The Null Device
2008/12/16
The first ever case has been reported of someone sending emails in their sleep. The emails were reported as being haphazardly formatted, in a mixture of upper and lower case, and written in strange language, though more or less comprehensible:
The 44-year-old woman, whose case is reported by researchers from the University of Toledo in the latest edition of medical journal Sleep Medicine, had gone to bed at around 10pm, but got up two hours later and walked to the next room.
She then turned on the computer, connected to the internet, and logged on by typing her username and password to her email account. She then composed and sent three emails.
One read: "Come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out. Dinner and drinks, 4.pm,. Bring wine and caviar only." Another said simply, "What the……."
To commemorate the upgrade of the West Coast Main Line (that's the one that runs from London to Glasgow via Birmingham), the BBC has posted a time-lapse video of a train journey from London to Glasgow, filmed from the cab of a train and sped up to five minutes.
The upgrade of the line, to allow Virgin Train's Pendolino tilt-trains to actually do the tilting thing, has cut journey times by 30%, making the London to Glasgow journey just four hours and 30 seconds. However, compared to railways on the continent (such as France's TGV system), it is still slow; the maximum speed is 200kmh, or under two thirds of that of what they call a "fast train" across the Channel. Watching the video gives a hint to why this is so and likely to remain so for some time: the track ahead of the train curves hither and yon, still apparently following the path laid down in the 19th century to avoid powerful landowners' concerns and keep gradients low enough for the relatively feeble locomotives of the day. Whilst the aristocracy is not what it used to be, and today's trains have less of a problem with gradients, the West Coast Main Line remains too wavy to be traversed at speed.