Wow, biblical weather for the VIIV vigil.

Thanks to Paul Yu for the lightning and Apple Daily for the rain.

Fascinating reading this year especially.

This Flickr stream is brilliant. I could spend weeks on it, especially where I know the location.

Wise words from CDM.

Science tries to tell people, in language they understand, something that none of them ever knew before. Marketing is the exact opposite.

Brilliant Onion nails it.

He's been a busy, and surprisingly amusing fellow.

I don't need to read it now!

Great Telegraph piece.

It is pretty clear that wine tasting does not work the way we might think it ought to.

1. Experts contradict themselves over time in their scoring of the same wine
2. Experts in a test can't tell if a wine is red or white when it is the same white wine dyed red
3. Emotional circumstance affects our enjoyment of the wine
4. Wine critics say they know they are inconsistent
5. Trained wine critics enjoy expensive wine more than inexpensive wine. Us numpties go the other way.

The interesting question for me is whether we can fix this.

There's an interesting suggestion from a Freakonomics show:

Steven Levitt: My approach to buying wine for gifts is simple: I go in the store, and I look for the label that looks the most expensive of anything in the store. And I make sure it costs less than $15, and if it does, then I buy it.

Nice.

More evidence that more evidence is needed in public health and safety interventions.