Went to the fireworks at Callendar Park last night. I know size isn’t everything, but I’ve decided I like the really big explosions that fill the sky accompanied with loud booms that reverberate in the ground beneath your feet. And the glittery ones.
Managed to get there in time for the fireworks but sufficiently late not to have to stand in the cold listening to 80s stadium rock supplied by the local radio station.
Here’s a low res cameraphone video for a brief flavour.
A remake of a classic 1974 film opens in December, written and directed by one of The X-Files‘ regular writers. In the tradition of such remakes, and in light of some reviews, I don’t hold out hope of it being particularly good, but I did enjoy the trailer I caught at the cinema last night:
Yesterday took me to the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh for a visit to their library and museum organised via ELISA. The college itself is on Nicholson Street near Edinburgh University, its pillared frontage opposite the Festival Theatre standing out amongst the banks and restaurants.
The very enthusiastic librarian kindly showed us a number of very old books including a Book of Hours and a Nuremberg Chronicle, both from the 15th century and in Latin. The latter is an early printed work, full of marvellous wood-cut illustrations and charting the history of the world up to 1493 (though omitting the discovery of the New World). The library also holds the College archives, which include letters leading up to the 1505 formation of the college (as the Craft Guild of Barber Surgeons) written in Old Scots.
We were treated to a visit to the Surgeons’ Hall Museums. The pathology museum is well worth a visit, but is not for the squeamish or for the hypochondriac: there are plenty of human remains, assorted tumours and kidney stones, plus battlefront injuries in the form of damaged bones and paintings of the victims. Like the photographs on European cigarette packets, there were plenty of images and objects to put you off an unhealthy lifestyle (or going to hospital…). There are also displays about Joseph Bell, a Fellow of the College and the main inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, Burke and Hare, and the history of the College.
On Tuesday morning, fresh (perhaps not the word) from the Caledonian Sleeper, I headed to the offices of lawyer Pinsent Masons for a very interesting breakfast seminar called “Legal risks of Web 2.0 for your business” organised by their IT arm OUT-LAW.
It was absolutely packed – their most popular seminar so far, I was told – and covered potential legal pitfalls of modern web activity, including defamation, employment law and copyright infringement in the areas of blogging, wikis, message boards, and sites like YouTube. Several recent examples from the blogging world were cited, including Inigo Wilson’s Lefty Lexicon, the doocing of Petite Anglaise and Joe Gordon, and the Mumsnet/Gina Ford case. One of the interesting facts I learned was that using a competitors’ trademark as a tag to draw attention to content (for example, if Pepsi posted an ad to YouTube tagged with “coca-cola”) can be considered trademark infringement.
If you’re interested in IT legal issues, I’d recommend these free breakfast seminars, which run across the UK (the next are in the spring). You can also read OUT-LAW magazine on the website.
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