There is a review of the Giant Escape Mini Zero at road.cc.

What strikes me is that the image of the small wheeled bicycle is changing. Increasingly it is being seen as something that can be fast.

As a Moulton aficionado I can only welcome this.

The Giant Escape Mini Zero does look a bit like it might break in the middle. Maybe there is something special inside that roughly horizontal tube.

Personally I think that high quality low stiction suspension allied to an ultra-rigid frame à la Moulton is essential to a good design, but bicycles like the Giant Escape Mini Zero do help in changing perceptions.

I was muttering about the wasteful nature of our throwaway society as I dumped my “old” printer. “Old” it wasn’t, in fact I’d bought it only a couple of years ago. However it had started failing to lift the paper from the tray. I phoned the manufacturer but it was out of warranty and it would cost more to fix it than replace it.

It was an extremely cheap printer. It’s pretty rare for me to buy something very cheap, I tend to buy infrequently but carefully. When I do buy I get something more expensive which will last longer.

This printer was my first mono laser printer after having used an inkjet for some years. I wasn’t sure if I was ready for mono. I knew I hardly ever used the colour of the inkjet. However I did find that mono laser is the way to go for me now with this cheap printer so it had some value.

I don’t print anything like as much as I used to. The vast majority of creation on the computer goes into PDF files which get emailed.

I remember when the computer was all about creation for paper, but that is long ago now. I remember when getting a colour printer for the first time was so cool. It didn’t make sense to have a black and white printer when I had a computer capable of creating such superb colour.

Now the Internet in all its forms has come and so “output” means uploading something not printing it.

I took the mono Samsung printer to the Hove district depot on my bicycle. It has been replaced by a more expensive mono laser printer the price of which confirms that I will never print in colour again.

I’m really pleased to read the report of the atheist buses at guardian.co.uk.

Hanne Stinson, from the British Humanist Association is reported as saying “People can lead a happy, enjoyable and rewarding life without religion”, how very true!

Woolly mammoths (mammuthus primigenius) have been in the news a lot. A few weeks ago we were told that they were going to be revived by some ingenious insemination of elephants using woolly mammoth DNA.

Now we are told that space impacts may have wiped out woolly mammoths and early human settlers in North America according to this BBC News article.

However, what hasn’t been considered is the smell. It was the illustration at that BBC News article that put this thought into my mind. It’s all that wool you see, on such a large animal. I bet they got pretty hot in the summer. It would have added up to a significant pong.

Maybe smelly mammoths would be more appropriate than woolly mammoths.

As if there wasn’t enough in the future to strike fear into our hearts what with global warming and marauding mammoths some German scientists (in fact the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering and Organisation) have dreamt up what looks like the hotel room from hell.

In this bizarre BBC news report Steve Rosenberg tells us what a wonder it is. It is a wonder that Steve Rosenberg could go through that script without laughing.

The room reminds me of that lift in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which keeps trying to keep its passengers calm but its efforts only infuriate them.