the best position in which to sit at your desk is leaning slightly back, at about 135 degrees.

Experts said sitting was known to contribute to lower back pain.

Data from the British Chiropractic Association says 32% of the population spends more than 10 hours a day seated.

Pardon me while I adjust my posture. Zzzzzz…..

James Miller pointed me to this splendid rant by Andrew Rawnsley on the ballooning cost of the London 2012 Olympics. Sample:

The Games’ supporters do not like to speak about cost; they prefer to talk about ‘investment’, implying there will be some sort of return. Which will be what exactly? The experience of other cities is that international sports festivals do not attract tourists – they repel them. Tourists stayed away from Germany during last year’s World Cup because they did not want to spend their holidays in the company of thousands of football fans. When Australia and Greece staged the Olympics, tourists boycotted the countries, fearing traffic jams, a security clampdown and hotel rooms to be had only at rip-off prices. Who in their right mind is going to want to holiday in London in the congestion and security hell that will be the capital city in the August of 2012?

Just as with the dome, supporters of the Olympics say they will regenerate part of London. I’m all for the regeneration of the East End, but you didn’t need to do it by bringing this overblown, ludicrously expensive spectacle to town. It is a perverse and wasteful way to regenerate that area of the capital by squandering money on facilities for which there is no long-term use and stuffing the mouths of developers and contractors with gold.

When all their other justifications turn to dust, the cheerleaders fall back, just as did the supporters of the dome, on the claim that the Games will be some sort of tonic for the nation’s morale. The unfailingly optimistic Tessa Jowell proclaims that we should cheer for the Olympics because three million primary schoolchildren think they are going to be medal winners.

That’s three million children who are going to be bloody disappointed, then…

Great stuff. Worth a read.

Owen Barder is returning from his sojourn in Berkeley to resume life as a senior civil servant. He’s published My goals as a manager on his Blog. They’re admirable, and sensible. Wonder if HMG will allow him to achieve them. I particularly like Number 9: “I will not take myself too seriously”. Tut, tut. If the lad goes on like this he will blow his chance of a knighthood.

Lovely post by Chris Anderson (he of Long Tail fame)…

It’s a big day for Moore’s Law. I’m not sure anyone else has noticed this, but by my calculations we have in the past few months reached the penny-per-MIPS* milestone. Intel’s Core Duo running at 2.13 GHz now costs around $200 at retail (it’s around $180 at volume), but can do about 20,000 MIPS. I remember my first 6 MHz 286 PC in 1982 that did 0.9 MIPS. I have no idea what the CPU cost then, but the PC it came in cost nearly $3,000 so it couldn’t have been cheap. Say it was around $1,000/MIPS back then. Now it’s $0.01/MIPS. I know I shouldn’t be astounded by Moore’s Law anymore, but that really is something.

Good Morning Silicon Valley picked up on this and added an interesting quote from Alec Saunders, who added some extra historical perspective:

In 1977, Digital Equipment’s Vax 11/780 was a 1 MIPS minicomputer, and the Cray-1 supercomputer delivered blindingly fast execution at 150 MIPS.

By 1982, 5 years later, a 6 Mhz 286 had about the same equivalent processing power as the Vax.

Sometime in the mid 1990’s, Cray’s benchmark was finally passed on PowerPC processors, as PowerMac’s emerged benchmarked at 150 to 300 MIPS.

A 1999 era Pentium III/500 delivered 800 MIPS of processing power.

A year later, in 2000, the Playstation 2 pumped out an astounding 6000 MIPS.

My 2002 vintage Athlon XP clocks in at 4200 MIPS.

And today, for about $200, you can buy a 20,000 MIPS processor.

*Note for non-geeks: MIPS stands for “million instructions per second”, a standard measure of CPU power.

Oh dear. An article in the New York Times explains all.

“So many people are not clear communicators,” said Judith Kallos, creator of NetManners.com, a site dedicated to online etiquette, and author of “Because Netiquette Matters.” To be clear about what an e-mail message is trying to say, and about what is implied as well as what is stated, “the reader is left looking at everything from the greeting to the closing for clues,” she said.

Mr. Troutwine [a chap described earlier in the piece] is not alone in thinking that an e-mail sender who writes “Best,” then a name, is offering something close to a brush-off. He said he chooses his own business sign-offs in a descending order of cordiality, from “Warmest regards” to “All the best” to a curt “Sincerely.

”When Kim Bondy, a former CNN executive, e-mailed a suitor after a dinner date, she used one of her preferred closings: “Chat soon.” It was her way of saying, “The date went well, let’s do it again,” she said.

She may have been the only one who thought that. The return message closed with the dreaded “Best.” It left her feeling as though she had misread the evening. “I felt like, ‘Oh, that’s kind of formal. I don’t think he liked me,’ ” she said, laughing. “A chill came with the ‘Best.’ ” They have not gone out since…

Why is this interesting? Well, simply that I’ve always innocently signed off my email messages with “Best”. No wonder I have such an uneventful social life. Sigh.