World of more

For convincing proof that atheists must be correct, look no further than the panda. A glamorous icon for the WWF and cuddly toy of countless pre-pubescent girls it may be, but it's also clearly the worst designed animal ever. Consider: the average male panda weighs 100kg, that's bigger than me and nearly half the size of my flatmate. Its padded paws (the panda, not my flatmate) hide fearsome claws and vicious incisors line its mouth. It is, in short, plenty capable of killing and eating tasty mammals and reptiles (the panda, not my flatmate, although he probably could do). Yet, a few million years back, pandas decided to give up eating meat and focus instead on bamboo. Whatever prompted their decision to become vegetarians - a dodgy madras, a flyer from Greenpeace - dietary efficiency was not a consideration; they can only extract about 20% of the nutritional value of the green shoots they cram into their mouth. They shit nearly pure bamboo. They have to spend almost th...

And another thing while I'm on the subject of the Chinese language : it's impossible to speak. Well, obviously it's not impossible, 1.3 billion people are currently proving me hopelessly wrong, but you can't just flick through the language section of a guide book and just pick up some useful phrases like you can with European languages*. You don't know that to start with though, so it's easy to convince yourself that Chinese is like all the other languages you've attempted on holiday. Flicking through the the pinyin gives you nothing to contradict your initial belief; spicy chicken is simply gong bao ji din . That looks pretty straightforward, how difficult can it be to order? You spent a week in Sardinia without any Italian language and got by just saying prego and molto bene , Mandarin looks a cinch. Foxed copy of the Lonely Planet in hand then, you march into a restaurant, hold up four fingers in case the waitress has difficulty counting the number o...

On a freezing cold minibus, driving over icy freeways from Xi'an to the wondrous Hua Shan , the Chinese Vincent d'Onofrio lookalike sitting next to me is whiling away the hours like any Western teenager - ferociously texting on two phones simultaneously. As I watch over his shoulder, fascinated, he is filling screen after screen with Chinese characters using just a standard numeric keypad. I have no idea how he's doing it. The spare and elegant efficiency of the Roman alphabet, with its tiny set of written symbols capable of supporting every word known to man and plenty more besides, can be fully appreciated when compared with the beautiful mess that Mandarin seems to be. If I were running a project to design the written representation of a spoken language and my technical architect came back with written Chinese I'd be livid. Each morpheme has its own symbol or logogram , and by some counts there are 60,000 such logograms. According to the Lonely Planet, even the...

"Squeeze your buttocks. Good. Now relax to 50%. Good. 75%. Good. 25%. Excellent." In an attempt to correct knee pain picked up during an arduous summer of half-marathons, 100km walks and Alpine mountaineering, I have engaged a physio to prod and embarrass me on a weekly basis. Alison is making me work on my core muscles to provide better support for my knock-kneed pipe-cleaner legs with their tendency to let my feet over-pronate, my knees roll inwards and me generally run like a girl. "OK, now just tense your left buttock. No, not both, just the one." I can't, it's either all buttocks or none, not some mix of the two. How can this be? I'm a master at graceful movement through the virtual domains of my work and leisure hours, as at ease piloting the Master Chief around the battlefields of Halo 2 as I am at vaulting along the main highways and quieter backwaters of the internet. I can make my PC sing and could tell within a moment if it had sp...

My top-floor Linhope bedroom, full of clutter, home of a mattress that bears the scars of battles with heavy sleepers and bedroom gymnasts since long before I was born, moonlights (literally) as an observatory. Some time ago a previous resident took a brush and some luminous paint and, with an eye for the stars, painted dots on the ceiling. No tacky five-point stars or smiling man in the moon for this Marylebone Michelangelo, they accurately recreated the uneven distribution of brightness and density that the true night skies exhibit. A few large, bright blobs, many of average size, and the occasional tiny, turn-your-head-to-see-properly, pinpricks. The simple genius of the effect is that the dots are invisible under normal light; neither daylight nor bedside lamp allow for a viewing. Only when all lights are off and the sole light source is London's perma glow filtered through the curtains does the room turn into a mini planetarium. Most times I forget about the ersatz stars th...

The word most frequently used towards the end of Trailwalker is "broken". In the context of a 100km walk it means fatigued, exhausted, pained, as in "my legs are broken", "my feet are broken", or more commonly "I'm broken". Walking Trailwalker is like being crushed by a glacier: the pain is slow, inexorable, inevitable, and it chafes a bit. Covering 100km on shanks' pony is a strange endeavour, 62 miles is a prepostorously long distance and 20 hours a ludicrous time to be walking. It's almost impossible to imagine what it's like without taking part. Picture yourself walking for eight hours; enough to cover about twenty-five miles and a decent day walk in most people's book. At the end of that eight hours your feet tingle, your legs are slightly stiff, you're a bit hungry. If you're doing Trailwalker you're not even half way around. With three 25 mile training walks under my belt I figured I could cover 40 miles ...

A rare conjunction of Barry's insistent nagging, an evaluation copy of Dreamweaver and some slack time in the office has let me finally get around to writing up a couple of walking trips I went on a few months back. Present, in all their winter glory, are a December weekend in the Lake District and a February ice-climbing trip to Scotland .