It is often said that watches are the only jewelry for men. Strictly speaking not true of course, but the mixed effect of gadget and showoff, makes watches an attractive way of spending money for a lot of people. I am one of them. The minute I heard the words "you are not supposed to have only one watch", the words made sense to me and I have wasted a lot of money since.

Most of them on Diesel watches, but there is an oldtimer which is so 80s in design that it now counts as retro-fancy: The Casio F105. It has the basics for a digital watch: Time, date and stop-watch, is very light (only 24g) and still cheap enough so that you dare actually use It. it is "water resitant Rank II" which means that splashes or rain is not a problem (no swiming) and has background light. Thats it. Plain and simple - no bullshit. Or as the watch salesman said: "Its the VW Beetle of watches".

When satelite navigation became available for everybody a few years ago, there were many bizarre examples of how the thing was giving insane instructions of roads not existing, shortcut through parks, or at bike lanes not really suitable for cars. Most them have improved so dramatically that it now actually pays off to use them, and they have passed the phase of "for tech-geeks-only" into "standard-equipment-for-mr/mrs-smith".

But not everywhere: In a small town called "Vale of Glamorgan" in southern Wales, the council has decided to put up signs warning drivers not to trust their satelite navigation equipment after a period of chaos with large trucks in the village. The signs are the first in Britain, and I have not seen anything like that in Denmark, yet. (Via Telegraph and BoingBoing)

Another related issue is the one with the combination of satelite navigation and construction work. There is always construction work going on somewhere - and often this work is not marked on a satelite navigation, causing the driver to go down closed roads, etc. I am told, that newer models of SatNav takes care of this, so in the future, maybe signs like the one in Wales will become obsolete.

The music-loving machine learning scientist and neuroresearcher, Mads Dyrholm, for the time being in New York, has sent the following recipy for music:

* Deep Purple's Stormbringer album
* 200 lines of Matlab coding
* The intelligent Sound Toolbox (Matlab)

Your can hear the result "Gulerod 1" at Daddys Grovebox (Myspace)

In a major league baseball match between New York Mets and Atlanta Braves, the bat left by Martin Prado balanced perfectly (see video below). It is the almost magic flip of a coin that outsmarts the statistics teacher!

So is this possible at all? In a traditional physics class, the bat having a round top, cannot be stable and balance as indicated, but it may not be fake after all: In the real world the bat is not infinitely smooth and the roughness may create a small area in which the balance i spossible. Also, the point of balance doesn't have to be perfect, it just have to be good enough for the bat to balance in the few seconds visible on the video.