Delicious LiveJournal Links for 8-26-2009

[andrewducker]

• New high-speed rail plan unveiled
  $34Bn to join London to Glasgow - via Birmingham and Manchester. 2:16 travel time rather than 4:48 as it is at the moment. I wonder if it will actually get made...
  (tags: travel UK trains)
• Multitaskers bad at multitasking
  Now there's irony for you.
  (tags: media technology attention concentration multitasking psychology)
• What determines Caster Semenya's sex?
  It is, of course, not as simple as you might think.
  (tags: sex gender genetics hormones)

Comments

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

The article on gender only helps confirm my view that gender and sexuality are jokes played on us by the gods ;)

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it will actually get made...

Almost certainly not. At least, not in a timespan that is relevant. Even if you take £34bn as the actual cost, rather than a finger-in-the-air, we-might-get-it-within-an-order-of-magnitude-of-this initial guess ... that's £34bn the Treasury doesn't have and probably won't for a decade or more. And even if the Government of the day was keen as mustard, and not likely to be hammered at an election in less than a year, the planning will be a nightmare of nimbyism - it's going to have to run through almost all the heavily populated parts of the country apart from Nottingham and Leeds/Bradford.

[sterlingspider.livejournal.com]

There's an interesting blurb on the multitasking study at mindhacks (which is a super neat site, by the way).