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I received an email over the weekend from the President of Reading University Students’ Union informing me that the Department of Physics (in which I studied) is being prepared for closure. Yesterday, the BBC picked up the story. Enrollment in physics courses across the UK has been going down for years, and the fact that the department only attracted thirty-five students is a striking low. It’s not a surprise that the University’s Senior Management Board is considering drastic measures. But this is also the fourth department to be scheduled for closure in as many years. While I was working in the Student Union we were fighting the closure of the Music department, and since then they’ve closed Sociology and Mechanical Engineering. ...

In the comments on my entry a couple of months ago about tourb.us, Carl writes: If you like tourb, you will love BeeThere.net. BeeThere has been live since October 2005, has the features you request here, and is clearly the site that tourb is trying to imitate. I would love to hear what you think! Naturally, I can’t be sure exactly what inspired tourb.us but looking at BeeThere I don’t feel like Carl’s claims are fair, and having spent some time exploring his site I really don’t think it does provide the features I was requesting. ...

Personal Kyoto (via O’Reilly Radar) is a great idea. The site allows residents of New York to register their electricity accounts, and see the change in usage that’s required for them to do their part to meet the targets set in the Kyoto Protocol. While the protocol itself does not go nearly far enough to have a serious impact on climate change, it is good to see so many communities and individuals in the US reacting to the government’s failure to act by taking the initiative. Tools that help people see the impact they are having, coupled with ideas of how to improve that, are vital. ...

Being the concerned citizens that we are, we’ve been trying to work out how much of our travelling next summer can be completed by public transport. Good sources of train information are hard to come by, so I was very pleased to discover Seat 61, an impressive resource with details of train and ship travel for more than eighty countries. Well worth a look if you’re trying to plan some travel without the carbon cost of airfare. ...

In the process of building my bus route app, I realised that half the data for bus stops is missing. While the site’s developers have done a good job of providing clear data on half the stops, if you want to see stops going in the other direction, you have to use a drop-down box that triggers an AJAX request and repopulates the table. A little digging shows that the call is to: ...

The Rapid, the bus service for Grand Rapids and surrounding areas, recently redesigned their website. The redesign was long overdue and the result certainly looks a lot cleaner, if still far from inspiring. They’ve added a flash-based map showing their routes (though it could do with being a little larger on the page) and added PDF maps of each route (eg. this one for Route 6)). Unfortunately as yet there’s no tool for working out routes, but that’s not a big surprise. ...

Disclosure: I was sent a review copy of The Long Tail by the author after responding to a request on his blog for reviewers. I wrote a few times on The Long Tail when Chris Anderson’s original article began its journey to being one of the most talked about concepts in the blogosphere. In the months that have followed, the phrase has become part of everyday language and the buzzphrase to drop when talking about media consumption. ...

David Brin complains about the difficulty of obtaining BASIC for modern computers, in a piece published yesterday on Salon. He’s been trying to teach his son to code, starting with simple algorithms and developing a good sense of what the computer is doing as it processes each step. Java and C++ are considered too complex for this purpose, and he seems to consider most scripting languages to be too high-level: The “scripting” languages that serve as entry-level tools for today’s aspiring programmers – like Perl and Python – don’t make this experience accessible to students in the same way. BASIC was close enough to the algorithm that you could actually follow the reasoning of the machine as it made choices and followed logical pathways. Repeating this point for emphasis: You could even do it all yourself, following along on paper, for a few iterations, verifying that the dot on the screen was moving by the sheer power of mathematics, alone. Wow! ...

I spend a lot of my time in iTerm, but even on my macbook pro it’s far from slick. A month or so ago I tried their latest nightly build, but it was very buggy (crashing when I resized the window) and no faster. So I’ve mainly been waiting to see if someone came out with an alternative. As a result, I was very pleased to see this post from Rob Orsini as I was scanning Planet Ruby on Rails before starting work this morning. It seems the iTerm developers have completely replaced their tab code, fixed some memory leaks, and come out with nightly builds that are much more stable and far faster. ...

Once again inspired by slacktivist’s alphabetical progression through his music collection: Jesus, Etc. - Wilco - Kicking Television Jesus, I / Mary Star of The Sea - Zwan - Mary Star Of The Sea Jesusland - Ben Folds - Songs for Silverman Jezebel - Iron & Wine - Woman King EP Joan - The Innocence Mission - Umbrella Joan of Arc - Leonard Cohen - Songs Of Love and Hate Joe Dimaggio Done It Again - Billy Bragg & Wilco - Mermaid Ave Vol. 2 John Saw That Number - Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings The Flood July, July! - The Decemberists - Castaways and Cutouts June - Over The Rhine - Eve