Chindie

Environmentally, meat isn't great, especially since the planet has a growing taste for it. We're basically don't have enough space to do everything we want with the world, we don't have the ability to meet the desires of the world if it continues to want to consume more and more meat. It's also a pretty ineffiecient way of putting food on the table, even when you consider that we've manipulated these animals to provide more steak per head to the point that a number of them are basically malformed now. If you can get the point that we can make beef in a lab, by perfecting this process that is going to lead us a 'synthetic' burger, on a large scale, it'll almost certainly have less environmental impact than raising billions of head of cattle.

Probably because McDonalds is pretty ropey on the whole would be my guess.

You can play it like any other version of Fifa, although in the time I'd played it I didn't clock how they'd solved the problem of not having twin shoulder buttons.

Best way to think about this is this - everything is made of cells, and we've found out that stem cells are like... cells before they've found out what job they want to do. So you can make them into anything you like, if you know how. So what they've done is made the stem cells go 'We're gonna make cells that make meat!'. And so they've made strips of what is chemically identical to 'meat-y' bit of meat, the protein, in a petri dish. Which is kinda cool.

It probably won't taste like much, apparently. Seems they've worked out how to make meat, meat, but not taste like it. I'd try it though. Mmm, tasty chemicals. Tasty science! Or not so much.

Burger King is my preferred burger chain too. It helps I can also get a discount there when I'm at work . Anywho, would you eat a synthetic burger? Assuming you didn't have to pay for it, obviously.

They get on pretty well. The Russians like Iran being opposed to the West as the Middle East has increasingly turned (or been turned) to Western affiliations, either by force or trade. The Midde East now has considerable numbers of countries tthat are influenced by the US. They've also found that Iran is a willing customer as the West has ostracised it. Iran's military has lots of Russian kit in it these days, although IIRC that took a hit a few years back on the back of wider sanctions from the UN. Russia isn't exactly unhappy to have Iran not like the US, put it like that.

Updated my Monster profile. I get the associated boost in prospective employers ringing me. Cool. They're all in **** recruitment. Argh.

Co-ordinating a series of strikes isn't that difficult. The big problem is knowing if you have all of them. If you haven't, an they've gotten the bomb already, you've just crossed the Rubicon and have a pissed off nuclear armed nation with it's finger on the button. And even if you do, you've just nixed any chance of there ever being a peaceful nation there. You've made one problem go away... but just made another. It's all this that makes this interesting if conflict is the thing you choose. You need to act quickly (relatively - it's not like Iran will have a true nuke tomorrow), but you also need to act perfectly and with all the information being utterly correct, and you need to be aware that you're only kicking the can down the road - Iran will remain a problem until a total sea change in it's government occurs. And that will only happen successfully from within. You cannot force a government on an unwilling people. It's unlikely the Iranian people would choose to follow the lead we would like them to go down.

I think the Iranians are rather too well up on their country's recent history to fall for another Pahlavi. It's quite a cosmopolitan state, even with the mad legal stuff and it's utterly bizarre 'quasi-democracy', so I suspect putting in a puppet is more difficult, and ultimately given the crisis that's beginning to unfold with increasing pace, too slow (were it to work at all) to bring about our ends. I don't think it's so much a case of Armadinnerjacket (or his boss) being popular with his people - the youth of Iran doesn't appear to particularly likes it's government... but they also don't particularly like the idea of being beholden to the West either. Arguably, nor should they.

Whats brimstone without the fire though?! You could have grated Bible on it. Give it a certain piquancy. I hear Revelations is particularly eye opening on a blini.

I've never travelled obviously, but one of my mates insisted on telling who would listen that, for all it's shitholeness, Naples gave him the best pizza he's ever had, in some shifty looking back alley restaurant. So it's got something going for it.

I believe mjmooney will be adding fire and brimstone to the accompaniment list for next years round of posh pancakes. Sounds delightful.

Thermobaric weapons, easy. Make the air pop with such force that anything in it's way goes bye bye. They work particularly effectively in tight enclosed spaces, which is why they got used a bit in Afghanistan - you fire the thing into a cave and everything inside dies. Nasty way to die too. If it works perfectly, your lungs pop due to the enormous pressure wave hitting your body. If it doesn't, the air around you bursts into flames and you end up breathing fire at absurd temperatures. And then the initial pressure wave is reflected, followed by an enormous pressure drop that works much in the same way the first intial wave did, just backwards.

In other Vita related news, Fifa is pretty good on it. The rear touch shooting is cool once you get comfortable with it - although it forced me, for instance, to hold the Vita in the awkward manner I've disliked since day one holding it. Front touch can be used for passing, which means you can get really sweet with through balls if you've nimble enough fingers.

It does indeed work by streaming content from the PS3 to the Vita. However, it's not, currently, going to be all your dreams desire. It requires updates to the PS3 copy of the game that the publisher would have to work on, and thus far it's only been shown off with simple games, Peggle for instance. The system has been hacked to open up this feature, with it apparently being able to run things like RDR, but with huge imput lag and I rather suspect utterly killing the battery life. Basically, don't pin any hopes on it.

Forza 4. I've made the (now increasingly obviously bad) decision to try and get as many achievements as I can. Sadly one of them is get a first on every event list race. I think I'd right in saying theres knocking on for a thousand, if not more. Great game though, especially now I have a wheel

I ****' love pancake day. So yes, a resident atheist and anti-religious poster calling in for pancake eating duty tonight

The Beeb I demand science works on a burger tree. I may accept a burger bush. Or if necessary, a burger box and associated equipment required to produce my own burgers without a cow. More seriously, this is fantastic. It's kind of amazing we're at the stage we're thinking about making our own crap food from scratch. Over £200000 a pop though. Without fries.

Its got the sportback-y look but I think the Scirocco look ends there. Saying that I like the old Scirocco, so it wouldn't be the worst look imo . Hell, the Scirocco's successor, the Corrado, is a dream car of mine.

The Ferrari was better looking than the Evoque, that's for sure.

I'm not working the launch of this, and I couldn't be happier.

Talk from regular customers at our store (which was woefully understocked on this in the end - the demand seemed to really really underestimated) is that it's a more grown up Fable with sprinkled with Elder Scrolls flavouring, and that it's huge. Nobody's traded in a copy yet, which is unusual. I've heard from some reviews and web comments that it's pretty much too big, GiantBomb certainly made that point, you lose interest in playing before you come near 100%ing it. My own thoughts, having quickly played a bit, is that I find the thing very... plain. But I don't think it's going to disappoint many people.

I'm just very cynical - theres been talk for a long time, for example, that the cut of the lap we see is actually a composite of all their laps. It's unimportant anyway. I just hope the series carries on in this vein now. It was a good episode after lots of middling and crap ones in the last year or so. I have to reiterate how happy I was that the scooter skit wasn't the disaster I'd feared (lacked the obvious stupid playacting), and I'm really glad they didn't go mawkish with the injured soldiers. They'd done that a series or 2 ago with the soldiers intending to do the Dakar, it became more about the fact they were injured than that they were people doing something amazing. With the scooter skit they completely avoided it, let the guys involved speak for themselves on screen rather than play with the heart strings in a grim way. EDIT - Oh and did anyone else get the feeling with that Ferrari that it was more a 'tech demo' than a genuine product? It struck me that it was less Ferrari going 'Lets make a Ferrari 4WD GT car' and more Ferrari going 'We'd maybe want to go into 4WD seriously in the future, but lets see what we can do first as a starting point to work from', the FF being that launching point with lots of new tech (that needs work) and a big pricetag associated with it, even taking the badge into account.

Debate in the Commons today on ruling out military action. The Iranians have shown a hand, cutting oil supplies to Uk and French companies (and possibly other Euro markets shortly) that is largely posturing (since the actual effect on us, for example, is slim - we don't really use Iranian oil anymore). Hague has spoken about the potential for Iran for spark either an arms race or a Middle Eastern Cold War if it's nuclear ambition continues. Heating up, sabres rattling... We live in interesting times.